Rule discovery performance unchanged by incentives

Bibtex entry:

@inproceedings{osborn-popp2022ruleincentives,
	abstract = {Human behavior is modulated by financial incentives, but it is not well understood what types of behavior are immune to incentives and why. The cognitive processes underlying behavior appear to create restrictions on the effect an individual's motivation will have on their performance. We investigate a classic category learning task for which the effect of financial incentives is still unknown (Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins, 1961). Across four renditions of the category learning experiment, we find no effect of incentive on performance. On a fifth experiment requiring category recognition but NOT learning, we find a large effect on response time and a small effect on task performance. Humans appear to selectively apply more effort in valuable contexts, but the effort is disproportionate to the performance improvement. Taken together, the results suggest that performance in tasks which require novel inductive insights are relatively immune to financial incentives, while tasks that require rote perseverance of a fixed strategy are more malleable.},
	address = {Austin, TX},
	author = {Osborn Popp, P.J. and Newell, B. and Bartels, D. and Gureckis, T.M.},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
	editor = {Culbertson, J. and Perfors, A. and Rabagliati, H. and Ramenzoni, V.},
	publisher = {Cognitive Science Society},
	title = {Rule discovery performance unchanged by incentives},
	year = {2022}}

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