little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”1 Likewise, when Dan Ariely and his colleagues conducted their Madurai, India, performance study with a group of MIT students, they found that when the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.” But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
