Evolution of Freedom
Part II: TEAM SPORT - Chapter 16
Motivation
All human behavior is motivated by needs and wants. In his famous hierarchy of needs, Abraham Maslow listed a universal set of human needs that we are all motivated by. While our immediate needs can change from moment to moment, we are ultimately motivated by all the needs listen in this hierarchy. This means that, as a whole, what humans need and want are both knowable and unchanging. There are individual preferences and differences, of course, but in large numbers human needs and wants are predictable.
While we can’t change the needs themselves, we can change how these needs can be met and the order in which we are motivated by them. By providing for certain needs on a communal level, be they material or immaterial, we allow individuals to focus on their other needs, for example.
Most of our needs can’t be fulfilled directly but require extensive steps. When we are hungry, we don’t just grab the first piece of food we come across like a hungry animal would. Instead, we go to work so we can earn money with which we can purchase food, so we never go hungry. We can’t change our basic need for food, but we can change the way food is acquired.
Instead of pushing and prodding people in the desired direction as most laws do, correct motivation is something that draws people to do the right thing almost naturally. To motivate people correctly, we have to design the incentive structure correctly. The incentives and disincentives have to be clear, and they have to be consequential. We want humans to be naturally motivated to do the right thing.
To understand how motivation works, it might benefit us to draw inspira-
tion from the arts. If painting represents the art of color and architecture: the art of space, is there an art of human motivation? Yes, there is. Drama is the art of human motivation. By orchestrating the motivations of the play’s characters, the play springs into life.
I studied dramatic writing for 15 years. As the dynamics behind human motivation started to dawn on me, I wondered if we could motivate an entire society to act in the interest of the whole community. Could we build a society in which good deeds would not only be noticed but consistently rewarded, while bad deeds would be penalized? Could such a society be built?
I asked these questions because people are naturally motivated to take care of themselves and to be selfish. That we know. The hard part is to come up with a way to incentivize people to take care of others and the community at large.
One of the most discouraging aspects of life is that many times bad deeds seem to be rewarded while good deeds go ignored. Selfishness seems to be infinitely more beneficial for the individual, even when it comes at a great cost to the community. The more we observe cheats and crooks succeed, the more likely it is that we resort to underhanded means to attain our own goals. These persistent injustices erode our faith in the system we live in and produce great harm to our society and the planet as a whole.
Taking good care of our community is not a trivial matter. Since many of our shared problems can only be solved at the communal level, how our community functions has a direct impact on our well-being. A sign of a strong community is the willingness of its members to regularly put the interest of the larger community ahead of their own immediate self-interest. Any time you choose to cooperate with another member of the community, you donate your energy/matter to benefit somebody else. By doing this, you behave unselfishly and perform a public good.
Now, everybody is first responsible for their own needs, so you can’t choose the short end of the stick every time. That’s not even the point. The point is to create a better balance between selfish and unselfish behavior and to find a new way to reward unselfish behavior to take the sting out of it. But how do you do this?
The answer is simple: by linking private gain directly to public benefit.
What makes a pro-social incentive system work is that it perfectly aligns an individual’s self-interest with their community’s interest. This incentive system rewards us based on how much we contribute to the community. If we truly want to build a better world for ourselves, citizens should be rewarded based on how much they contribute to the public good. The only way to act selfishly should be to first act unselfishly.
This can be formulated into our third hypothesis:
While we can’t change the needs themselves, we can change how these needs can be met and the order in which we are motivated by them. By providing for certain needs on a communal level, be they material or immaterial, we allow individuals to focus on their other needs, for example.
Most of our needs can’t be fulfilled directly but require extensive steps. When we are hungry, we don’t just grab the first piece of food we come across like a hungry animal would. Instead, we go to work so we can earn money with which we can purchase food, so we never go hungry. We can’t change our basic need for food, but we can change the way food is acquired.
Instead of pushing and prodding people in the desired direction as most laws do, correct motivation is something that draws people to do the right thing almost naturally. To motivate people correctly, we have to design the incentive structure correctly. The incentives and disincentives have to be clear, and they have to be consequential. We want humans to be naturally motivated to do the right thing.
To understand how motivation works, it might benefit us to draw inspira-
tion from the arts. If painting represents the art of color and architecture: the art of space, is there an art of human motivation? Yes, there is. Drama is the art of human motivation. By orchestrating the motivations of the play’s characters, the play springs into life.
I studied dramatic writing for 15 years. As the dynamics behind human motivation started to dawn on me, I wondered if we could motivate an entire society to act in the interest of the whole community. Could we build a society in which good deeds would not only be noticed but consistently rewarded, while bad deeds would be penalized? Could such a society be built?
I asked these questions because people are naturally motivated to take care of themselves and to be selfish. That we know. The hard part is to come up with a way to incentivize people to take care of others and the community at large.
One of the most discouraging aspects of life is that many times bad deeds seem to be rewarded while good deeds go ignored. Selfishness seems to be infinitely more beneficial for the individual, even when it comes at a great cost to the community. The more we observe cheats and crooks succeed, the more likely it is that we resort to underhanded means to attain our own goals. These persistent injustices erode our faith in the system we live in and produce great harm to our society and the planet as a whole.
Taking good care of our community is not a trivial matter. Since many of our shared problems can only be solved at the communal level, how our community functions has a direct impact on our well-being. A sign of a strong community is the willingness of its members to regularly put the interest of the larger community ahead of their own immediate self-interest. Any time you choose to cooperate with another member of the community, you donate your energy/matter to benefit somebody else. By doing this, you behave unselfishly and perform a public good.
Now, everybody is first responsible for their own needs, so you can’t choose the short end of the stick every time. That’s not even the point. The point is to create a better balance between selfish and unselfish behavior and to find a new way to reward unselfish behavior to take the sting out of it. But how do you do this?
The answer is simple: by linking private gain directly to public benefit.
What makes a pro-social incentive system work is that it perfectly aligns an individual’s self-interest with their community’s interest. This incentive system rewards us based on how much we contribute to the community. If we truly want to build a better world for ourselves, citizens should be rewarded based on how much they contribute to the public good. The only way to act selfishly should be to first act unselfishly.
This can be formulated into our third hypothesis:
3. In an effective pro-social incentive system, the only way to benefit oneself should be to first benefit the community. The rewards people receive from the community must be directly proportional to the benefit they create for others.
This isn’t a radical idea. This is a universal principle you can find almost everywhere, from corporate sales offices to bands of hunter-gatherers. In certain hunter-gatherer communities, the kill is shared equally with the entire group, but the best hunters are rewarded with the best parts of the meat. This is also how all commission-based sales jobs work: the more money you bring into the company, the higher your salary and bonus will be. This is fair and very effective.
The only way to enrich ourselves should be by enriching our community first. Establishing an unbroken connection between these two outcomes is vital. When there is a direct connection between how much you put in the shared hat and how much you take out of it, the community blossoms and everybody benefits.
The point is that everybody is rewarded for the public good they produce. This means that we are able to codify delayed return altruism at a system-wide level. Codify delayed return altruism, or reciprocal altruism, means that we come up with a mechanism which guarantees that all cooperators will be compensated at a later date.
Interestingly enough, undergoing a change in motivation is also a pivotal transition that main characters make in classical plays and film scripts. Initially, our heroes are usually motivated by selfish interests. They want something so fervently that they pursue their goals by ignoring something vital in their lives: their significant other, their family or their community. They do this because they believe in a lie that makes them unaware of what they truly need.
This path invariably leads to a dead end, and the main character is forced to re-evaluate and grow. Only by undergoing a change in motivation and acting to benefit their lover, family or community instead of themselves can they reach their original goal. It is no surprise that this ancient storytelling format we still use to tell our most engaging tales directly reflects the same profound wisdom that we are wrestling with in this book.
We now know a fundamental principle that helps us maximize well-being: by aligning personal and communal incentives, we can create an abundance of shared well-being. Since everybody wants to increase their well-being, we also increase positive liberty. When we motivate people correctly, we change the goals they work for. This change has a dramatic impact on people’s behavior and can be employed to great benefit.
Shared well-being is built on a culture in which every player knows how they can best serve the needs of their community and the people around them. These communities, in turn, know how best to serve the needs of all the individuals who make up that community. To ensure that individuals and communities consistently do right by each other, their incentives have to be aligned. By aligning incentives, we create win-win situations that benefit everybody.
The only way to enrich ourselves should be by enriching our community first. Establishing an unbroken connection between these two outcomes is vital. When there is a direct connection between how much you put in the shared hat and how much you take out of it, the community blossoms and everybody benefits.
The point is that everybody is rewarded for the public good they produce. This means that we are able to codify delayed return altruism at a system-wide level. Codify delayed return altruism, or reciprocal altruism, means that we come up with a mechanism which guarantees that all cooperators will be compensated at a later date.
Interestingly enough, undergoing a change in motivation is also a pivotal transition that main characters make in classical plays and film scripts. Initially, our heroes are usually motivated by selfish interests. They want something so fervently that they pursue their goals by ignoring something vital in their lives: their significant other, their family or their community. They do this because they believe in a lie that makes them unaware of what they truly need.
This path invariably leads to a dead end, and the main character is forced to re-evaluate and grow. Only by undergoing a change in motivation and acting to benefit their lover, family or community instead of themselves can they reach their original goal. It is no surprise that this ancient storytelling format we still use to tell our most engaging tales directly reflects the same profound wisdom that we are wrestling with in this book.
We now know a fundamental principle that helps us maximize well-being: by aligning personal and communal incentives, we can create an abundance of shared well-being. Since everybody wants to increase their well-being, we also increase positive liberty. When we motivate people correctly, we change the goals they work for. This change has a dramatic impact on people’s behavior and can be employed to great benefit.
Shared well-being is built on a culture in which every player knows how they can best serve the needs of their community and the people around them. These communities, in turn, know how best to serve the needs of all the individuals who make up that community. To ensure that individuals and communities consistently do right by each other, their incentives have to be aligned. By aligning incentives, we create win-win situations that benefit everybody.
