The money effect

According to Kathleen Vohs and colleagues, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis:

The researchers found that the volunteers who had been primed with the money-related words worked on the task for longer before asking for help. In a related experiment, people in the money-word group were also significantly less likely to help a fellow student who asked for assistance than were people in the group primed with non-money words (Science, vol 314, p 1154).

 These findings have interesting implications for the structure of invention workshops. To encourage cooperation, the first phase - problem space exploration - has to be done without mentioning any monetary consequences of the work. Then, the second phase - problem solving - has to be preceded by an evaluation session, which not only separates high quality problems from background noise, but also primes participants to apply their best effort.