Monetary and Psychological Incentives Across Cultures

Motivating effortful behavior is a problem that employers, governments, and nonprofits face globally. However, most studies on motivation are conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures. We compared how hard crowd-source workers in a diverse set of nations worked in response to monetary incentives versus psychological motivators, such as competing with or helping others. In our first study, the advantage that money had over psychological interventions was larger in the United States and the United Kingdom than in China, India, Mexico, and South Africa. In our next study, we randomly assigned cultural frames through language in bilingual Facebook users in India. Money increased effort over a psychological treatment by 27% in Hindi and 52% in English. In the final study, we measured how likely crowd-source workers in 40 countries are to work beyond the minimum amount of time required to receive pay. Findings in this dissertation suggest that the market mentality of exchanging time and effort for material benefits is most prominent in the wealthy West, at least on low-wage work tasks.