Does General Motivation Energize Financial Reward-Seeking Behavior? Evidence from an Effort Task

Justin Chumbley and Ernst Fehr

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 9, 1-6

Abstract: We aimed to predict how hard subjects work for financial rewards from their general trait and state reward-motivation. We specifically asked 1) whether individuals high in general trait “reward responsiveness” work harder 2) whether task-irrelevant cues can make people work harder, by increasing general motivation. Each trial of our task contained a 1 second earning interval in which male subjects earned money for each button press. This was preceded by one of three predictive cues: an erotic picture of a woman, a man, or a geometric figure. We found that individuals high in trait “reward responsiveness” worked harder and earned more, irrespective of the predictive cue. Because female predictive cues are more rewarding, we expected them to increase general motivation in our male subjects and invigorate work, but found a more complex pattern.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0101936 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 01936&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0101936

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0101936

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().