By Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos, lecturers in economics at the University of Southampton; cross posted from VoxEU
Aside by Yves; I have very mixed feelings about publishing this article. First, any study that reaches men v. women generalizations has to be viewed with a lot of skepticism. For groups as large as men and women, the variations in behavior within each class are going to be greater than the variations across classes. So I wonder whether this sort of thing merely reinforces and legitimates the propensity to stereotype. Second, the authors cite pre-existing research, and their study findings were consistent with that research. This study was not double blind. Query whether researcher bias influenced the results.
To the article:
What motivates workers in their job? This column presents evidence from a recent field experiment suggesting that women are motivated by concern about the social cause pursued by their employer, while men are not. This may provide new insight into the gender earnings gap.
What motivates workers? The canonical view in economics is that workers respond to monetary incentives. In line with this perspective, a large literature has been devoted to analysing how compensation contracts should be designed in order to induce workers to be more productive (Prendergast 1999).
Recently, economists are becoming increasingly aware that this may not be enough for certain types of workers. Besides extrinsic rewards such as bonuses or promotions, an important driver is a concern about the social cause pursued by the organisation for which they work or a sense of altruism towards the welfare of a third party who is the recipient of the good or service being produced in their workplace.
A worker with this type of motivation will provide more effort and require less monetary compensation compared to a worker solely motivated by monetary rewards. This type of altruistic motivations is potentially very important in organisations engaging in the provision of education, health care, childcare, and social services – as well as in charities and non-government organisations.
“Warm glow” or “pure altruist”?
Research on altruistic behaviour distinguishes between two types of pro-social motivation:
A worker may enjoy contributing to a cause he or she cares about. This joy that arises from the act of contributing is referred to as “warm glow” (Andreoni 1990). For example, a nurse may enjoy to be actively involved improving the lives of sick people.
A worker may be directly concerned about the well-being of others. Such individuals are referred to as “pure altruists”. For example, a nurse may be interested in the fact that patients’ health improves, regardless of whether he or she has a personal role in this.
The distinction between these two perspectives of pro-social motivation – which are of course not mutually exclusive – has significant implications. For example, if workers are pure altruists, then non-profit organisations may have an advantage in eliciting their effort compared with for-profit organisations (Francois and Vlassopoulos 2008). No such difference arises if workers are solely motivated by warm-glow altruism. Thus understanding the sources of workers’ pro-social motivation has implications for the policy debate on whether public services should be provided through the public sector, the for-profit private sector, or non-profit organisations. For example, drawing on the nurse example from above, one implication of privatising a health facility is that a pro-socially oriented and purely altruistic nurse may decrease or withdraw altogether the amount of donated labour he or she provides.
Despite the important policy implications, no attempt to quantify and discriminate the importance of the two views of altruistic motivation using non-experimental data has been made, in part because appropriate field data that would allow for sound econometric analysis are difficult to come by. In recent research (Tonin and Vlassopoulos 2009), we have performed a field experiment that aims to identify and quantify these sources of pro-social motivation in the workplace.
A field experiment with student-workers
Our research uses experimental methods in which we randomly assign workers to environments that are designed to elicit the different motivational aspects described above. We then measure the impact on productivity. An important aspect of our study is that we observe subjects providing real effort in a natural work environment, as opposed to the artificial environment of the lab where behaviour may not be representative of what happens in the field (Levitt and List 2007).
In the autumn term of 2009, we hired university students through email announcements to perform a short-term computer data entry job. In particular, workers were employed on two separate occasions lasting one hour each and taking place two weeks apart. For each session workers received £10 plus a performance bonus based on their productivity.
On the second occasion, we randomised students into three different groups. For one of the groups the second occasion was identical to the first one. This baseline condition acts as our control, as it accounts for any change in productivity due to experience, learning and so on. For the two other groups, we implemented two treatments aimed at eliciting, respectively, warm-glow effort and effort induced by both types of altruistic preferences. In both cases, personal compensation was identical to the one received in the first session and, moreover, a donation to a charity was made on the worker’s behalf based on his or her productivity. For one group the amount received by the charity was held constant, as the donation done on the worker’s behalf crowded out one-for-one a donation done on the employers’ behalf. For the second treatment group, there was no crowding out, so that the more work, the higher the total amount received by the charity.
Comparison of productivity across the three groups allows us to assess the relative strength of the two sources of pro-social motivation. In particular, comparing the changes in productivity between the treatment with crowding out and the control group, allows us to detect any effort due to warm-glow altruism, while comparing the changes in productivity between the treatment without crowding out and the treatment with crowding out, allows us to detect any effort due to pure altruism.
New insight: Gender differences in pro-social behaviour
We find that women’s effort is positively affected by an environment that induces warm-glow altruism, while there is no additional impact due to pure altruism. In particular, in the treatment condition eliciting warm-glow altruism, women increase their productivity between the two sessions by an additional 10% compared to women in the control group.
On the other hand, we find no statistically significant differences in productivity changes between the control and any of the treatment groups for male subjects. This unresponsiveness suggests that pro-social preferences are less relevant for men than for female workers in our sample. This finding is consistent with other research on gender differences in social preferences (Croson and Gneezy 2009).
The finding of a gender difference in pro-social behaviour in a workplace setting may have important implications for understanding women’s economic outcomes. If women are indeed motivated by a concern for the social cause pursued by the organisation they work for, then they will be more likely to enter occupations and sectors with characteristics that engender pro-social behaviour (such as health, education and social care) and will require less monetary compensation. Gender differences in pro-social motivation might therefore help explain the observed occupational segregation by gender that accounts for a substantial portion of the overall gender earnings gap.
While our results provide a new insight, it would be inappropriate to draw firm implications for the labour market as a whole from a single field experiment using student workers who exert effort on a short-term job. Further empirical studies are needed to evaluate whether our findings are robust in other labour market settings and populations of workers.
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This stuff is not quite up there with the candidates for the IgNobel awards, but its getting real close, it makes the short list.
It is obvious to anyone who has worked in business that there are other things than direct financial incentives that motivate both men and women. We are, both genders, complicated creatures. What motivates us is partly financial, though its effects are often indirect, partly peer group dynamics, approval for participating to a team effort, partly self esteem – people feel good about doing things well, or often, just about working hard.
Now, there probably are differences between men and women in work, but I suspect that this is because women have different social relations with management and with the peer group. I do not believe that women are motivated by the general good and men not, to any great extent. I would believe that social factors play different roles for the genders.
And finally, the problem these guys are having is that they have most likely never worked in business. They are trying to test and describe the economy of Soviet Russia without having been there
Excellent comment, michel.
The only thing I would add is that, respecting the note by Yves at the beginning, humans are prone to stereotypes precisely because stereotypes are useful. Using stereotypes has, I think, shown a positive ROI over the development of both the species and the many cultures formed by this species. Stereotypes are merely just one of many heuristics used to filter the enormous amount of information that overwhelms us every day. Of course, like with any of these many heuristics, one has to sometimes step back and understand that a stereotype is a useful rule of thumb, not an immutable law of the universe.
michel and Anonymous Jones,
I’ll give both your comments a hearty thumbs up.
I will take my chances at being labeled as a troll or a nutto on this blog…
Since we are FINALLY getting back to observing the animal world, and not papering our ideological prejudices over it, we have noticed that… in dolphin society the ADOLESCENT testosterone driven males are temporarily excluded from the pack WHICH INCLUDES the mother and baby dolphins (we might say the… weaker elements that need to be protected in order for THE SPECIES to survive…) until hormones settle down, and they can better control their agressive impulses.
I get a belly laugh about the fact that our “scientific” communities regularly commit mucho time and financial resources to “discovering” things (but what that really means is TRANSLATING words we have used for a while into the NEW, management, scientific idiom to give them more credibility and weight…) that we have known for a long time.
While the above observations are interesting, what is STILL terribly wrong with them is the pig headed insistence on measuring and quantifying everything.
From an epistemological framepoint, measuring and quantifying INFLECT the “object” that you are “measuring” and “quantifying”.
In my book… i am NOT sure at all that altruism or anything approaching it can survive “measuring” and “quantifying”.
They are probably..antithetical.
I measure and quantify my world thousands of times per day, albeit crudely most often. It’s called perception. Science simply attempts to be more rigorous by using formal tools such as precise instruments, language, logic, mathematics, statistics, and computers to relate and quantify the objects of our perceptions. I fail to see what bearing this rigorous approach has on altruism. Empathy and compassion can motivate good science as much as vanity and competitiveness.
Re: in dolphin society the ADOLESCENT testosterone driven males are temporarily excluded from the pack WHICH INCLUDES the mother and baby dolphins
In my opinion, groups (regardless of their size) which fail to regulate their males generally fail. America hasn’t successfully regulated anything for some time now.
I don’t think we need to get overly romantic about workers caring about the greater good in order to acknowledge that corporations are sociopathic in principle as well as in action, and that large structures and concentrated wealth always act tyrannically and usually destructively as well, and to act on these facts.
So regardless of how intrinsically altruistic a decentralized, unconcentrated worker-managed economy would be, the evidence by now is dispositive that it would be the most socially benevolent and economically constructive.
I believe your reply is the most thoughtful, thought-provoking and well-informed, as well as being the most intelligent.
Unfortunately, as one can witness from Yves’ writings, while she has been evolving, she is still a strong supporter of the status quo (exactly as both Obama, and his dinner-wish-list-guest, Gandhi, are and were).
Anyone who has ever been involved with the fraud investigation field (or ask any experienced certified fraud examiner, for that matter) will tell you that the whistle-blowers are men in the vast majority of cases, with females ardently making up the sheeple.
To borrow that line from The Onion, “Stereotypes are easier.”
I’d like you to support your assertion that I am a supporter of the status quo. I’ve written about the potential for revolution in the US (a view the vast majority of readers rejected, BTW), pointed to evidence repeatedly (go back to the inception of the blog) on rising and substantial income inequality, and also pointed to evidence that it produces bad outcomes, even to the rich.
I’ve also written about global warming, as well as evidence that the costs of remedying it are less than the nay-sayers would have you believe, and the consequences of inaction greater.
This blog (and ECONNED) has discussed at excruciating length about how the financial services industry has become systematically predatory, has engaged in looting, how reform efforts were likely to (and are now) fall short, and how that will lead to an even bigger bust. Oh, and I’ve been a relentless critic of this Administration, both its pathetic health care “reform” and its posture towards the financial services industry (which is to use propaganda to cover for the fact that it has cast its lot with the perps).
These are all major issues today and my position is clearly not aligned with supporting the status quo. I can only conclude you don’t read or attack me to advance your own status as an authority of some sort in this thread.
I’m always interested in informed criticism and learning where I might be off base, since that helps me and the community of readers here, but I have no interest in commentators who engage in false accusations against their host. Your remarks are a violation of comment policy. Consider this a warning.
On a related topic in today’s Globe and Mail “A qualified man is hard to find”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/a-qualified-man-is-hard-to-find/article1577525/
“But what if women are deliberately avoiding certain jobs—such as 80-hour-a-week Up in the Air-style corporate gigs, or as welders on construction sites—in order to pursue their interests in other areas? Several surveys of university graduates indicate that the majority of women put a priority on being able to make a difference in their work, and the ability to work flexible hours, which might propel them toward a career in public law, counselling or social work, for example.
Could it be that the institutionalized sexism in our culture is now a less powerful force than the choices freely made by the work force? On one hand, women, largely the higher-achieving sex in the classroom, simply prefer medicine over software engineering or bond trading. On the other, men gravitate toward business and computer science, and away from jobs that require lots of teaching, discussion and “touchy-feely” content, as Feldman has discovered. In short, what if the received wisdom—that equal opportunity for the sexes should automatically create a 50-50 result in every occupation—is just a dated ideal that doesn’t take into account people’s actual preferences?”
Never have there been so many female college grads, and never have been so many college-educated women who are incapable of an adult-level conversation.
‘Nuff said on that matter…..
(Although, never have there been so many adults who haven’t read a single book per year, while never have there been so many Americans involved in writing books????)
You know, this is absolutely amazing. Failure to appropriately design the study is just a start.
Anecdotally, my husband is entirely motivated by the picture of himself as a do-gooder. His ego construct requires that he work for something he can believe in. He earns very little, because purportedly he’s being paid in warm fuzzies or something.
I’m primarily motivated by making sure our kids get fed and perhaps get to take piano lessons. Tragically middle class, yes, in such a “last century” kind of way. But I’ve got no delusions about the moral underpinnings of the profit motive. As I sometimes said when I practiced corporate law “I don’t work for satan, but I am pretty sure he’s a client.”
At this juncture, I doubt seriously that any part of a worker’s place in the machine is chosen by the worker. He/she may tell themselves a nice little story about how they came to be shackled to this or that spot, but I doubt it has meaning. Certainly this study doesn’t.
OK, there ARE still some women who can hold an adult-level conversation…..
For groups as large as men and women, the variations in behavior within each class are going to be greater than the variations across classes.
Ontologically and logically, this is a wholly spurious and unsupported assumption. It is unwarranted.
To support it you would have to prove that the “classes” were arbitrary and artificial. Here, comically, you have come across a “class” distinction that is anything but arbitrary or artificial. This goes beyond “mere” biology or “psychology”–have a gander at the story of civilization, if you can bear it.
Also, the notion presented here of “pro-social” is in fact a canard and an artless one at that. What you mean of course, is “pro-communist”, “pro-Cultural Marxist” or at the very least “pro-collectivist”. This is hardly the same thing and the usage here actually is a willfully dishonest misappropriation of the notion and the “term”. Moreover, there is no definition of this “virtue” given or any way to evaluate it. It appears to be at best a hallucination; at worse it is wholly manufactured but of propaganda.
Long ago it was know that your baker bakes his bread out of self interest, and this indeed is “pro-social” in that it puts food in your mouth. Carnegie did much more “advance society” than did Stalin or his all of his slaves grinding away in the steel mills of the USSR. Some female out there “working” on some preposterous liberal fad of the day help “society” not at all. She is merely being manipulated by her vanity.
If this study proves anything–other than the ideological blinders of the “researchers”conducting it- it proves that either single women are even more suseptable to fatueous and woolly-headed nonsense that single men or they are better at feigning political correctness.
You can rest assured that any married womaan with mouths to feed is out there working for the money, and not some strange notion of “social good”. The smart one are at home and their husbands are going out to work everyday to pay for it. Btw, his is a good thing;this is about as “pro-social” as most women can get. This is indeed what society is mostly about.
How strange the notion of the female the Left shops around. As all of history knows, there are few things more self absorbed in their own egoism, self-interest and mechanization than the female sex.
The notion that they are somehow more “altruistic” is pure lefty hogwash. This is confusing vanity with orality.
Actually all sorts of anthropological and other evidence indicates men are generally relatively more selfish and self-serving, at least with respect to their own children. For example, Yus stopped giving microloans to men and kept giving them to women, because on average, loans to women resulted in improved welfare for their children, while men basically used the money to puff themselves up to attract sexual mates, or just buy sex directly. Kristof recently ran a column on the regrettable fact that third world men spend much more on liquor and cigarettes for themselves than on their children’s health and education; women have a better record here as well. This doesn’t mean women can’t be exploitative or apathetic regarding their own children under various conditions – they are – but the overall record here is empirically strong.
Hattip,
In your own ham-fisted way, you bring an important perspective to this discussion, because you get right to the nuts and bolts of what this discussion is really all about.
Your recitation of the “Long ago it was know that your baker bakes his bread out of self interest” cant is an obligatory part of the classical/neoclassical liturgy.
And like a bullet you zero in on the fatal flaw that lies at the heart of Marxism—-it’s innocence in believing that some benevolently inspired class can or will operate for the greater good. The existence of such pure altruism is very much in doubt, and those who claim it invariably resort to Robespierre’s “terror of virtue” and its Bolshevik epigones. Of course most progressives have acknowledged this fatal flaw that lies at the heart of Marxism. Niebuhr, Arendt, Martin Luther King, Cornel West, and many other progressive intellectuals have written extensively about it. But unfortunately, as you are quick to point out, there is still a handful out there—adherents of the New Left—who refuse to acknowledge the fatal flaw that lies at the heart of Marxism.
But the fact that the “New Left” is not “the left” is lost upon you. Either that or you are consciously engaging a rhetorical strategy. It’s called stereotyping. So it is the New Left that you paint the entire left with. There’s nothing remarkable or unusual about this strategy and I think all of us revert to it at one time or another. The greater problem comes if you really believe the propaganda you are spouting and/or you create other true believers with your brainwashing.
Either way, your diatribe obscures the blind spots that lie at the core of your own classical-neoclassical dogma, which are every bit as fatal, and make your own dogma every bit as flawed, as that of the New Left:
1) That no human behavior is motivated by altruism, or even worse that altruism doesn’t exist at all,
2) That no human behavior is motivated by what Thomas Hobbes termed “the continual competition for honor and dignity” in human affairs. The false abstraction of “economic man” that lies at the heart of your classical/neoclassical dogma, as Niebuhr put it, “understands neither the traditional ethnic and cultural loyalties which qualify a consistent economic rationalism; nor the deep and complex motives in the human psyche which express themselves in the desire for ‘power and glory.’ All the conflicts in human society involving passions and ambitions, hatreds and loves, envies and ideals not recorded in the market place, are beyond the comprehension” of classical/neoclassical dogma.
3) That all human behavior is motivated by, as you put it, “self interest.”
So what you and the New Left give us is this Chiliastic battle of wrong vs. wrong, error vs. error. And neither you nor the adherents of the New Left have any regard for truth.
In addition to their mutual hatred of truth, the samurais of the right and the New Left have another point in common. They both seem to believe that if they turn up the volume on the histrionics loud enough, that somehow the truth will get drowned out. As Robert Hughes put it, the hard left and the hard right “are now locked in a full-blown, mutually sustaining folie à deux, and the only person each dislikes more than the other is the one who tells both to lighten up.”
Is the right capable of the same sort of self-criticism that the left is? I often wonder.
The following, written by Ralph Ellison, is typical of the scorching critiques that have emanated from progressives, aimed at avatars of the New Left. Here Ellison is responding to an essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons,” which was written by Irving Howe and published in Howe’s magazine, Dissent. Howe was one of the leading lights of the New Left during the Civil Rights era:
Many of those who write of Negro life today seem to assume that as long as their hearts are in the right place they can be as arbitrary as they wish in their formulations. Others seem to feel that they can air with impunity their most private Freudian fantasies as long as they are given the slightest camouflage of intellectuality and projected as “Negro.” They have made of the no-man’s land created by segregation a territory for infantile self-expression and intellectual anarchy. They write as though Negro life exists I light of their belated regard, and they publish interpretations of Negro experience which would not hold true for their own or for any other form of human life.
Here the basic unity of human experience that assures us of some possibility of emphatic and symbolic identification with those of other backgrounds is blasted in the interest of specious political and philosophical conceits. Prefabricated Negroes are sketched on sheets of paper and superimposed upon the Negro community; then when someone thrusts his head through the page and yells, “Watch out there, Jack, there’s people living under here,” they are shocked and indignant.
–Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
Male motivation can be explained with the 4F’s: Food Fear Fighting and Sex.
I have no clue how female brains work, but they are different than males.
I must be seriously deficient as I only care about food and sex….
1) I suggest that you should be cautious of stereotyping stereotypes, Yves.
2) One needs to be cautious of arguments of the type “For … men and women, the variations in behavior within each class are going to be greater than the variations across classes”, lest one conclude that men are not on average taller than women.
Did you read my sentence? I suggest you read it again.
First, it said behavior. Height and other physical attributes are not behavior.
Second, the statement is accurate even when applied to most physical attributes. Variation across classes (variations in height across classes, as in men v. women) is less than variations within a class (variations in height among women, think of the height of giants v. dwarves in each class).
The danger (for example see the comment of the breadwinner woman earlier with the altruistic husband) of these gender based stereotypes, is that they pigeonhole each gender. Despite the fact that most women score badly on spatial ability, not all women do (yours truly is an example). There are women who have such well honed aggressive instincts that I’ve seen men on deals completely intimidated by them (and this is in M&A, a high testosterone business). I’m sure you can think of men and women who violate the accepted norms for their gender in significant ways.
“”For … men and women, the variations in behavior within each class are going to be greater than the variations across classes’, lest one conclude that men are not on average taller than women.”
That conclusion would not follow logically from the statement. The statement you quoted doesn’t assert (or imply in any way) that there are no differences BETWEEN the groups, only that the variability within the groups is larger than the differences between them. E.g., in the USA the average man is 5’9″. But assuming a normal distribution (which IIRC is generally true for height), men who are ~ 5′ 4.5″ through ~6′ 1.5″ are within 2 standard deviations from the mean (i.e., of normal height by even a conservative definition of normal). In the USA the average woman is 5′ 4″. But women who are ~ 5′ through ~5′ 8″ are within 2 standard deviations from the mean. Therefore, even a conservative estimate of the within group differences (9″ for men and 8″ for women) exceeds the between group differences (~5″).
It would not be unusual for a randomly picked woman to be taller than a randomly picked man, although if you randomly picked 100 women and 100 men, it would be unusual for the average height of the women to be taller than the average height of the men. (Although that does not necessarily follow from the statement, it is generally how the statement you quoted is used).
How are the slaves motivated?
Warm glow altruism or pure altruism?
Lashes to the back or FICO scores?
Articles that deflect from the slave owner or articles that glorify and legitimize the billionaire slave owners?
Patriotism or religion?
… “warm glow altruism” should get the head fuck of the year award and Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos should be given mind enemas.
Altruism is a deception.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Altruism is deception? What could that cryptic epigram mean? Are you saying that when the Boy Scout helps the little old lady across the street, or the American doctor takes time from a thriving practice to treat river blindness in Africa for free, or I shovel my disabled neighbor’s driveway without compensation, it’s because we’ve all been “deceived”? By whom? To what end? What would we be doing if, rather than being delusional, we were seeing things clearly?
Not a cryptic epigram at all, it is a statement of reality.
The boy scout, motivated by his programming, is in the “warm glow” reward zone and feels the reward of his parents and scout masters adoration. His “compensation” is getting a ‘perceived need’ met instilled by the merit badge kool aid.
Similarly, the doctor and yourself get “compensation”. People think highly of you both and you like that. It makes you feel good. It makes you glow inside. It satisfies an instilled by others need. The doctor gets “warm glow” AND business building press in the local newspapers to make his business thrive even more. You get “warm glow” and the adoration of your neighbors as “compensation”.
Every act, every externalization of every organism, humans included, is made to get needs met and is deceptive in nature.
You ask, “By whom? To what end? What would we be doing if, rather than being delusional, we were seeing things clearly?”
By whom, and to what end, I can only speculate on the universal level.
On the earthly level however, I would say that the end is that when you accept the reality, as painful and frightening as it is, that we exist in a dog eat dog (human eat human, organism eat organism) world, where deception and perception are the prime movers of evolution, you are better able to deal with it and less inclined to accept pie in the sky when you die fantasies and a myriad of other false ideologies, isms, deceptions, etc., put forth by those who do perceive that reality more clearly and are giving you endless kool aid snow jobs, like Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos, so as to get their own needs met.
When you accept that very natural, organism eat organism reality, and the greater intellect and externalizing power of humans, you see the need for alliances and very strong regulation and transparency in those alliances. Regulation and transparency that would prevent the few, who do see the reality clearly, from gaming all of those who do not.
Free of the intra species cannibalization we would turn our attention fully to other species and inorganic resources to further evolve our own spirits.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Every act, every externalization of every organism, humans included, is made to get needs met…
In this worldview, how do you explain the soldier who throws himself on the grenade, and dies, to save his fellow soldiers?
On the earthly level however, I would say that the end is that when you accept the reality, as painful and frightening as it is, that we exist in a dog eat dog (human eat human, organism eat organism) world…
i on the ball patriot, meet Ayn Rand.
Why do you ape this highly simplistic, reductionist pseudo-science that is the currency of the New Atheists, and lies at the heart of the neoliberal dogma?
i on the ball patriot, you are deceived.
Re: In this worldview, how do you explain the soldier who throws himself on the grenade, and dies, to save his fellow soldiers?
Uh, the deception that it actually matters? Or perhaps the deception that there is a greater-good. Or, perhaps just stupidity.
DownSouth asks; “In this worldview, how do you explain the soldier who throws himself on the grenade, and dies, to save his fellow soldiers?”
NOTaREALmerican has it right, the soldier is a product of his or her kool aid.
DownSouth asks further; “Why do you ape this highly simplistic, reductionist pseudo-science that is the currency of the New Atheists, and lies at the heart of the neoliberal dogma?”
Because it is the currency of reality. I repeat, “when you accept the reality, as painful and frightening as it is, that we exist in a dog eat dog (human eat human, organism eat organism) world, where deception and perception are the prime movers of evolution, you are better able to deal with it and less inclined to accept pie in the sky when you die fantasies and a myriad of other false ideologies, isms, deceptions, etc., put forth by those who do perceive that reality more clearly and are giving you endless kool aid snow jobs, like Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos, so as to get their own needs met.”
Simplifying counters the deceptive complexity and makes one more skeptical. It reveals the kool aid.
Why do you color me Ayn Rand or an atheist because I see the reality?
I am not an athiest, I believe in the onotron (even more frightening to frail human egos than being a mere cannibal) as a result of observing reality and not buying into others kool aid.
You are what you have been through,
But now and the future are up to you.
I reject the philosophy of Rand and believe in Fairism. A philosophy that will come about when perception overwhelms the deceptions.
Given that you reject reality, what is your right brand of kool aid DownSouth?
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
NOTaREALmerican,
Now you’re really beginning to sound like Richard Dawkins. Is there anything the New Atheists won’t stoop to in order to justify the glorification of selfishness and greed?
Instead of dealing with the reality—-that the soldier’s falling on the grenade was a selfless act, even if and in spite of the fact that his reasoning may have been faulty—-the sophistries begin. This is an example of a genetic “mistake,” Dawkins tells us. The soldier does this because he was “deceived,” you tell us.
Either way, whatever motivates the soldier’s act, it certainly wasn’t self-interest, and it disproves i on ball patriots assertion that “Every act, every externalization of every organism, humans included, is made to get needs met…”
I on the ball patriot,
My “kool aid,” or my “truth,” was articulated very eloquently by Sue Rosser, who is the first speaker on this panel:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/origins-symposium/panel-2-human-uniqueness
My “kool aid” is called skepticism or academism.
It is to be found in the tradition handed down to us by Erasmus:
Erasmus begins (in “A Warrior Shielding: A Discussion of Free Will Against the Enslaved Will by Martin Luther”) by defending his skepticism. He asserts that Luther has mischaracterized him as a skeptic who calls basic Christian doctrine into question when in fact he only suggests suspending judgment about obscure matters of interpretation on more peripheral issues. For Erasmus a skeptic is not someone who does not care what is true or false, but Is rather someone who does not leap to conclusions or fight to death for his own opinion. Luther, by contrast, acts as if he were God himself, asserting as certain what can at best be probable. Erasmus here again draws on the ancient debate and particularly on Carneades’ famous concept of the probable as a sensible alternative to Luther’s impossible, “Stoic” demand for certainty.
[…]
Erasmus thus derides Luther’s claim to certain knowledge as hubristic and argues that such claims to divine knowledge put civilization at risk…. This view in his opinion can only lead to disaster.
–Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity
This tradition of skepticism can be traced from the ancients, to Erasmus, to the Enlightenment, to Gandhi (renunciation of any claim to absolute truth), to Hannah Arendt (pitfalls of Robespierre’s “terror of virtue” and its Bolshevik epigones), to Havel:
At the basis of this world are values which are simply there, perennially, before we ever speak of them, before we reflect upon them and inquire about them. It owes its internal coherence to something…[that] firmly grounds this world, bestows upon it its order and measure, and is the hidden source of all the rules, customs, commandments, prohibitions….. Any attempt to spurn it, master it, or replace it with something else, appears, within the framework of the natural world, as an expression of hubris for which humans must pay a heavy price.
–Vaclav Havel, “Politics and Conscience”
DownSouth says; “My “kool aid” is called skepticism or academism.”
Your not skeptical enough to see through the deceptions.
You make my point with your comment about the soldier; “that the soldier’s falling on the grenade was a selfless act, even if and in spite of the fact that his reasoning may have been faulty”
Where did he get the faulty reasoning? Where does the suicide bomber, or the kamikaze, or the overzealous cop that beats immigrants get their faulty reasoning?
Are these the basis of this world, “values which are simply there, perennially, before we ever speak of them, before we reflect upon them and inquire about them” that you belive in? … that owe their “internal coherence to something…”?
Bullshit. They are culturally instilled beliefs, the internal coherence of which is mediated by the base forces of perception pitted against deception.
You need to review the things you come in contact with on a daily basis that allow you to get your needs met for the deception footprint contained within them. You will see yourself there if you are perceptive and honest.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
Bullshit. They are culturally instilled beliefs….
i on the ball patriot,
Are they?
Paul Boghossian wrote an entire book, Fear of Knowledge, that details the fallacies and pitfalls of this constructivist creed:
One source of their appeal is clear: they are hugely empowering. If we can be said to know up front that any item of knowledge only has that status because it gets a nod from our contingent social values, then any claim to knowledge can be dispatched if we happen not to share the values on which it allegedly depends.
But that only postpones the real question. Why this fear of knowledge? Whence this felt need to protect against its deliverances?
In the United States, constructivist views of knowledge are closely linked to such progressive movements as post colonialism and multiculturalism because they supply the philosophical resources with which to protect oppressed cultures from the charge of holding false or unjustified views.
Even on purely political grounds, however, it is difficult to understand how this could have come to seem a good application of constructivist thought: for if the powerful can’t criticize the oppressed, because the central epistemological categories are inexorably tied to particular perspectives, it also follows that the oppressed can’t criticize the powerful. The only remedy, so far as I can see, for what threatens to be a strongly conservative upshot, is to accept an overt double standard: allow a questionable idea to be criticized if it is held by those in a position of power—-Christian creationism, for example—-but not if it is held by those whom the powerful oppress—-Zuni creationism, for example.
The intuitive view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them.
DownSouth: The soldier does this because he was “deceived,” you tell us.
No, you are confusing “deceived” with natural useful human self-delusion. Nobody who successfully “believes” is ever “deceived”. Once the brain’s bullshit story machine creates a believable reality then that IS truly real.
Just as when I die the universe ends. It does, really.
i on the ball patriot,
And you fail to see the common thread here.
Whether it’s the soldier falling on the grenade, the suicide bomber, or the kamikaze, all are examples of persons willing to self-sacrifice for some cause. The common element in all of these instances is the act of self-sacrifice, and that is counterfactual to your claim that “Every act, every externalization of every organism, humans included, is made to get needs met…”
NOTaREALmerican says:
Nobody who successfully “believes” is ever “deceived”. Once the brain’s bullshit story machine creates a believable reality then that IS truly real.
Oh, I get it now.
It’s like those BP engineers on the Deepwater Horizon. They created their own reality in which the laws of physics—-like all that stupid stuff about Boyle’s Law—-no longer applies.
All you gotta do is go watch some Nike commercials and then “Just do it!”
I see how it all works now.
NOW yer thinking like a REAL male!
Dude, what can happen dude?! Let’s go for it. Totally dude.
DownSouth said; “The common element in all of these instances is the act of self-sacrifice, and that is counterfactual to your claim that “Every act, every externalization of every organism, humans included, is made to get needs met…””
The “self sacrifice’ is an act made that fulfills the genetic and culturally instilled needs of those who sacrifice, for whatever reason. One needs to be patriotic. One needs to die for one’s country because one is taught that it is heroic to do so, and so they “self sacrifice” in order to be heroic and fulfill that need.
The Boghossian comment is a deflection but speaks to the concept of aggregate generational deception that is carried genetically and in the environment, especially in the rule of law, which functions as an external dna instruction set.
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
NOTaREALmerican,
Yea man! We can all dance like Ginger Rogers, play basketball like Michael Jordan and think like Einstein. “Just do it!”
On a more serious note, saying that there is bias in science is not the same as saying that all of science is bias.
It does not follow that, because bias exists in science, that the quest for objective truth should be abandoned.
Because of the great complexity entailed in human behavior, the behavioral sciences are much more vulnerable to bias than the physical sciences.
What one believes does not influence the behavior of gasses, or the effect of gravity. What one believes does influence ones behavior, and this opens the door even further for bias in the behavioral sciences. Since science influences what people believe, which in turn influences their behavior, this creates a motivation to bias behavioral science. There are, however, many other things that influence behavior besides what one believes.
The assertion that “Simplifying counters the deceptive complexity” is totally misguided. Simplifying is what landed us in the economic quagmire we are now in.
The science of economics is, because of the immese amount of fincancial interest involved, without a doubt the most biased. Physics, on the other hand, is perhaps the least biased.
There are also philisophical, moral and theological truths. Philosophy and theology are, like the behavioral sciences, higly vulnerable to bias. But just like with science, the fact that there is bias does not mean that the search for truth should be abandoned.
Down South et al… I’m way late to this convo and I cannot really catch up.
However, in the soldier on the grenade bit; One needs to analyse the term “selfless”. If you accept that selfless can be seen as a rejection of ego, then the individual’s worth is zero. Even or perhaps specially in the indiviual’s own perception. This is also true of suicide bombers and similar cases. A far more pertinent example might be a parent giving up their life in an attempt to save a child. The issue at stake is as much motivation as perception of value.
I find Ayne Rand’s writings interesting for their forsight an predictive values (see Australia 2010), however they were writen in simpler times. Also, Ayne Rand was speaking more to economics than psycology. While her predictions were uncanily accurate on a macro scale, I don’t think we can apply them to individual motivations.
And just to pay a lip service to Yves original lead; I think the study is a flawed and simplistic peice of garbage. Humans and their individual environments are far too diverse to be pigeon holed in this manner. For the bulk of mankind the needs of survival make the analysis a joke. It might be argued that in many places the gift of a handfull of rice might be greater than giving $10,000 to a homeless person in NYC. The only reason we even argue the semantics of this question is that we are not concerned about our day to day survival.
I choose altruism as my deception. Thank you.
The idiocy that spews from economic analysis knows no limit.
Agreed!!!!
A number of posters are completely clueless to the standard reframing, Bernays-type advert propaganda techniques, and consistent portrayal of every situation as Team One against Team Two, us versus them, they who purport to be Good, or doing the Lord’s Work, and they who must be following Satan (although I still think knowledge is a Good Thing).
When those revolutionaries kept American hostages at the taken-over American Embassy in Tehran back in 1978, they were not only concerned with the previous history of the overthrow of their democratically-elected president back in the ’50s, but evidently cognizant that the Carter Administration, via Zbig Brzezinski and his Saudi buddies, were relocating Islamic extremist fundamentalist to Afghanistan’s northern border (which was then populated by the almost secular Sufi Islam sects) to foment trouble with the Soviet Union (and, as history demonstrates, it most unforutnately worked!).
Reality is usually far more complicated and explanatory, but again as The Onion says, “Stereotypes make things easier.”
“If women are indeed motivated by a concern for the social cause pursued by the organisation they work for, then they will be more likely to enter occupations and sectors with characteristics that engender pro-social behaviour (such as health, education and social care) and will require less monetary compensation. ”
I don’t see from where it logically follows that being pro-social makes one worker “require less monetary compensation”. The article does not explain. If one feels it’s doing his/her job well, it doesn’t mean that he/she ought to be exploited because he/she’s a sucker who doesn’t know the real value of the work.
Bravo for pointing out the glaringly obvious inconsistencies of yet another pseudo-scientific study.
Although I hear that Carly Fiorina (HP’s offshoring queen and ardent John “I bombed my own aircraft carrier” McCain supporter, along with Blythe “I created the credit default swap” Masters (currently creating all those carbon derivatives), and Teri “I created the B.I.S.T.R.O. and love those credit default swaps” Duhon.
Yup, all socially-aware and concerned fems, along with the most evil offshore queen of all, Diana Farrell, Obamas fourth presidential appointment.
Correction:
After “…Duhon.” the sentence should continue with, believe in the efficacy of this study….
There is more to the picture than meets the eye. Perception is not always the whole truth. The Philadelphia economy and the region it is the center of has a very large Non-Profit sector. In the city, it is estimated to be 27% of economy. The Philadelphia Economy League has released a study:
https://www.philafound.org/ForNonprofits/NonprofitStudy/Overview/tabid/876/Default.aspx
I would seem that there are a thousands of jobs and billions in wages directly produced by this sector. Health, Education and Human services lead the way, but it also includes arts groups, including the high profile Ivy League University, hospitals, and Ballet and Orchestra, there are smaller less renown groups numbering in the thousands. It would indicate that there is a need for more than wealth making, at least, a demand that is being funded by people willing to go out and get the funding and then, operate these non-profits.
Ah, but yes, can the TOTAL “value” of work be translated into a monetary equation ?
When we assume so, we are practicing… idolatry.
Idolatry of MONEY. (By the way.. idolatry of money destroys.. money as a means of exchange. Logical.)
If we look carefully at our society, gratuity is present.
When you invite your “friends” over for dinner, you don’t CHARGE them for the meal do you ?? If you give your friend some advice, you don’t hold out your hand, now, do you ?
ASSUMING that gratuity doesn’t exist is part of that cynical equation.
The INABILITY to perceive gratuity in our society results from our inability to BELIEVE that it can exist.
It is wise to remember that in our society, still… WOMEN raise men (at the early stages…)
It is important for both sexes to perceive difference in their behavior.
And perceiving difference is even more important to us than… equality, sorry to say.
From an anthropological and sociological point of view.
It is important for both sexes to perceive difference in their behavior.
And perceiving difference is even more important to us than… equality, sorry to say.
From an anthropological and sociological point of view.
Debra,
There is a tremendous amount of gender bias built into “science.”
For a superb discussion of this there’s this lecture by Sue Rosser, who is the first speaker on the panel:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/origins-symposium/panel-2-human-uniqueness
Truth gets slaughtered on the altar of ideology and interest.
The problem is that somewhere along the way the decision was made, at least by some influential scientists, to meet lies not with truth, but with other lies.
“Scientists” have proven to have few built-in immunities to the afflictions which have plagued philosophers and theologians for time immemorial.
Correction should read: The problem is that somewhere along the way the decision was made, at least by some influential scientists, to meet lies not with truth, or at least the quest for truth, but with other lies.
Above in Yves’ most recent post you can read my answer adressing the question of science/belief.
I don’t believe in… the truth, Down South…
I don’t divide my world into a construct where truth/falsehood play out.
For better or for worse.
I believe… that the division of our perception of the world into the polarities “truth/falsehood” is responsible for much of our suffering, as it turns out.
It looks like you are an interesting person who takes time to think through your comments, and I am happy to meet you.
But… I think that I am going to bow out of this blog, as it is taking a lot of my time AWAY from my reflexion, and reading (the classics…).
Good luck.
The study subjects were UK college students. That should have killed the study right there. Not school-leavers, not O levels, not a representative sampling full stop.
Ten quid an hour is another red herring. At current exchange rates, that’s about $14.46 a hour. If I were among the self-appointed elite (a college kid) getting twice minimum wage for a couple of hours of my time, I’d be motivated, too!
It’s so much nicer dealing with the the elite! None of this grubby working class stuff for these researchers!! People just like them. Their own students, perhaps!
The millions of minimum wage drudges at McDonald’s won’t produce these results. Nor the wage-slaves at Walmart. Or the cannon fodder in the military. Those are sort of the jobs that most of us have to choose from.
The result of this disconnect is the Tea Party. Which daily grows in anger, precisely because of studies like this.
I think the quality of this research ranks right up there with this economic insight ;)
Short trunks lengthen economic hopes, say US fashion experts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/28/short-trunks-economic-recovery-david-beckham
A new theory from the US fashion industry suggests that as skimpier men’s swimwear grows in popularity, so do signs of economic recovery
If economics was renamed Money Psychology people wouldn’t lose so much sleep over this stuff. What purpose does economics have other than for the fun of a perpetual argument based on assumptions or for the purposeful deception of the dumbass peasants?
I’m assuming there’s a difference between Finance (screwing other humans in markets for fun and profit) and Economics.
The Finance people (men AND women) get paid more….
“….corporations are sociopathic in principle as well as in action, and that large structures and concentrated wealth always act tyrannically and usually destructively as well, and to act on these facts.”
That is ridiculous, once more someone who has probably never worked in business. Corporations vary as much as people. Some do indeed get into sociopathic loops. Others however have values that any rational person would assent to and take pride in. And enforce them on their staff.
I have worked in both places, with managers of both sorts. The generalization is no truer of corporations than of any other form of human social organization. Our task, as individuals, is to inculcate proper values in the many organizations we belong to and touch in daily life. That’s how we make a difference. Not by demonizing some forms of organizations, and (probably) religiously worshipping others, equally irrationally and helplessly.
Please name the multinational which is an exception to my thesis. That ought to be good for a laugh.
Needless to say I’m not talking about each and every individual smaller entity which still has to exist in the “competition” stage. My thesis applies to every entity which reaches the rent-seeking stage, and I do assert this as a “law”, if you like, of politico-economics: No corporation will “compete” as a “capitalist” for one day longer than it has to. The moment it has the clout and wealth to “invest” instead in lobbying and otherwise using its size anti-competitively to become an oligopolist or monopolist, it will.
“If women are indeed motivated by a concern for the social cause pursued by the organisation they work for, then they will be more likely to enter occupations and sectors with characteristics that engender pro-social behaviour (such as health, education and social care) and will require less monetary compensation.”
Oh, here’s the “junk shot” I keep hearing about.
…no, I don’t think it’s going to work.
All those debt-financed billionaires require lots of monetary compensation….
And, being altruistic advocates of altruism themselves, they usually know where to get it too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/nyregion/10charter.html?pagewanted=all
““A lot of hedge fund and finance people in New York had decided state politics was too dirty and focused on their philanthropy.” Mr. Curry, a founder of two Girls Prep charter schools in New York City, added, “I think there’s an awakening now that we can be a force in Albany, but we’ve got to play a tougher game than before.” …
“Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, has melded these companies — which run only about a dozen of the 140 charters in the state — into all pro-charter forces in his talking points, accusing hedge fund managers of putting “profits above education.”
“I think they should donate their money, and they seem to have a lot of it, directly to the education budget,” Mr. Mulgrew said. “They seem to be willing to spend anything, which always leads me to suspect motive.”
Charter supporters say the unions’ own motives are clear: “To protect their own self-interest, often at the expense of children,” said Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager who is on the board of KIPP New York, which runs six charter schools.
The financial titans, who tend to send their children to private schools, would not seem to be a natural champion of charter schools, which are principally aimed at poor, minority students.”
Oh wait–I missed the junk shot:
“New York State United Teachers, the statewide union, produced a report last month listing what it called abuses by charter school officials, including instances in which for-profit management companies signed questionable loans or property rental deals with the schools they were hired to run.”
Umm, Yves,
You say “For groups as large as men and women, the variations in behavior within each class are going to be greater than the variations across classes. ” But isn’t that exactly what Student’s t-test controls for?
I don’t understand why i_on_the_ball so objects to this study, given that it reveals no statistical evidence of “pure altruism”.
But it’s a beta error to accept the “null hypothesis” that “pure altruism does not exist”, so I’m with DownSouth and others in condemning i_on_the_ball for reducing humans to brutes without statistical evidence. What if the study subjects had been told $1000 dollars would be contributed for every 1% increase in productivity? Would “pure altruism” then have exhibited itself?
On the other hand, what if the subjects were promised “eternal salvation and bliss in the afterlife”? Would a significant difference emerge, and would we call it “pure altruism”? Or just “Loving our neighbor? I don’t know. I think I’m with i_on_the_ball on this call: Deception is the strongest political farce on the planet.
Thorstein,
A statistical test cannot compensate for bias or flaws in study design, which can render the data points invalid. One might infer that the study was designed to test a gender hypothesis. They are many studies that show that experimenter bias influences outcomes (go back to the old work on expectancy theory, for starters). That is why, as I remarked earlier, that all drug trials are double blind.
In addition, the experimenters saw a change in productivity and argued that it was due to altruism. But it may simply that this small sample of women (which per another comment, may not be representative) is more susceptible to the Hawthorne effect (note findings on the Hawthorne effect have been mixed over time).
IIRC in the 1930s some experimenters did some experiments in a factory to try to improve worker productivity. They tried changing the speed of the line. Productivity went up. They tried changing the light bulbs. Productivity went up. They painted the wall a different color. Productivity went up.
The experimenters came to conclude it was having their productivity observed led to productivity increases. Any change seemed to be interpreted as a fixed observation. Measuring their productivity increase more finely (which was required in the second scenario) may have been more motivating than version one. In other words, the results may be solely about how various individuals respond to knowing their productivity is being measured, and how it is being measured, independent of how it is rewarded.
Now I as a prospective worker am having trouble understanding: “For one group the amount received by the charity was held constant, as the donation done on the worker’s behalf crowded out one-for-one a donation done on the employers’ behalf. For the second treatment group, there was no crowding out, so that the more work, the higher the total amount received by the charity.”
So presumably there was a threshold (a minimum productivity increase required to have the award happen) for case 1. All study participants may have not understood the how the compensation to the charity worked (it isn’t really clear here) or regarded the trigger level as too high or simply too difficult to relate to their prior output. Or the donation may have been in place independent of the productivity gain, which meant the productivity measurement was BS. That’s how I’d interpret it: “Oh, this is an experiment, now I understand, but they are trying to get me to work harder when it won’t make any difference. This is really silly.” I get annoyed with silly and misguided efforts to get me to perform.
So this may not have been altruism. The women may have been interested in a challenge or test that they thought they could “win” (as in show progress against)). Everyone may have rejected version 1 as too complicated, simply not likely to be attainable, or just silly (how could they remember how productive they had been in the prior session?)
Perhaps I am missing something, but the testing sample seems remarkably thin to be drawing such sweeping conclusions in the first place, particularly with regard to something as complex as motivation.
Pure garbage.
I have just 2 comments:
1. As a former resident of the UK (Southampton, in fact, where these authors are from), I assure you that the University of Southampton does not rise any higher than your below-average American community college. Any studies produced by that institution should be viewed with deep skepticism.
2. Regarding the authors’ comparing women and men, this is merely a reflection of British society, which is still deeply steeped into paternalism, feudal norms, nasty covert-discrimination, and plain-vanilla backwardness, all cleverly veneered behind a thin layer of pseudo-modernism and overly-repressed politeness.
Vinny
2. Regarding the authors’ comparing women and men, this is merely a reflection of …
sounds like Atlanta.
Not nearly as phony as the Brits, though :)
Vinny
I think, Yves, that you may have been better off listening to the part of you that didn’t really want to propagate this. Anonymous Jones’s comment that stereotypes are useful is precisely to the point: because stereotypes are indeed very useful, it matters a great deal for a culture _which_ stereotypes are current. Stereotypes are very powerful, and therefore very dangerous. This study does not study its data in the hope of finding something interesting, it studies its data in the hope of finding its conclusions; that is, they were looking for differences between men and women, and lo an behold! they found them. Investigator bias indeed.
Yves, you said it best yourself in the comments: as far as men and women are concerned, variation within the group is generally far more substantial than variation between the groups. Unless one is talking about birth, nursing, and hormone levels or about entrenched and obviously erroneous social attitudes and about the weakness of women, all so-called differences between men and women are bunk. I thought this was the whole point behind feminism?
Generation me students have less empathy than 20 years ago http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7779290/Generation-me-students-have-less-empathy-than-20-years-ago.html
Yves: in your bit about any changes possibly leading to increased productivity. Part of that may depend on where the startpoint of the study is. If the study begins with a static state situation, ei) where little has changed for a long period, then certainly two factors are involved. a) I know from experience that ‘a change is as good as a rest’. b)Secondly, any external stimuli provoke greater energy. This is part of a ‘defence mechanism’.
Since this is moving so fast I will repost from above::
Down South et al… I’m way late to this convo and I cannot really catch up.
However, in the soldier on the grenade bit; One needs to analyse the term “selfless”. If you accept that selfless can be seen as a rejection of ego, then the individual’s worth is zero. Even or perhaps specially in the indiviual’s own perception. This is also true of suicide bombers and similar cases. A far more pertinent example might be a parent giving up their life in an attempt to save a child. The issue at stake is as much motivation as perception of value.
I find Ayne Rand’s writings interesting for their forsight an predictive values (see Australia 2010), however they were writen in simpler times. Also, Ayne Rand was speaking more to economics than psycology. While her predictions were uncanily accurate on a macro scale, I don’t think we can apply them to individual motivations.
And just to pay a lip service to Yves original lead; I think the study is a flawed and simplistic peice of garbage. Humans and their individual environments are far too diverse to be pigeon holed in this manner. For the bulk of mankind the needs of survival make the analysis a joke. It might be argued that in many places the gift of a handfull of rice might be greater than giving $10,000 to a homeless person in NYC. The only reason we even argue the semantics of this question is that we are not concerned about our day to day survival.
There was a Brit Study published a few years ago comparing gender productivity.
Study: National Health was hiring 8,000 new doctors, when only 7,000 would be required if all the new hires were men.
Regarding generalizations, math proofs are verified by generalization. For example, saying that only 4 colors are needed to identify multiple entities within a map must work not only for the experimental model, but for all maps.
This model is way over simplified. Altruism might equal quality product or service, it could also be efficiency. What is altruism in production? A product that helps the rest of your culture or society? This seems silly to me. The product or service has a market or use be it altruistic or not.
Both male and female could be motivated by both compensation and pride of work. I’m a carpenter and compensation is important, so is craft and efficiency. This can be competitive and possibly motivated by testosterone in young workers, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing but it’s a phase that fades with age. Women are motivated by these same things without testosterone aggressiveness.
There’s pride in teamwork too.
A worker’s motivation at work comes on many levels and might be related to their talents and skills within the job they are doing. A selfish person can be productive and a generous person can be on the same level in production and quality.