Which incentive is more powerful?

What is the best way to motivate people? It's a simple question with a surprisingly difficult answer.

A professor performed an experiment on two different classes to see if he could come up with evidence.

Dalakas, a professor of marketing at California State University San Marcos, offered optional pop quizzes in both sections of his consumer-behavior class. If students did well on a quiz, they earned a point; if they did poorly, though, they lost a point. If they gained five points over the course of the semester, they could earn the right to opt out of the final exam.

The trick, however, was this, Dalakas writes for the Conversation:

In the first class, the students were told that the final exam was required but they could earn the right to not take it with five points from the quizzes. In the second class however, they were told that the final exam was optional. But, they could lose that right if they did not get five points from the quizzes.

So the difference was in the framing: The right to opt out of the final was either something to gain or something to lose.

Both classes had about the same number of students, learned the same material, earned about the same grades, and, of course, learned from the same teacher. But the outcomes were remarkably different. In the first class — where students were given the opportunity to work toward the right to opt out of the test — 43 percent of the students scored the five necessary points. But the second class — again, where the right to opt out of the final exam was presented as theirs to lose — had a much stronger showing at the end of the term, with 82 percent of students eligible to claim their right to skip the final exam.

Dalakas credits "loss aversion" as a more powerful tool than traditional bonus incentives.

Dalakas explains his findings with the behavioral-economics phenomenon called loss aversion, or the idea that our annoyance over losing something is stronger than our joy over gaining something. Dalakas uses the example of a $20 bill: You’d probably be peeved if you discovered you’d somehow lost 20 bucks. If you’d found a $20 bill lying around, on the other hand, you’d be happy — but the strength of that emotion would be milder than if you’d lost it.

What would you have done?

Here is the link to the full article:  http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/this-professor-turned-his-classes-into-an-experiment-in-motivation.html