Solving the "Candle Problem:" exploring the link between financial incentives and performance in individuals and groups.

Abstract

Sam Glucksberg demonstrated in an experiment that the use of financial incentives could reduce performance in solving an insight problem. I wish to conduct a modified version of this experiment to investigate if his results can be duplicated. In addition, I wish to examine if the results are the same when a group of participants attempt to solve the same problem as individual participants. The experiment was divided into two sessions. One session where pairs attempted to solve the problem, and one session where individual participants were asked to solve the same problem. Within each session the participants were either assigned to an incentivized or a non-incentivized condition. The results from the experiment indicate that the use of financial incentives created no difference in the mean solution time within each session of the experiment; the incentivized and the non-incentivized participants performed equally well in both sessions. The difference between the sessions was, however, significant with the participants in the group session performing significantly better than the individual participants. The results also indicate that males might have a lower mean solution times than females.