2 docs tagged with "motivation"

Incentive Theory describes how rewards, punishments, and structural conditions shape human behaviour by changing the costs and benefits of different actions. Central to economics, psychology, and organisational design, it explains why people respond to the incentives they actually face rather than those we intend, why misaligned incentives are the root cause of most persistent organisational dysfunction, and how to design systems that produce desired behaviour reliably.

Status Games describes how much of human social behaviour is organised around the acquisition, maintenance, and display of status — relative social rank. Will Storr's framework identifies three fundamental status games — dominance, virtue, and success — which shape everything from office politics to social media behaviour to geopolitics. Understanding which game is being played reveals why people behave the way they do in groups.