Reward Not Punishment Brings Greater Good !

Pulse

oi-Staff

By Staff

Monday, September 7, 2009, 15:40

We all have faced situations in our workplace, which calls for more cooperation among office workers. The latest news is that the rewarding good behaviour can improve public cooperation than punishment.

Often office atmosphere has a lot of conflicts, arising mainly due to thinking differences, envy and other small-a-mole issues that mostly snowball into major problems. To curb these problems, rewards can robustly improve the compliance and cooperation among people, which could also help solve thorny issues.

The engagement in public good games is an essential factor. All of us engage in public goods games, on both large and small scales. For instance, climate change is a huge public goods game: If each person does his or her part to conserve energy and reduce CO2 emissions, it benefits us all.

On a more local level, public goods games include volunteering on school boards, helping to maintain public facilities in your community, or cleaning up after yourself and doing your share of work at the office. In these types of domains, where people interact repeatedly with each other to solve a group social dilemma, the rewards result in better outcomes than punishment.

David G Rand, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics conducted this study.