Is There an Incentive Magnitude Effect on Adult Performance?

Abstract

Four experiments ( ns = 40, 20, 46, 40) comparing the absolute and relative interpretations of the incentive magnitude effect utterly failed to show the effect with normal, community-dwelling, adult female Ss. Money was the incentive commodity used in both card-sorting and digit-symbol tasks, and it was paid both to the individual S and to S's women's club, and it was paid on both a per-task and per-unit-of-accomplishment basis. The limitations of both the incentive magnitude effect and of the methodology of these experiments are discussed.