People are frequently challenged by goals that demand effort and persistence. As a consequence, philosophers, psychologists, economist and others have studied the factors that enhance task motivation. Using a sample of undergraduate students and a sample of working adults, we demonstrate that...

Extrinsic incentives play a key role in motivating behavior. However, conflicting findings have been observed with respect to the effectiveness of various extrinsic incentives (e.g., a cash reward vs. a donation to charity) in motivation. We propose a novel framework that accounts for these...