[go: up one dir, main page]

  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Electromyographic Activity of Hand Muscles in a Motor Coordination Game: Effect of Incentive Scheme and Its Relation with Social Capital

Roberto Censolo, Laila Craighero, Giovanni Ponti (), Leonzio Rizzo, Rosario Canto and Luciano Fadiga

PLOS ONE, 2011, vol. 6, issue 3, 1-9

Abstract: Background: A vast body of social and cognitive psychology studies in humans reports evidence that external rewards, typically monetary ones, undermine intrinsic motivation. These findings challenge the standard selfish-rationality assumption at the core of economic reasoning. In the present work we aimed at investigating whether the different modulation of a given monetary reward automatically and unconsciously affects effort and performance of participants involved in a game devoid of visual and verbal interaction and without any perspective-taking activity. Methodology/Principal Findings: Twelve pairs of participants were submitted to a simple motor coordination game while recording the electromyographic activity of First Dorsal Interosseus (FDI), the muscle mainly involved in the task. EMG data show a clear effect of alternative rewards strategies on subjects' motor behavior. Moreover, participants' stock of relevant past social experiences, measured by a specifically designed questionnaire, was significantly correlated with EMG activity, showing that only low social capital subjects responded to monetary incentives consistently with a standard rationality prediction. Conclusions/Significance: Our findings show that the effect of extrinsic motivations on performance may arise outside social contexts involving complex cognitive processes due to conscious perspective-taking activity. More importantly, the peculiar performance of low social capital individuals, in agreement with standard economic reasoning, adds to the knowledge of the circumstances that makes the crowding out/in of intrinsic motivation likely to occur. This may help in improving the prediction and accuracy of economic models and reconcile this puzzling effect of external incentives with economic theory.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0017372 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 17372&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0017372

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0017372

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2023-07-22
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0017372