When is intrinsic motivation bad?

Intrinsic motivation – the desire to do a thing for its own sake – is often regarded as the ideal motivation in the context of designing incentive structures. But there are some cases when a reliance on intrinsic motivation leads to adverse selection.

Consider policing. How many cops are sociopaths? The rate in the general population is about 4%. If police were representative a naïve estimate might be that 4% police are sociopaths. But police are not drawn at random from the population – people choose to be police. This has interesting implications.

Suppose police operate under “low-powered” incentives, thus intrinsic motivation is a larger component of why people choose to become police. This could be desirable if the effort exerted by police is difficult to monitor, thinking along the lines of “we trust police to try and catch bad guys even when they aren’t monitored, because police actually want to catch bad guys”. And we might believe that they want that because if they were “in it for the money” i.e. not (at all, there are degrees) intrinsically motivated they wouldn’t have chosen a career in law enforcement in the first place.

The problem is that low-powered incentives can select for intrinsic motivation, but not for particular kinds of intrinsic motivations. You might want to become a cop because you want to serve your community and keep people safe – or you might want a cop because you want to be able to beat, harass, and bully people with impunity. That is to say, you’re a sociopath sitting pretty in the middle of the “dark triad” of narcissism, machiavellianism, and sadism and despite low-powered incentives would so enjoy abusing others that you do the work anyway.

What can you do about this adverse selection problem? If you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak) and keep selecting for (public-spirited) intrinsically motivated cops by using low-powered incentives then you need effective and rigorous screening and accountability measures to weed out those who want to be cops for the wrong reasons. If you can’t or won’t do that, then you need to consider whether it would be worth it (or even possible) to switch to “high-powered” incentives and do away with intrinsic motivation altogether, good or bad. In the American context, with an extremely fractured patchwork of law enforcement agencies that vary wildly in professionalism and accountability, this is particularly a problem – a “bad cop” can just get a job at another department. One department could be doing everything right, and another 20 minutes away could be doing everything wrong – and then cops sort into departments that match their behaviors.

Should we rely on the intrinsic motivation of police? To make the judgement, you have to ask yourselves “Do I think there are more public-spirited people who want to become cops than sociopaths?” or “Do I think there are more public-spirited cops than sociopathic cops?”

I can’t answer those questions. But I think the answer is probably that the proportion of cops who are sociopaths is greater than x. Police unions fight tooth-and-nail against every measure of accountability, no matter how small – and I have little doubt that plans to consolidate police departments into larger, more professional organizations would provoke howls of protest. But more fundamentally, I just think that the temptations of the power given to American police – in practice, the power to deprive another of life, liberty, and property with near impunity – is so much more tempting to the sociopath than the public-spirited person’s desire to use a badge and a gun to actually help people. I guess I just think there are a lot more shitty people out there than really good ones, so if you set up an incentive structure that mostly attracts shitty people or good people, you’re going to end up with a lot more shitty people than good.

There’s a lot of jobs like this consider the case of prison guards – we want prison guards to only be in it for the money. People who enjoy being jailers probably shouldn’t be.

Just some food for thought.