Can Cognitive Discovery Be Incentivized with Money?

The ability to discover patterns or rules from our experiences is critical to science, engineering, and art. In this article, we examine how much people’s discovery of patterns can be incentivized by financial rewards. In particular, we investigate a classic category learning task for which the effect of financial incentives is unknown (Shepard et al., 1961). Across five experiments, we find no effect of incentive on rule discovery performance. However, in a sixth experiment requiring category recognition but not learning, we find a large effect of incentives on response time and a small effect on task performance. Participants appear to apply more effort in valuable contexts, but the effort is disproportionate with the performance improvement. Taken together, the results suggest that performance in tasks that require novel inductive insights is relatively immune to financial incentives, while tasks that require rote perseverance of a fixed strategy are more malleable.