Emotional Intelligence

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Getting paid to do something you love can totally ruin the experience.

Odd, eh?

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many investigators think we have more than one motivational system, and these systems compete - activating one can knock out the other.

One study I've found focuses precisely on this phenomenon. It's called Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science (Vol15—Num11: 787-793). They were studying "homo economicus", and they wanted to see if adding compensation to a task would affect how much effort people put into a task. If humans are rational self-maximizers, they argued, then the more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words: