INFORMS 2014: Rethinking Classroom Exercises and Creativity

I sat in on a fascinating presentation by Sanjiv Erat on creativity and incentives. The setup, as best I remember it, was that students could earn money based on how creative their answer was to a certain prompt. They could have unlimited time or 10 minutes. The reward might be $2 per ratings point (where their entries were judged on creativity, via a 1-10 scale) in the piecework scenario. Or, in the competition scenario, their reward was $4 per ratings point if they won, and $0 if they lost (e.g., if I got a 6 of 10 on my entry, competitor got 5 of 10, I get $24, s/he gets $0). I believe that was the general set-up; any errors are my own, of course. Students were used as the subjects.

The median score (e.g., 5.6) in each scenario was reported, and was broken down further by unlimited time/10 minutes and by gender. What was most fascinating, and slightly alarming, was the split via gender.

1) If the contest was the piecework scenario (where my reward depends only on my own effort), the women had a higher median score than the men (something like 5.7 to 5.2).

2) If the contest was the competition scenario, the men had a higher median score than the women, regardless of time.

Now that I think about it, I’ve noticed both effects in the classroom at times. If I give students extra time on an in-class exercise, or assign several students to a lengthy project, it seems like the male students, on average, are more likely to under-perform and not take advantage of the extra time or extra colleagues. However, if I add some competitive element, I have seen the men, on average, respond to that element with much more enthusiasm than the women. I don’t want to stretch Erat’s conclusions further than he intended, but I wonder about how these results could explain some workplace dynamics as well.