Most web communities are built with lots of help from volunteers – forum moderators, review writers, members who report problems, etc. One of the more common tales of woe told by online community operators is how, in an effort to reward the contributions of these volunteers, they somehow demotivated them. A typical story goes, “I had great forum mods who spent a lot of time keeping the forum going. When the site finally started to generate revenue, I wanted to show my appreciation for these volunteers with some nominal pay. Most of them ended up spending less time or even quitting entirely!”
Conventional wisdom is that these volunteers burn out or quit because the pay forces them to do a per-hour calculation and they realize that they are receiving a pittance for their efforts. Or, even if they are well compensated, they somehow start only working the hours they feel they are being paid for.
Now, behavioral psychologists may have another explanation: thinking about money makes people unconsciously behave in a selfish manner. According to Money and Me, Me, Me, a ScienceNOW article by Greg Miller, even extremely subtle cues about money cause measurable changes in behavior in experimental subjects. University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vos used very subtle cues like a money-oriented screensaver to produce surprising results:
People cued to think of money also spent only half as much time, on average, assisting another person who asked for their help with a word problem and picked up fewer pencils for someone who’d dropped them.
The antisocial behavior didn’t end there. Volunteers reminded of money preferred working alone even if sharing the task with a co-worker resulted in substantially less work. They also chose solitary leisure activities on a questionnaire–preferring a private cooking lesson, for instance, over a dinner for four. And when asked to set up two chairs for a get-to-know-you chat with another volunteer, subjects who’d seen a money-themed computer screensaver placed the chairs further apart than subjects who’d seen a fish screensaver…
It’s important to note that all of this conditioning and selfish behavior took place entirely without conscious awareness by the subjects. This process is called “priming”. (For some other examples and discussion of priming in a marketing context, see Priming the Customer.) It’s quite amazing that such subtle cues about money could cause easily measurable behavior changes, though perhaps no more surprising than the other examples of the effects of priming.
Does that mean faithful volunteers shouldn’t be rewarded? Of course not… but be aware of the risks involved in putting the volunteer relationship in any kind of financial context. Many community operators report good results with non-monetary rewards and spiffs for their volunteers – special privileges, site-related clothing or merchandise, gifts related to the site’s theme, etc. These seem to strike the right balance of showing sincere appreciation for the significant contributions the volunteers make without the negative psychology of introducing money into the mix.
