undefined | Better HN

0 pointssomenameforme2y ago0 comments

I think our differences in perspective probably just comes from different backgrounds. My sports background is in wrestling, and there's extremely minimal ambiguity in scoring there. I think I can empathize with you on these issues in sports like figure skating where scoring may be "objective", but complex enough that it starts to become subjective again - perhaps like boxing in some ways.

And in general I am very much a fan of avoiding excessive extrinsic motivation. For instance I loathe, with a passion, participation trophies. Because I do agree that this results in people participating only for those trophies rather than for the sake of the sport. But where we may differ, perhaps, is that I do very much think that excellence should be rewarded and recognized. Not even just for the sake of those victors, but as a model for other people to strive for. And, in any case, if somebody is good enough at basically anything to be #1 in it, they're already going to be driven intrinsically, or have crazy parents... but that's another topic!

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

divan2y ago· 2 in thread

I think you are right. While I'm interested in sports governance/economics/history as a whole, I'm mainly dealing with figure skating, so biased towards the problems of this sport. Boxing rankings are fun, by the way. As far as I understand none of the four (!) sanctioning bodies in boxing have implemented anything resembling a mathematical model for rankings.

Re: extrinsic motivation. SDT (Self-Determination Theory) actually has quite a lot of studies on this matter. See Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) as an example [1] If you're designing reward/incentive system and want to maximize intrinsic motivation, what to choose – reward for showing up, reward for doing a task, reward for doing great or reward for winning?

Here is a quick breakdown of these contingencies:

1. Task-noncontingent – Reward is given simply for being present and does not specifically require actually being engaged with the target activity.

2. Engagement-contingent – Reward is given for spending time being engaged with the target activity.

3. Completion-contingent – Reward is given for completing a target activity (sometimes within a time limit).

4. Task-contingent – Refers to a larger category containing both engagement-contingent and completion-contingent rewards.

5. Performance-contingent – Reward is given for reaching a specific performance standard, for example, doing better than 80% of other people who have done it.

6. Competitively contingent – Reward is given to the winner of a competition and the loser gets lesser or no rewards.

Simplifying a bit, the results are – the further you go from 1 to 6, the stronger the detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation. In 6, for example, intrinsic motivation can be sustained only for the winners (because it carries a strong positive competence signal) but undermines it for everyone else.

Note that it's not always bad. In a private company, you may want to get rid of "underperformers", so rewarding excellence works fine.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/

somenameformeOP2y ago

I think this is quite strongly rebuked by nearly all of history. Things like participation trophies are quite a modern invention, at least in anything like the scale they have now. In the past it's not like there was some dramatically reduced desire to compete, if anything it may have been much higher.

Anecdotally I'm sure you can also rebuke such, as can I. In sports and games I did do well in, I obviously did not start out amazingly, nor did I receive any accolades or such for merely existing. Yet I went on to thrive in a number of sports/games, in no small part because I wanted to reach the top.

And the same is true of endless household names. E.g. Michael Jordan is quite famous for having been a bench warmer until he hit a growth (and competence) spurt, which started to transform him into the beast he would become. It's not like he just quit when he was relatively weak.

The incidents of competitors which started and stayed at the top, through ever more stringent competition, are very much the exception, and not the rule. Yet if your above hypothesis was correct - they're pretty much all we'd see!

divan2y ago

Well, it's not my hypothesis at all :) The link I posted is a review of the literature on the topic.

I think the real problem with "participation trophies" is that it has very low competence signal. Not negative. But very low for everybody, regardless of performance. The winner's prize, at the same time, gives an extremely positive competence signal to the winner (at the expense of the negative signal to everybody else).

Again, if you put yourself into the shoes of a designer of an incentive structure, then you are facing a trade-off here. Do you want more people to keep doing this activity, or do you want to single out top performers? In sports, I believe it's more of a cultural element. Scandinavian countries, for example, are notorious for their culture of not expressing their personal success (Janteloven). That fits well with the Nordic sports model. More individualistic countries or post-soviet countries with "win at all costs" sports ideology tend to favor incentive structures optimized for early top performers.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse