Beyond the Paycheck

The Atlantic: 

There’s a belief that what gets some workers to keep coming into work every day is their “psychic wages”—the fulfillment that comes with doing meaningful work. That thinking is usually applied to authors, or doctors, or social workers, but the assumption for why a different class of workers—janitors, factory workers, call-center employees—keeps showing up every day is often simpler: They aren’t there for anything but money.

But Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, believes that jobs are about more than money, for both blue- and white-collar workers alike. When he was trained as a psychologist, decades ago, the thinking of B. F. Skinner—of Skinner Box fame—dominated the field. Skinner’s view of human nature was that every action can be explained through the lens of rewards and punishment: If someone wasn’t doing something, he or she simply wasn’t getting a sufficient reward for it. “And that always struck me as wrong—at least, as a description of human beings, as incomplete,” Schwartz told me.

Read the whole story: The Atlantic