As part of his ongoing coverage making sense of financial news, business and economics corespondent Paul Solman reports on what drives people’s behavior in the modern workplace.
Which brings us back to our experiment, one of many over the years that have come to the same conclusion — 128 people took part in the original candle experiment. Those offered money averaged 11 minutes to solve it.
But it turned out that, counter to the predictions of classical economics, those people offered no money at all discovered the solution much faster: tacking the box to the wall, to hold the candle and catch any dripping wax. They did it in an average of just seven-and-a-half minutes, instead of 11, and, thus, the punchline of this story and Dan Pink’s new book: To succeed in today’s global economy, it’s the fire within that must be lit.
