Inequality of opportunity drags down everyone’s motivation

Unequal compensation reduces people's motivation to work, even among those who stand to benefit from unfair advantages, finds a new UCL-led study. The researchers found that large disparities in rewards offered for the same task reduce people's happiness, which in turn reduce their willingness to work, in the study published in PLOS One . Lead author, Dr Filip Gesiarz (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) said: "Here we have shown the psychological impacts of inequality of opportunity, and how it can hurt the productivity and well-being of everyone involved. "Our findings may shed light on how psychological mechanisms, apart from structural barriers, can contribute to higher unemployment and lower university application rates of people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It's more difficult to motivate yourself to work hard if you know that other people will be more generously rewarded for the same effort." For the study, 810 participants were asked to complete a simple task in exchange for some money. In different scenarios across three experiments, participants were told that other people were being paid more or less than they were for the same task, to varying degrees of inequality. They were given the option of refusing to work on a given task, and in some of the trials, they were also asked how they were feeling.