This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantan.
You may have noticed that our modern world is saturated with awards.
Welcome to the 77th annual Peabody Awards.
Welcome to the 2019 Golden Globe Brilliance.
Academy, the Miss Universe, the fifth annual Tony Award feature of annual Ig Nobel Prize Life Achievement Award.
Many of these awards have been created in the past century, but awards have been around for millennia.
The Greeks and Romans had them.
Kings and queens have long given them to their bravest warriors.
Societies all over the world have recognized their best citizens with prizes.
We pay tribute to those distinguished individuals with our nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Awards are so ubiquitous that we rarely stop to ask, do they work?
Do prizes inspire and motivate?
Or do they cause jealousy and resentment?
The upside, the downside and the psychology of awards this week on hidden brain.
Bruno Frey is an economist who has spent years studying how prizes shape human behavior.
He works at the University of Basel in Switzerland, along with Yana Gallas.
He is co author of the book honors versus the economics of awards.
Getting an award makes people feel good, but Bruno says the real benefits of awards are seen long after that initial glow wears off.
When people are given an award in general, they are likely to work better, to be more engaged, to have, as we say, higher intrinsic motivation.