UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
The importance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for measuring IQ
Lex Borghans, Huub Meijers & Bas ter Weel #2013-006This research provides an economic model of the way people behave during
an IQ test. We distinguish a technology that describes how time
investment improves performance from preferences that determine how much
time people invest in each question. We disentangle these two elements
empirically using data from a laboratory experiment. The main findings
are that both intrinsic (questions that people like to work on) and
extrinsic motivation (incentive payments) increase time investments and
as a result performance. The presence of incentive payments seems to be
more important than the size of the reward. Intrinsic and extrinsic
motivations turn out to be complements.
Keywords: incentives; cognitive test scores
JEL Codes: J20; J24
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