Re: Tipping servers and other job items with money motivation.
Originally posted by dadudemon
Inimalist
not capitalized
Originally posted by dadudemon
and I have been discussing this and we each bring up some good points on motivation for tips or other services. I don't care if this thread goes off on tangents, as long as it focuses on motivation for money.
the point was about whether under-tipping/not tipping for perceived poor performance would be an effective tool of motivation for people to become better waiter/waitresses.
Given you seem to have devoted a thread to it, I may as well give it an honest effort. Learning is probably my worst area of psych...
I'll give it a look, but what about this: as a concept, "over" and "under" tipping are relative to the person. in the thread that spawned this, chomper said he only paid in accordance with performance, indicating that he would never "under/over tip". The amount he paid, regardless of the standard, was the proper amount, regardless of the perceptions of the waiter/waitress. Additionally, some people standardly pay more or less than the social norm for tipping, meaning that some cases may appear to be an over/under tip even though there is no intent on the part of the customer to communicate this.
Additionally, many factors other than performance would affect how much you tip. Whether there are social influences, if you with family or with people you hardly know, if you are drunk, the physical attractiveness of the server, you current economic situation or how much money you have on your person, and even just your overall mood irrespective of the meal/service. These things would not only affect how much you would be willing to pay, but also how you perceive the service and the experience. If you are broke, just had a fight with your wife and get some guy who didn't have time to shave before going into work (assuming you aren't into the rugged type) serve you, you might not realize he got called in on his day off when they were understaffed, and he is working the load of 3 people. He gets your order wrong, your mood presets you to under-tip to "teach him a lesson", whereas all it is communicating to him is that you are cheap and ignorant.
For what you are saying to be correct, there would have to be a stronger link between performance and tip than any other factor, including how much a customer normally tips. For a person to effectively learn to perform better, they would have to believe they performed poorly and know that this was the specific reason that they were tipped at a rate lower than standard, and that would have to be the actual motivation of the customer. This is similar to how, when punishing a child, one should attempt to use a punishment that is related to the wrong activity the child was doing. Hitting someone with a toy is better controlled by taking away the child's toy privileges than by sitting them in a corner, I guess iirc.
However, one might not need tip and performance to be the strongest correlation of variables for performance to impact tip in a significant way, and the cultural standard is such that there is enough regularity in tipping to account for people who tip based solely on performance and those who regularly over/under tip. It might be argued that some social pressure to over-tip might force the real average tip above the standard, but that is sort of irrelevant, as I would give you that over-tipping would improve performance (though relative to the caveats I gave).
The reason why over tipping might improve performance but under tipping would not comes from Skinner, and a lot of other learning research. Skinner, at the end of his career, got into the psychology of rehabilitation and the prison system. Basically, he said that prisons failed because they punished people, they gave them no motivation or incentive to get better.
Now, personality differences are important, and as you said, to you getting what you perceived as an "under-tip" made you try harder. That is awesome. However, I know for a fact it doesn't work that way with me [and I am NOT saying that this is better by any means...], and, not to sound all pompous, that might say more about how you rationalize failure to yourself than about any real behavioural changes.