How different types of participant payments alter task performance

Researchers typically use incentives (such as money or course credit) in order to obtain participants who engage in the specific behaviors of interest to the researcher. There is, however, little understanding or agreement on the effects of different types and levels of incentives used. Some results in the domain of statistical reasoning suggest that performance differences — previously deemed theoretically important — may actually be due to differences in incentive types across studies. 704 participants completed one of five variants of a statistical reasoning task, for which they received either course credit, flat fee payment, or performance-based payment incentives. Successful task completion was more frequent with performance-based incentives than with either of the other incentive types. Performance on moderately difficult tasks (compared to very easy and very hard tasks) was most sensitive to incentives. These results can help resolve existing debates about inconsistent findings, guide more accurate comparisons across studies, and be applied beyond research settings.