A candle puzzle from 1935 explains why bonuses backfire
Karl Duncker published a simple problem-solving test that has embarrassed executive compensation departments ever since.
The setup is modest: a candle, a box of thumbtacks, a book of matches, and a corkboard. The task is to mount the candle on the wall so wax won't drip onto the table below. The solution requires realising that the tack box itself is a tool—empty it, pin it to the wall as a shelf, set the candle inside.
Most people don't see it immediately. They are caught by what Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker, writing in 1935, called functional fixedness: the tendency to see an object only as its conventional purpose.
Decades later, researcher Sam Glucksberg ran the task with a twist: some participants were offered cash prizes for fast solutions, others were not. For creative problems like this one—where the insight requires seeing a box as something other than a box—the cash incentive group performed worse.
Daniel Pink used this result as the opening case in Drive because it overturned a comfortable assumption. For mechanical tasks with clear steps, rewards accelerate performance. For work requiring creativity or flexible thinking, they narrow it. Attention moves toward the prize and away from the problem.
The implication is structural. Most modern knowledge work lives on the creative side of that divide. The motivational system most organisations run—targets, bonuses, performance metrics—was designed for the other kind.