(We recreated a classic psychology experiment to find out...)

Back in the 1940s, there was a psychologist called Dunker.

He gave his participants a candle in a box with some tacks and he asked them to fix the candle on to the wall in whichever way they could.

Glucksberg in the 1960s went back to the original Dunker experiments with a different variation.

So one group were told that they were given a financial incentive if they did it quickly.

And another group were told that they were doing it just to see how long this experiment took.

So what I want you to do is attach the candle to the cork board so (that) when you light the candle, the wax doesn't drip onto the table.

The tack isn't long enough to go through the candle.

He's going to light the candle even though it's not fixed to the board, which could actually be very dangerous.

(Dangerous enough for us to have to stop it right there...)

I was just thinking maybe if I put one of the pins at the back of the board.

I wasn't expecting the board to catch fire, but you know....

Trying to create some kind of little cradle.

The candle was just falling apart and then all of a sudden, I worked it out.

He's actually fixing the box to the wall, in a very unusual type of way.

This is looking promising, treating the box as an object in its own right and not just a receptacle.

(The 'solution' as identified in the original experiment.)

(But our first group found equally creative solutions.)

In the 1960s, surprisingly the people who were offered the financial incentive didn't actually do it as well or as quickly as the people who didn't have the reward.

So this participant is starting off well and has done it very quickly. Well done.

Trying the candle out... oh! The box is coming out. Got it. Using the box for its purpose.

Some people do freeze under pressure.

Yeah, in a way here, money motivated me to do it. In a way it's in between the lines of creativity and also the money factor.

(Our results were inconclusive, both groups did roughly the same. But our sample size was tiny and hardly scientific.)

There's a lot of evidence now that people do not work for monetary rewards alone.

They work for intrinsic reasons.

And it's very important for people to have a certain amount of money.

Beyond that, it ceases to matter.

And if you don't have that intrinsic interest, you're not going to be creative and your problem-solving tendencies won't necessarily be so good.

Thanks for watching.

If you enjoyed that, be sure to check out these videos next.

And if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button and click the bell to get a notification each time we upload a new video.