Incentivization Weakly Improves Theory of Mind in Healthy Adults and Individuals with ADHD

ABSTRACT

Previous studies showed inconsistent results with respect to the effect of financial incentivization on Theory of Mind (ToM) indices, with some theoretical frameworks arguing for a positive effects of effortful attention caused by incentives, and others for a negative effect. In four studies we examined both the main effect of incentivization as well as potential moderators, including the type of ToM (emotional vs. cognitive), task difficulty, and gender. Additionally, two of the studies focused on a general population of online workers and two focused on those who stated they had ADHD. The results showed that across the four studies (n = 1,518) there was a very small effect of incentivization on identifying emotions in faces and identifying faux pas (Cohen’s d = 0.15, 0.07, respectively), that was significant across tasks. The effect was somewhat higher for difficult items, particularly in the faux pas test, though it remained rather small (0.16 across tasks). These findings suggest that certain unique aspects of ToM tasks “crowd out” the effect of incentives, leading to their having a smaller positive effect size than is commonly observed in other cognitive tasks. In a meta-analysis of the effect of incentivization on identifying emotions in faces, the very small effect size was replicated (d = 0.15) and accounted for about half of the heterogeneity between study results due to sampling noise.