Motivation #hashtag

In the candle experiment, participants were given a task that had one creative solution. When they were given an external reward, they performed more slowly. The speaker concluded that this was a worse performance, but was he right?

Is moving slowly such a bad thing? What happens when we are faced with a problem that has multiple solutions and takes time to figure it out? Can external rewards keep us from giving up or can external rewards encourage us to reexamine what we have already done? Can external rewards move us from taking the first solution to finding the best solution?