Do Incentives Work?

Update (8/5/2006): In case it wasn't clear, this post was just meant to be a joke. I am a great believer that incentives do work by changing the behavior of people and making them react strategically. In the video above the participants try to do their best to avoid the punishment. Most of the fail, yes, but that's just because they were not given sufficient time to react to the incentive. If they had been given a couple of days to prepare, you can be sure that most of them would have memorized the tongue twister and succeeded in the contest. The original post is below:

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If people expect to receive a punishment when they do something wrong, then they should be incentivized to do things the right way (as long as the punishment is harsh enough). The following video from a Japanese show seems to violate this postulate. In spite of the harsh punishment that is expected, five out of six participants could not say the tongue twister. What was the punishment? Well, check the video and judge by yourself if it was harsh enough.