Punished by Rewards
Highlights
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
What concerns me is the practice of using these things as rewards. To take what people want or need and offer it on a contingent basis in order to control how they act—this is where the trouble lies
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Our attention is properly focused, in other words, not on “that” (the thing desired) but on the requirement that one must do this in order to get that.
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
My premise here is that rewarding people for their compliance is not “the way the world works,” as many insist. It is not a fundamental law of human nature. It is but one way of thinking and speaking, of organizing our experience and dealing with others. It may seem natural to us, but it actually reflects a particular ideology that can be questioned
Note
Ce qui est habituel n’est pas naturel
- Thank God It’s Monday: The Roots of Motivation in the Workplace
Of course, it is possible to get people to do something. That is what rewards, punishments, and other instruments of control are all about. But the desire to do something, much less to do it well, simply cannot be imposed;
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Douglas McGregor reminded us that “How do you motivate people?” is not what managers should be asking. Nor should educators: children do not need to be motivated. From the beginning they are hungry to make sense of their world. Given an environment in which they don’t feel controlled and in which they are encouraged to think about what they are doing (rather than how well they are doing it), students of any age will generally exhibit an abundance of motivation and a healthy appetite for challenge.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
“How do I get these kids motivated?” is a question that not only misreads the nature of motivation but also operates within a paradigm of control, the very thing that is death to motivation.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
“I never use the expression ‘motivate a child,’” says Raymond Wlodkowski, who specializes in the topic. “That takes away their choice. All we can do is influence how they motivate themselves.”2
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
The job of educators is neither to make students motivated nor to sit passively; it is to set up the conditions that make learning possible. The challenge, as two psychologists put it, is not to wait “until an individual is interested…[but to offer] a stimulating environment
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
This chapter sketches some of the features of such an environment.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Finally, if students have spent years being told that the reason to read and write and think is because of the goodies they will get for doing so, and if the goodies themselves are appealing to them, they may resist the sudden withdrawal of rewards. Without pressing the metaphor too far, it might be said that students can become addicted to A’s and other incentives, unwilling to complete assignments without them and also dependent on them for their very identity.
The signs of such dependence are questions such as “Do we have to know this?” or “Is this going to be on the test?” Every educator ought to recognize these questions for what they are: distress calls
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
The student who offers them is saying, “My love of learning has been kicked out of me by well-meaning people who used bribes or threats to get me to do schoolwork. Now all I want to know is whether I have to do it—and what you’ll give me if I do.”
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Grades are justified as follows:
They make students perform better for fear of receiving a bad grade or in the hope of getting a good one.
They sort students on the basis of their performance, which is useful for college admission and job placement.
They provide feedback to students about how good a job they are doing and where they need improvement.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Let’s take these in order. I have spent the last 200 pages arguing that the first rationale is fatally flawed. The carrot-and-stick approach in general is unsuccessful; grades in particular undermine intrinsic motivation and learning, which only serves to increase our reliance on them. The significance of these effects is underscored by the fact that, in practice, grades are routinely used not merely to evaluate but also to motivate. In fact, they are powerful demotivators regardless of the reason given for their use.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Grades do serve a purpose of sorts: they “enable administrators to rate and sort children, to categorize them so rigidly that they can rarely escape.”
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Studies show that any particular teacher may well give two different grades to a single piece of work submitted at two different times; the variation is naturally even greater when the work is evaluated by more than one teacher.6
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
grades offer is spurious precision, a subjective rating masquerading as an objective assessment.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
a classroom that feels safe to students is one in which they are free to admit when they don’t understand something and are able to ask for help
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
Ironically, grades and tests, punishments and rewards, are the enemies of safety; they therefore reduce the probability that students will speak up and that truly productive evaluation can take place.*
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
When something is wrong with the present system, you move on two tracks at once. You do what you can within the confines of the current structure, trying to minimize its harm. You also work with others to try to change that structure, conscious that nothing dramatic may happen for a very long time. If we move exclusively on the latter track, such as by mobilizing people to dismantle grading systems, we may not be doing enough to protect our students, our children, from the destructive effects of the grades and other rewards with which they are going to be controlled in the meantime.
- Hooked on Learning: The Roots of Motivation in the Classroom
But—and this point can be more difficult to recognize—if we simply reconcile ourselves to the status quo and spend all our time getting our children to accommodate themselves to it and play the game, then nothing will change and they will have to do the same with their children. As someone once said, realism corrupts; absolute realism corrupts absolutely.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
“The most significant factor in an individual’s ability to remain in good health may be a sense of control over the events of life,” one psychologist has remarked.32 Indeed, research has found that people who rarely become ill despite having to deal with considerable stress tend to be those who feel more control over what happens to them
- Good Kids Without Goodies
In a well-known experiment, nursing home residents who were able to make decisions about their environment not only became happier and more active but were also more likely to be alive a year and a half later than were other residents
- Good Kids Without Goodies
And when patients who require medication for pain (either just after surgery or on an ongoing basis) are able to choose when to administer it themselves, they typically need smaller doses, experience fewer side effects, report being less anxious, and (in the case of postsurgical patients) may even recover more quickly than those who are given the medication by someone else.35
- Good Kids Without Goodies
The psychological benefits of control are, if anything, even more pronounced. Our emotional adjustment is better over time if we experience a sense of self-determination; by contrast, few things lead more reliably to depression and other forms of psychological distress than a feeling of helplessness
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Year-old infants had fun with a noisy mechanical toy when they could make it start; it was less interesting, and sometimes even frightening, if they had no control over its action.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Elementary school students had higher self-esteem and a greater feeling of academic competence when their teachers bolstered their sense of self-determination in the classroom
- Good Kids Without Goodies
One is repeatedly struck by the absurd spectacle of adults who talk passionately about the need for kids to become “self-disciplined” and to “take responsibility for their own behavior”—all the while ordering children around
- Good Kids Without Goodies
The truth is that if we want children to take responsibility for their own behavior, we must first give them responsibility, and plenty of it. The way a child learns how to make decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions. As Kamii has written,
We cannot expect children to accept ready-made values and truths all the way through school, and then suddenly make choices in adulthood.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Likewise, we cannot expect them to be manipulated with reward and punishment in school, and to have the courage of a Martin Luther King in adulthood.41
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Children who attend a school in Which they are asked to take some responsibility for the curriculum and rules discover democracy.”44 That concept in its fullest sense goes well beyond (and ideally may even exclude) voting:45 it involves talking and listening, looking for alternatives and trying to reach consensus, solving problems together and making meaningful choices. It is a vital lesson for children if we hope to prepare them to participate in a democratic culture—or to work toward transforming a culture into a democracy.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
In light of the importance of choice, it may be useful to return once more to the question of what our objectives really are as parents or teachers
- Good Kids Without Goodies
The first, and least ambitious, goal is to get children to do what they are told. Even here, letting children make some decisions increases the likelihood of compliance with a request: a two-year-old is more likely to sit down for lunch if she gets to choose which cereal to eat and the bowl out of which she will eat it. (Of course, rewards and punishments too can get children to comply
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Beyond compliance is the desire to induce children to keep following our rules even when there is no immediate reward to be obtained or punishment to be avoided—that is, to get them to “internalize” these rules. Here it is even more important to provide children with opportunities to make decisions. After all, if explaining the reason for a rule increases the probability that a child will follow it, inviting him to help devise the rule and figure out how to implement it is likely to be even more effective. Now he feels some commitment to the rule. (This is why the most important question to ask teachers whose classroom wall features a list of rules for behavior is, Who made them up? The teacher alone or the class as a whole?)
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Ryan and Deci have made what I think is a critically important distinction between two versions of internalization. In one, which they call “introjection” (borrowing from psychoanalytic theory), children swallow the rule whole. It is inside them but essentially unprocessed. Unhappily, it is possible to feel controlled from the inside as well as from the outside; people sometimes “pressure themselves in much the same way that they can be pressured by external events
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Internalization by itself—even the kind identified as introjection—satisfies someone whose chief concern is to get a child to do something without the adult’s having to stand around prodding him with bribes and threats. Like a wind-up toy, a child who has introjected a particular value will stay in motion after the controller has left the scene.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
No wonder those who direct and profit from a particular economic system prefer “a self-controlled—not just controlled—work force.”
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Ryan and Deci argue persuasively that we should aim higher than this. To say we want children to internalize a value is not enough because frequently that process takes the form of introjection. The alternative they propose, integration, involves helping a child make the value her own, understand its rationale, and experience a sense of self-determination in acting in accordance with it. The objective here is a deeper experience of choice, one understood not just as a selection of Option A over Option B but as something “anchored in the sense of a fuller, more integrated functioning.”49
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Adults can help children reach this goal by supporting their autonomy, giving them chances to solve their own problems (both alone and with their peers), inviting them to participate in making meaningful decisions, and engaging them in discussion about all of the above.50
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Ultimately, I think, we want children not only to be deeply committed to our values and rules but to be capable of making their own decisions about which values and rules to embrace. Here too the best preparation for making decisions is practice at making decisions. But we adults will also have to think in terms of helping children acquire the social, ethical, and cognitive skills necessary for reflection about which ends are worth pursuing and how best to pursue them.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Moreover, we will have to trust children at some point, resisting the temptation to judge our efforts on the basis of how closely the values children choose correspond to our own. This, of course, is a far cry from trying to implant a piece of ourselves in a child so he or she “voluntarily” makes all the same decisions we would make.
Note
The need for control of adults result in the absence of control in the child. Psychological Safety is needed
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Autonomy is not simply one value among many that children should acquire, nor is it simply one technique for helping them grow into good people. In the final analysis, none of the virtues, including generosity and caring, can be successfully promoted in the absence of choice.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
he recalled being “taught that my highest duty was to help those in need” but added that he learned this lesson in the context of the importance of “obey[ing] promptly the wishes and commands of my parents, teachers, and priests, and indeed of all adults… Whatever they said was always right.”
The man who said this was Rudolf Hoss, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz.
Note
Obey. You will become infamous
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Prosocial values are important, but if the environment in which they are taught emphasizes obedience rather than autonomy, all may be lost.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
If we are serious about the value of self-determination, then a number of issues have to be reframed in light of this commitment. For example, it is a truism that children need and secretly want limits, that we are actually doing them a service by imposing restrictions regardless of how they may complain about them
- Good Kids Without Goodies
While it is true that rules and structures have their place, “the critical question,” as Thomas Gordon has remarked, “is not whether limits and rules are needed in families and schools, but rather who sets them: the adults alone or the adults and kids—together?“53
Note
Set the rules WITH your kids.
Set society’s rule WITH its people
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Consider another example: some people insist that two parents must always present a united front by taking the same position in front of a child. True, two wildly different approaches to parenting in the same family will lead to problems, but
- Good Kids Without Goodies
if the child is deprived of any opportunity to decide what happens to her, the parents’ unity amounts to an alliance of them against her.54 Again, choice is the decisive issue.
“A child must have a voice in determining what goes into his stomach, what he wears, what he does with his free time and what he is answerable for in his class,” writes Nancy Samalin, an adviser on parenting issues.55
- Good Kids Without Goodies
But how much of a voice? At what age, and on what issues, should children be deciding things for themselves (or in concert with an adult) ? The answer is that no precise formula can be specified in advance. Struggling to figure out the right balance day by day is a major part of a parent’s job description
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Adults need to check a child’s capacity to make decisions, to make sure he has the requisite skills
- Good Kids Without Goodies
they also must be prepared for problematic responses from children who are not used to exercising choice. These responses are most common when a teacher provides the opportunity to make decisions to students who are accustomed to being controlled. First, children may simply resist, indignantly contending that questions about curriculum and rules are not their responsibility. This attempt to “escape from freedom,” as Erich Fromm has put it, offers the teacher an invitation to talk about whose classroom it is, what it feels like to be ordered around, and some of the other themes discussed in this chapter.
Note
Resistance to freedom wow
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Second, children may be skeptical about the offer and test the adult by making obviously inappropriate suggestions to see if she reasserts her authority and confirms their suspicions that the offer wasn’t made in good faith. While there may be some proposals that simply cannot be put into effect, the teacher will often have to go along with decisions he knows aren’t sensible, suggesting that the class try them out for a while and then reconvene to assess whether they seem to be working.
Note
They bait their freedom through consciously bad choices
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Third, children may say what they assume the adult wants to hear (or what they have heard other adults say). For example, asked to propose some guidelines for class behavior, a third grader may recite, “We should keep our hands to ourselves.” This can happen because children are anxious to please us, or because they don’t fully trust that the teacher wants to hear what they have to say, or because no one has helped them to think through the decision-making process.56 It is tempting for the teacher to accept the child’s offering gratefully, figuring that she has let children choose and gotten the rule she wants—the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, an echo is not a choice. She needs to stop the process at this point and talk with the children about the difference between “saying what you think somebody wants to hear” and “saying something even when you’re not sure how somebody is going to react,” emphasizing that the latter is what she is looking for here.
Note
Again, psychological Safety is needed to make choices.
All the rest is bribery and punishment
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Some of these same responses may turn up at home, too, particularly if a parent switches from an autocratic to a more democratic style
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Some may be unprepared for the transformation of the adult/child relationship that is entailed by letting the child make choices, and they may react by snatching away the decision-making power just given to the child on the grounds that he or she has failed to make the “right” decision (that is, the one they prefer). This not only fails to support children’s autonomy but can also generate considerable resentment.
Note
They give and take away with the first excuse or ‘bad decision’
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Other adults, meanwhile, grant to children the right to make choices that are severely constrained or even illusory from the beginning. I have heard a number of parents and teachers proudly announce their willingness to turn over to children the opportunity to decide things where the adult doesn’t much care what the outcome is. This, of course, leaves the adult comfortably in control and constitutes only the first step in promoting autonomy. Far more meaningful is the willingness to let children make decisions about the things that matter, where we do care what they come up with but are willing to give up power anyway. As one educator says, “Much of the control we exercise as teachers”—and, we might add, as parents—“belongs properly to the children and it is fear that keeps us from giving it to them.”58
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Finally, and most insidiously, there is the practice of letting children think they are making a decision when they have no real power to do so. (This tactic has already been discussed in the context of manipulation by employers to create a purely subjective sense of control among workers
Note
Or democracy today
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Some parents take pride in letting their children think they are making a decision when the game is actually rigged. The “engineering of consent,” as it has been called, seems to offer autonomy while providing “the assurance of order and conformity—a most seductive combination. Yet its appearance and its means should be understood for what they really are: a method of securing and solidifying the interests of those in power.”59 This description by educator James Beane might have been inspired by the behavior of politicians, but it is no less applicable to the province of parents. If we want children to learn how to choose, they must have the opportunity to make real choices.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Not long ago, a high school Spanish teacher in Wisconsin told me a story about a problem that developed in one of her classes. In an effort to promote social skills as well as academic excellence, she had paired up her students for the term so they could help each other learn. One girl who had an impressive facility with the language begged to be reassigned to someone else since her partner was having trouble keeping up. The teacher denied the girl’s request but eventually decided to do something more drastic: she stopped giving grades to her students.
At the end of the term, when it was time to switch partners, the high-achieving girl surprised the teacher by asking if she could continue to work with the same student. Freed from the pressure of grades, she had come to enjoy helping him and watching his progress
Note
People care more for each other a’d are less egoistic when they stopped being bribed and punished by rewards
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Her inclination to care was no longer smothered by the presence of extrinsic motivators; these had led her to look on her peers mostly in terms of how they would affect her chances of getting an A.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
Rewards and punishments actively interfere with what we are trying to do at home and at school. They defeat our best efforts to promote positive values
- Good Kids Without Goodies
The most compelling case for abandoning extrinsic control is made every day by parents and teachers who have done so. They (and their children) are living proof that it is not only realistic to stop bribing children to behave but infinitely preferable. For example, teachers who have moved toward creating a caring community in the classroom, a place where children work together to make decisions, sometimes say they would quit rather than go back to a program of behavior modification and rule enforcement.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
I realize that people who use rewards as a matter of course may find the evidence reviewed in this book deeply disturbing. In fact, I hope they do. “Does this mean I’m a bad teacher (or parent)?” is a question that may reasonably cross the mind of anyone who has relied faithfully on behavioristic assumptions and practices.
- Good Kids Without Goodies
The bad news is that we have paid an enormous price for having accepted it for so long. The good news is that we can do better.
Afterword
During my seven minutes of televised pontification, I mentioned that if for some reason we wished to raise children who don’t care about anyone other than themselves, we could achieve that goal by praising or rewarding them whenever we caught them being generous (see [>]). This paradox surprised and intrigued Ms. Winfrey—so much so that the same producer called in October to ask me back on the program to talk more about the effects of rewards.
Afterword
fortunately the staff had done their homework and were able to borrow a technique that Ed Deci at the University of Rochester had pioneered twenty-five years earlier (see [>]).
Twenty children were invited into an office building one at a time and were greeted by someone who pretended she worked for a toy company. Each child was invited to help evaluate some new puzzles. Half the kids were promised a reward of five dollars for each puzzle they tested. After the playing and evaluating were done, each child was left alone in the room for a few minutes—and secretly videotaped. It turned out that every one of the ten kids who had participated in the evaluation without any mention of payment went back to playing with one of the puzzles when the formal testing period was over and no one was around. But of the ten kids who had been rewarded for participating, nine did not touch a puzzle again.
Afterword
as soon as people are offered an incentive for doing something, they tend to lose interest in that activity.
Afterword
it makes you think about all the intrinsic motivation that’s being killed at this very moment.
Afterword
One thing I’ve learned over these six years is that, regardless of how much evidence may support the proposition that rewards are counterproductive, some people are just not ready to consider this possibility
Afterword
What continues to infuriate many businesspeople is the argument that rewards by their very nature are problematic.
Afterword
Remarkably, people I have never met feel no hesitation about attributing to me a certain motivational orientation or set of values.10 At the very least, this accusation reflects a confusion between making money and being driven by money, similar to the confusion between paying employees and trying to use pay as a reward
Afterword
Another response I’ve encountered quite often is the charge that any criticism of rewards in a particular setting (for example, grades in school) is misguided because “our whole society is run on rewards and punishments.”
Afterword
how does the pervasiveness of a practice constitute a defense of it? If there’s good reason to oppose something, then evidence about how deeply entrenched it is would just seem to underscore the importance of trying to bring about change.
Afterword
Cameron’s assertion that rewards are basically innocuous depends on drawing conclusions selectively from the relevant research, omitting other studies, and blurring important distinctions. For example, her own review of the data confirms that when people expect to get a tangible reward for completing a task, they do indeed tend to spend less time on that task later than do people who were never promised a reward. But she is at pains to downplay this finding, preferring instead to emphasize that rewards seem not to be harmful under certain conditions, such as when people aren’t expecting to receive them (which isn’t terribly surprising)
Afterword
Cameron also argues that negative effects are limited to tangible rewards, whereas the verbal kind are generally helpful. But the way she arrives at that conclusion is by (a) lumping together studies that define praise in very different ways,17 (b) failing to include studies that found negative effects of praise,18 and (c) distorting some of the studies that she does include. For example, she points to an experiment by Ruth Butler as proving that “extrinsic verbal reward” produces extremely positive effects. But anyone who takes the trouble to look up that study will find that it actually distinguished between “comments” and “praise,” finding impressive results from the former but discovering that the latter “did not even maintain initial interest at its baseline level.”19
Afterword
the most decisive response comes in the form of a new meta-analysis, which was specifically undertaken to correct the errors in Cameron’s design.21 I wish that it had been published in time to include in the original edition of this book because it is by far the most comprehensive, statistically precise review of the data on the effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation. Using a careful set of criteria for which studies to include,22 Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan analyzed 128 experiments and found that tangible rewards had a significant negative effect on intrinsic motivation—an effect that “showed up with participants ranging from preschool to college, with interesting activities ranging from word games to construction puzzles,23 and with rewards ranging from dollar bills to marshmallows.”24
Afterword
moreover, this review of the research showed that “by far the most detrimental type” of reward is the one given “as a direct function of people’s performance.”
Afterword
The familiar arrangement in which you get something desirable only if someone else decides you’ve done a good job is the surest way to make people less interested in what they’re doing, according to the data.
Afterword
Another interesting finding to come out of this new meta-analysis is that while verbal rewards seemed to enhance intrinsic motivation in studies where the subjects were college students, they didn’t have a positive effect on children—the very people on whom praise is lavished most often in the real world.
Afterword
whatever benefits really do occur are more short-term than long-term, and more about quantity than quality of work.
Note
Proof?
Afterword
Inc. magazine followed suit with a heartfelt essay, “Incentive Pay Isn’t Good for Your Company,” written by the president of a manufacturing firm in Louisville. The author described how a bonus plan had brought about some positive results for a few months, after which “productivity began to drop.” Soon, the company was marked by “a divisiveness that wasn’t there before,” as employees “were so busy fighting over who was going to pay for what that they couldn’t make decisions that were good for the customers or the company as a whole.”
Afterword
a columnist for the American Lawyer raised concerns about the use of performance incentives in law firms, noting that they represented “an excuse to abdicate responsibility for coaching, counseling, and assisting—an excuse not to manage.”
Afterword
. He had calculated that salespeople and managers were spending fully 20 percent of their time in activities related to the commission system itself, and this lost time was costing the company millions of dollars a year. His calculations didn’t even include a number of hidden costs: stress, turnover, fraud, and actions on the part of salespeople that amounted to “gaming the system”—that is, figuring out how to maximize their own commissions despite the long-term damage done to the organization.
Afterword
CEO Rot Rodin and his colleagues first got rid of all contests and other practices that set employees against one another. Then they eliminated management incentives. Finally, they took the most courageous step—replacing sales commissions and everything else smacking of pay for performance with a base salary.29 As a result, turnover dropped by an astonishing 80 percent, morale soared, salespeople began coordinating their efforts more effectively, and sales, along with profitability, grew dramatically. In 1992, when Marshall began “de-incentivizing,” its annual sales were $575 million. When I checked in seven years later, they had tripled. Frankly, Rodin remarked, if the company had continued to use commissions and incentives, “I’m not sure we’d still be in the game today. “30
Afterword
the supervisors who believed they were in charge of someone who was extrinsically motivated responded by becoming more controlling. As a result, the employee did in fact end up less interested in the task, confirming the expectation about how one “has to” treat such employees. Conversely, the belief that a worker wasn’t just interested in getting a reward led supervisors to create the kind of work environment where the employee did come to enjoy the work more.33
Afterword
The researcher surveyed more than 1,200 workers at three very different organizations that used incentive plans and arrived at the following conclusion: “The overall picture is one of a predominantly negative impact of PRP [performance-related pay] on employee motivation across all organisations and between high and low performers.
Afterword
another survey was released a few years ago, similar to those described on [>], demonstrating that money matters less to most people than the quality of the work environment. Asked to name the most important reasons for deciding to take a job, respondents ranked wages or salary sixteenth on a list of twenty—well behind “open communication,” “stimulating work,” and “control over work content.”39
Afterword
Whether top executives understand this consciously or not, they are (at least in my experience) far less likely to be receptive to arguments and data that challenge carrot-and-stick psychology. The resistance increases as you move up the hierarchy.
Afterword
To my surprise, the audience of middle-level managers greeted my message with enthusiasm and even relief; heads were nodding all over the room. They readily understood that rewards—“Do this and you’ll get that”—are fundamentally instruments of control.40 They are effective means by which people at the top of organizations can maintain their power over those down below
Afterword
Even a very young child realizes that behavior management systems are not intended to foster curiosity or creativity or compassion; they are primarily designed to elicit mindless obedience, the logical conclusion evidently being a student who resembles an inanimate object.
Afterword
One father, for example, told me that his son’s first-grade teacher rates the children’s behavior every day on a four-point scale. The boy explained to him how the system works: a 1, the lowest possible rating, is very rare; a 2 is essentially a punishment for any action frowned on by the teacher; and a 3 signifies general compliance. “What about a 4?” asked the father. “Well,” replied the boy, seeming awed by the mere mention of this number, “to get a 4, you’d have to be a statue!”
Afterword
what matters more than the fact that children read is why they read and how they read. With incentive-based programs, the answer to “why” is “to get rewards,” and this, as the data make painfully clear, is often at the expense of interest in reading itself. The answer to “how,” meanwhile, at least with Accelerated Reader, is “superficially”: they’re skimming for facts they will need for the quiz, which is altogether different from the sort of thoughtful engagement we’d like to see kids come to adopt when they open a book
Afterword
For example, other research has shown that time set aside for free, voluntary reading in school is effective at promoting both skills and interest
Afterword
the conventional thinking among some behaviorists is that sticks should simply be replaced with carrots. So in 1995 two researchers set about to prove that this switch would work here. They designed a two-year experiment in which “adolescent girls at risk of school failure” were offered financial incentives for improving their performance. The result: contrary to the experimenters’ prediction, these students ended up doing worse with respect to both grades and school absences than did girls who received social and educational services without any rewards. More remarkably, they also did worse than the control group—that is, the girls who were just left alone!50 As we’ve seen in other studies,51 offering rewards proved to be not merely ineffective but actually counterproductive.
Afterword
Stronger evidence of a causal relationship came from two other sources. The first was an unpublished study of nearly 8,000 students in the 1980s that found not only that parents’ use of punishments and rewards was associated with lower grades, but that students who had been rewarded for good grades subsequently got lower grades.53
The second confirmation came from a study of children in California published in 1994. Adele Gottfried and her colleagues had been following about a hundred mothers ever since their children were a year old. Eight years later, they zeroed in on those who pushed their kids hard to do well in school, especially those who gave rewards for good grades or removed privileges for bad grades. The children of these mothers became less interested in learning and, as a result, were less likely to do well in school. Paradoxically, the more that achievement was the parents’ chief concern, the lower was the kids’ achievement.54
Afterword
This last point suggests that the problem may not be just with rewards and punishments per se but with an excessive concern about kids’ performance. The use of grades, stickers, and other goodies often implies that too much attention is being paid to how well students are doing in school. This is not at all the same thing as helping students to become fully engaged with what they’re doing.
Note
This is the point of the whole book
Afterword
Bribes and threats are intended to increase performance (or, if you like, “raise standards”), but that may undermine learning.
Note
Another point of the book
Notes
The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999b).
Note
Livre à lire?
Afterword
I always knew that rewards and threats could “work” to elicit temporary compliance, but I now appreciate more fully how appealing that goal can be, how easy it is to overlook the downside of carrots and sticks, how tempting it can be simply to use your adult wiles to make a child do whatever you want. I know what it is to be so sleep-deprived from a baby who keeps waking up that you are ready to dip your toes into the rancid waters of Ferber.58 I know what it means to lose patience with a child, who (unlike you) has all the time in the world. And I realize that child-rearing, like so many things, is most accurately rendered in shades of gray. While some interventions are clearly bad and some are clearly good, most aren’t so easy to pin down. Even with respect to the issues highlighted here, I have to confess that “When your bath is over, then we can read another story” (a sentence I have indeed uttered) sounds suspiciously similar to “If you take your bath now, I’ll reward you by reading a story.”59
Afterword
If parenthood has taught me anything (other than humility), it is the necessity of reminding oneself how things look from the child’s perspective. This is also the single best way to avoid falling back on rewards and coercion, which tend to follow from seeing the child as an object instead of a subject.
Note
Wow. UX empathy
Afterword
parents are widely admired for getting their children to obey. We live in a culture where the highest compliment a parent can receive is that his or her kid is “well behaved” (read: docile). When strangers in restaurants tell us how “good” our daughter is, they don’t mean that she is admirable in an ethical sense but merely that she hasn’t been a nuisance to them.60 No wonder people declare matter-of-factly that it’s simply unrealistic to do without treats and threats: these tactics may indeed be necessary if our goal is to produce children who spend their lives just doing what they’re told.
Note
Wow
Afterword
The more we stay focused on our long-term goals of raising a child who is a caring, moral, self-confident, happy, responsible, reflective person, the less likely it is that we will ever say, “I’ll give you a goodie if you do it” or “You need a time-out” or “Because I said so!”
Afterword
We hug Abigail constantly; we make sure she knows she’s loved and also that we’ve noticed her accomplishments, but we try not to steal her pleasure by telling her how she should feel about them. We try not to preempt the process by which she can learn to form her own evaluations about what she’s done. When she manages some new feat, we’re likely to say simply, “You did it” or (now that she’s old enough) to ask her bow she did it. We give her guidance and feedback when she seems to need it. What we try not to do is arrogate to ourselves the right to decide whether the “job”62 she did was good or bad. And from everything we’ve seen, this approach really works. Abigail seems to feel appreciated while truly taking pride in herself rather than becoming a praise junkie.
Afterword
I said before that working with people, while more difficult and time-consuming, ends up being an awful lot more successful than doing things to people, such as by offering them incentives for jumping through your hoops. Now I’m adding that this conclusion has been corroborated in my own house.
Afterword
In workshops and lectures, I like to tell people that they don’t have to accept everything I’ve said in order to see the value of making some changes. It’s not a package deal. You aren’t ready to give up rewards (at home, at school, at work, wherever), but you’re willing to rethink the wisdom of punishment? Fine; go that far. You have to admit that tangible rewards can be destructive, but you can’t bring yourself to stop giving verbal rewards? OK; do that much. Ride my train as far as you can and get off when you have to. Maybe later you’ll hop aboard again, a little closer to “working with” than to “doing to,” and we can continue the journey.
Afterword
will that satisfy all the people who have been insisting that only my lack of parental experience led me to criticize the(ir) use of bribes and threats? Nah. “They’ll find some other way to fend off what they find threatening,” warned a friend of mine, a psychologist who shares my concerns about behavioral manipulation. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, well, you have a girl. No wonder you don’t have to use rewards.’ Or: ‘Sure, you can manage because you have only one kid.’ And if you have another one and reach the same conclusion, then they’ll just say, ‘Yeah, well, but you don’t have my kids.‘”
His point was that people who aren’t ready will not be convinced by what a dad says any more than by what the data say.
Note
People who feel threatened will not listen
Preface
I have also spent hours badgering a number of other writers and researchers, picking their brains, challenging their ideas and inviting them to reciprocate. For some reason they agreed to this, even though most of them didn’t know me. I’m very grateful to Rich Ryan, Barry Schwartz, John Nicholls, Ed Deci, Mark Lepper, Carole Ames, and the late B. F. Skinner (who, of course, would have been appalled by the result). Friends who have pressed me to think harder about these issues over the years include Lisa Lahey, Fred Hapgood, Sarah Wernick, and Alisa Harrigan.
Note
Mastermind ?
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
This book is about an idea that has attained just such a status in our society. The idea is that the best way to get something done is to provide a reward to people when they act the way we want them to.
Note
Topic of the book
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Scholars have debated the meaning and traced the development of the intellectual tradition known as behaviorism. What interests me, though, is the popular (or pop) incarnation of this doctrine, the version that lives in our collective consciousness and affects what we do every day.
The core of pop behaviorism is “Do this and you’ll get that.” The wisdom of this technique is very rarely held up for inspection; all that is open to question is what exactly people will receive and under what circumstances it will be promised and delivered
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
We take for granted that this is the logical way to raise children, teach students, and manage employees. We promise bubble gum to a five-year-old if he keeps quiet in the supermarket. We dangle an A before a teenager to get her to study harder. We hold out the possibility of a Hawaiian vacation for a salesman who sells enough of the company’s product.
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
But my aim is considerably more ambitious. I want to argue that there is something profoundly wrong-headed about this doctrine—that its assumptions are misleading and the practices it generates are both intrinsically objectionable and counterproductive
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
is not to suggest that there is something wrong with most of the things that are used as rewards. It is not bubble gum itself that is the problem, nor money, nor love and attention. The rewards themselves are in some cases innocuous and in other cases indispensable
Notes
2. “It is absolutely necessary, then, when workmen are daily given a task which calls for a high rate of speed on their part, that they should also be insured the necessary high rate of pay whenever they are successful. This involves not only fixing for each man his daily task, but also paying him a large bonus, or premium, each time that he succeeds in doing his task in the given time” (Taylor, 1911/1947, p. 121).
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Rewards were in use long before a theory was devised to explain and systematize their practice. John B. Watson suggested that behaviorism, of which he is known as the father, began with a series of lectures he gave at Columbia University in 1912. But a summary statement very similar to “Do this and you’ll get that”—the so-called Law of Effect, which states that behavior leading to a positive consequence will be repeated—was set out by psychologist Edward Thorndike back in 1898.1
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
One year before Watson’s lectures, Frederick W. Taylor published his famous book, The Principles of Scientific Management, which described how tasks at a factory should be broken into parts, each assigned to a worker according to a precise plan, with financial rewards meted out to encourage maximum efficiency in production.2
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
• A full century earlier, a system developed in England for managing the behavior of schoolchildren assigned some students to monitor others and distributed tickets (redeemable for toys) to those who did what they were supposed to do.*
Note
En 1812 donc
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
- This plan, similar to what would later be called a “token economy” program of behavior modification, was adopted by the first public school in New York City in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was eventually abandoned because, in the view of the school’s trustees, the use of rewards “fostered a mercenary spirit” and “engendered strifes and jealousies.”3
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
For as long as animals have been domesticated, people have been using rudimentary incentive plans to train their pets
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Classical conditioning begins with the observation that some things produce natural responses: Rover salivates when he smells meat. By pairing an artificial stimulus with the natural one—say, ringing a bell when the steak appears—Rover comes to associate the two. Voilà—a response has been conditioned: the bell alone is now sufficient to elicit dog drool. †
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Operant conditioning, by contrast, is concerned with how an action may be controlled by a stimulus that comes after it rather than before it. When a reward—Skinner preferred the term “reinforcement”4—follows a behavior, that behavior is likely to be repeated. A good deal of research has refined and embellished this straightforward principle, focusing on such issues as how to time these rewards for best effect. But Skinnerian theory basically codifies and bestows solemn scientific names on something familiar to all of us: “Do this and you’ll get that” will lead an organism to do “this” again.
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Skinnerians are not only interested in figuring out how rewards work; they are apt to argue that virtually everything we do—indeed, who we are—can be explained in terms of the principle of reinforcement. This is the essence of behaviorism, and it is the point of departure for our investigation.
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
“Man is an animal different from other animals only in the types of behavior he displays,” Watson announced on the very first page of Behaviorism,5 the book that convinced Skinner to become a psychologist. Thus it is that behaviorists speak sweepingly of how “organisms” learn.
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
he insisted that organisms (including us, remember) are nothing more than “repertoires of behaviors,” and these behaviors can be fully explained by outside forces he called “environmental contingencies.” “A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.”
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
this would seem to imply that there is no “self” as we usually use the term, would it not? Yes indeed, replied Skinner.
But surely Fred Skinner the man—not the scientist, but the fellow who ate his breakfast and told a good joke and became lonely sometimes—surely he was a self. Amazingly, poignantly, he said no. In the epilogue to Skinner’s memoirs we read:
I am sometimes asked, “Do you think of yourself as you think of the organisms you study?” The answer is yes. So far as I know, my behavior at any given moment has been nothing more than the product of my genetic endowment, my personal history, and the current setting… If I am right about human behavior, I have written the autobiography of a nonperson.7
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
over the course of four hundred pages, the book gives the impression that someone else is telling the story—someone who doesn’t care much about him, in fact. (His mother’s death is related without feeling, and the process of raising his two daughters is described as if it were one of Frederick Taylor’s efficiency studies.) This uncanny detachment permeated his life. “When I finished Beyond Freedom and Dignity ” Skinner once said, “I had a very strange feeling that I hadn’t even written the book… [It] just naturally came out of my behavior and not because of anything called a ‘me’ or an ‘I’ inside.”*
- Skinner-Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism
Skinner believed that he had “chosen” to visit my class—and that all of us “choose” our actions—about as much as a rock in an avalanche chooses where to land. But then, the notion that a self freely decides is not likely to make much sense to a man who has repudiated the very idea of a self in the first place. If the rest of us presumptuously persist in talking about “intending” to do something, it is either because we derive comfort from thinking of ourselves as being in control or because we are ignorant, individually and collectively, of the forces that actually determine our behavior.
Note
Wa s skinner some kind of guru?