What are Autonomous and Controlled Goals?

Earlier we looked at Achievement Goal Theory,  where I described the various types of goals which consisted of mastery-approach goals, performance-approach goals, mastery-avoidance goals, and performance-avoidance. Within the blog, I stated that this distinction of achievement goals provided psychologists information about the "What" behind goals but not necessarily the "Why". As a means to reconcile the various findings on the effectiveness of pursuing performance-approach goals, achievement goal theory created the distinction between autonomous and controlling goals. This dichotomy was incorporated into the framework of a theory called self-determination.  

"Self-determination theory is a key theory of motivation that has made a substantial contribution to predicting self-regulated behavior, including numerous health-related behaviors. This theory suggests that the quality of individuals' motivation affects the extent to which individuals will engage in, and persist with, behaviors" (Hagger, 2014)."Research suggests that the source of a goal will influence how goal pursuit is regulated and whether it will meet with success (Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, & Deci, 1996). Goals that are not endorsed by the self are likely to generate intrapersonal conflict, whereas autonomous goals allow individuals to draw on volitional resources such as the capacity to exert
sustained effort" (Koestner et al, 2008).

"Autonomous motivation is defined as engaging in a behavior because it is perceived to be consistent with intrinsic goals or outcomes and emanates from the self. In other words, the behavior is self-determined. Individuals engaging in behaviors feel a sense of choice, personal endorsement, interest, and satisfaction and, as a consequence, are likely to persist with the behavior. The behavior is consistent with and supports the individuals' innate needs for autonomy, the need to feel like a personal agent in one's environment, competence, and the need to experience a sense of control and efficacy in one's actions. Individuals acting for autonomous reasons are more likely to initiate and persist with a behavior without any external reinforcement and contingency. Autonomously motivated individuals are, therefore, more likely to be effective in self-regulation of behavior. Controlled motivation, in contrast, reflects engaging in behaviors for externally referenced reasons such as to gain rewards or perceived approval from others or to avoid punishment or feelings of guilt. Individuals engaging in behavior for controlled reasons feel a sense of obligation and pressure when engaging in the behavior and are only likely to persist with the behavior as long as the external contingency is present. If the reinforcing agent is removed, action is likely to desist. Individuals who are control-motivated are therefore less likely to be self-regulated" (Koestner et al,2008).

There are two bases for autonomous regulation: intrinsic motivation and well-internalized extrinsic motivation. In contrast to autonomous regulation, controlled regulation pertains to feeling pressured to perform a behavior (Deci and Ryan 2000) or pursue a goal (Sheldon 2002). Autonomous regulation occurs by intrinsic (i.e., ‘‘because of the fun and enjoyment which the goal will provide’’) and identified reasons (i.e., ‘‘because you really believe that it is an important goal to have’’). On the other hand, controlling regulation occurs because of introjected (i.e., ‘‘because you would feel ashamed, guilty, or anxious if you didn’t’’) or external reasons (i.e., ‘‘because somebody else wants you to’’). These qualities are illustrated in the diagram below:



Through this distinction, we can essentially expand intrinsic and extrinsic causes of motivation to incorporate the new clarifications found through autonomous and controlling regulation.


All in all, autonomous and controlling goals are another facet of achievement goal theory used to understand the motives behind a goal or behavior. Its inclusion is a necessary component for self-determination theory which provides a broad framework to analyze behavior and inform behavior change in many contexts of social psychology such as education, health care, work organization, and parenting.

Literature Review: Punished By Rewards (Part Four)

  

  Resuming Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards, I will articulate on the negative aspects of rewards and behaviorism practices in education, and then provide alternatives to improve them. Since I am focusing on academic achievement motivation specifically in my research project, I will cover only the education-related aspects of this book rather than continue the author's analysis on the effect of rewards to parenting and work. 

   When kids first begin their educational journey, they are endlessly fascinated by the world. They sit rapt as the teacher reads from a storybook and once home, they excitedly tell their parents all about the new connections and facts they've learned. But by the time they have spent years within the system, their spellbound trance becomes broken. Children start complaining about homework. They count each minute until the period is over, each day until the weekend, and each week until the next break. They begin to question whether they need to know the information they're learning. 

This change in attitude is usually written off as a natural development or of the loss of innocence, but instead it is the direct result of what is occurring in schools. "Though no single factor can completely account for this dismaying transformation, one feature of American education goes a long way towards explaining it: "Do this and you'll get that" (p. 143). 

Two recent studies confirm what everyone already knows: rewards are constantly used in the classrooms to motivate children and improve their performance. They are offered stickers and stars, edible treats, extra recess, grades, and awards. ... When rewards don't succeed at enhancing student's interests and achievement, we offer - new rewards. When this too proves ineffective, we put the blame on the students themselves, deciding that they must lack the ability or are just too lazy to make an effort. Perhaps we sigh and reconcile ourselves to the idea that "it is not realistic to expect students to develop the motivation to learn in classrooms" (p. 143). 

   Setting aside everything we know about grades and motivation, Kohn states that three facts about education eventually present themselves. First, "young children don't need to be rewarded to learn". The author cites Martin Hoffman and states that "Children are disposed to try to make sense of their environments"(p. 144). Nearly every parent of a preschooler or kindergartner will attest they play with words and numbers and ideas, asking questions ceaselessly, with as purely intrinsic a motivation as can be imagined. "As children progress through elementary school, though, their approach to learning becomes increasingly extrinsic, to the point that careful observers find little evidence of student motivation to learn in a typical American classroom" (p. 144). 

   Secondly, "at any age, rewards are less effective than intrinsic motivation for promoting effective learning. The point here is quite simple; just as adults who love their work will invariably do a better job than those goaded with artificial incentives, so children are more likely to be optimal learners if they are interested in what they are learning" (p. 144). Kohn cites a study that reveals how important intrinsic motivation is for achievement. "One group of researchers tried to sort out the factors that helped third and fourth graders remember what they have been reading. They found that how interested students were in the passage was thirty times more important than how readable the passage was" (p. 145). 

   Taking this into consideration as well as the evidence cited in the past few blog posts, we would expect intrinsic motivation to play a prominent role in the sort of learning that involves conceptual and cognitive thinking. Kohn conjectures that educators and parents often fail to see a truth starting them in the face: "If educators are able to create the conditions under which children can become engaged with academic tasks, the acquisition of intellectual skills will follow. We want students to be rigorous thinkers, accomplished readers and writers and problem solvers who can make connections and distinctions between ideas. But the most reliable guide to a process that is promoting these things is not grades or test scores: it is the student's level of interest " (p.146). In this sense, educators and parents should be focusing their attention on who read on their own and come home chattering about what they learned that day. 

   Additionally, Kohn believes that interest in education is not merely a means to an end of achievement. He cites Richard Ryan, who argues that it is not enough "to conceive of the central goal of 12 years of mandatory schooling as merely a cognitive outcome" (p. 147). Instead, we should aim for children who are willing and even enthusiastic about achieving something in school, curious and excited by learning to the point of seeking out opportunities to follow their interests beyond the boundaries of school. We think school "should prepare people not just to earn a living but to live a life - a creative, humane, and sensitive life, then children's attitude towards learning are at least as important as how well they perform at any given task" (p. 147). 

   The third fact Kohn wanted to reiterate is that rewards for learning undermine intrinsic motivation. It is bad enough if high grades, stickers, and other Skinnerian inducements just weren't good at helping children learn. The tragedy is that they also decrease the sort of motivation that does help. Kohn references Carole Ames and Carol Dweck, two of the most penetrating thinkers on the subject of academic motivation, and states that they have "independently pointed out that we cannot explain a student's lack of interest in learning simply by citing low ability, poor performance, or low self-esteem- although these factors may play a role". According to one study, if teachers or parents emphasize the value of academic accomplishment in terms of rewards it will bring, student's interest in what they are learning will almost certainly decline. 

   Kohn continues in discussing two reasons for the decrease in intrinsic motivation: the controlling techniques used in the classroom and the emphasis on how well students are performing. In stating this, it must be noted, that Kohn does not argue that educators should stop providing guidance or structure to children. Rather, he says that is better to provide students with a reasonable degree of autonomy. For example, "Tests are not used so much to see what students need help with but to compel them to do the work that has been assigned" (p. 149). 

   Telling students what they have to do, or using extrinsic incentives to get them to do it, often contributes to the feeling of anxiety and even helplessness. Some children, as a result, relinquish their sense of autonomy.  This is because "the more we try to measure, control, and pressure learning from without, the more we obstruct the tendencies of students to be actively involved and to participate in their own education. Not only does this result in a failure of students to absorb the cognitive agenda imparted by educators, but it also creates deleterious consequences for the affective agendas of schools [that is, how students are feeling]"(p.149).  Kohn provides more evidence which suggests that tighter standards, additional testing, tougher grading, or more incentives will do more harm than good. Thus, the students' lack of interest becomes highly correlated with the excessive control implemented by the education system. 

   With regards to student performance and grades, there is an enormous difference between getting students to think about what they are doing, on the one hand, and about how well they are doing it. Students who are encouraged to think about what they are doing will likely come to find meaning in "the processes involved in the learning content, value mastery of the content itself and exhibit pride in craftsmanship" (p. 156 - from Brophy & Kher, 1986, p. 264). This is precisely what education wants to promote - partly because students who care more about the subject rather than the grade are more likely to be successful in learning it. 

   In contrast, "students led to think mostly about how well they are doing - or even worse, how well they are doing compared to everyone else - are less likely to do well" (p.156). Having students focus on grades and tests rather than doing well on the task or subject results in the same effect with rewards that mentioned in previous posts: they don't do as well on measures of creative thinking or conceptual learning. Even when they only have to learn things by rote, they are more apt to forget the material a week or so later. Getting people to focus on how well they are doing also increases student's fear of failure. This is harmful since "the game is not to acquire knowledge but to discover what the teacher wants, and in what form she wants it" (p.158). 

   For anyone who remembers my blog on Achievement goal theory, the desire to avoid failure is synonymous with children motivated by a  performance avoidance goal (PAv). And the negative side to it is that PAv goals result in the least amount of learning out of the four possible goal orientations. To conclude, students often say that "getting grades is the most important thing about school". However, anything that gets children to think about their performance will undermine their interest in learning, their desire to get challenged, and ultimately the extent of their achievement.    

   Now that the critiques are all laid out, Kohn explains the various methods that school can undertake to gradually resolve the problems that exist in teaching and education. 

The job of the educator is neither to make students motivated nor to sit passively; it is to set up the conditions that make learning possible. The challenge is not to wait until a student is interested but rather offer a stimulating environment that can be perceived by students as presenting vivid and valued options which can lead to successful learning and performance (p. 199).  

Kohn argues that there should be a gradual removal of rewards existing within education, but first mentions that this is not a change that could occur overnight. For example, if a teacher chooses to stop all extrinsic motivation starting tomorrow students will not be leaping out of their seats cheering, "Hooray! Now we can be intrinsically motivated!" When teachers contemplate a new method of doing things they ought to bring the children in on the process such as by opening up a discussion with them. Secondly, even when the behaviorist tactics are abandoned, the structures and conditions necessary to facilitate appropriate motivation must also be created. Next, Kohn explains the concepts of grades by how they are justified in their use and then provides alternatives to them. The first three axioms for on the use of grades are typically justified in a classroom are as follows: 

 1. They make students perform better for fear of receiving a bad grade or in hope of        

  getting a good one.

  2. They sort students on the basis of their performance which is useful for college 

 admission and job placement.

 3. They provide feedback to students about how good a job they are doing where they 

need improvement 

  

   I will tackle these in order. Kohn in 200 pages - or the equivalent of my past three blog posts -  argued that the first rationale is wrong. " 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. In addressing the second justification,"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" (p. 201). Some critics argue that the grading categories are too rigid, the criteria too subjective, the tests on which grades are based. Thus, it is alleged that grades do not provide much useful information to business hiring or college admitting students on that basis. 

    Kohn argues that grades offer spurious precision since studies show greater when the work is evaluated by more than one teacher. "The trouble is not that we are sorting badly - the trouble is that we spend too much time sorting them at all. In certain circumstances, it may make sense to ascertain the skill level of each student in order to facilitate teaching or placement. But as a rule, the goal of sorting is simply not commensurate with the goal of helping students learn."(p.202) In this sense, faculties seem not to know that their chief instructional role is to promote learning, not to serve as personnel selection agents for society. 

   The third justification for grades is that they let students know how they are doing. In fact, informational feedback is an important part of the educational process. But if our goal is really to provide such feedback, rather than just rationalize the process of giving grades for other reasons, then reducing someone's work to a letter or number is unnecessary and terribly unhelpful. 

A B+ at the top of a paper tells a student nothing about what was impressive about the paper or how it can be improved. The problem is not just that grades don't say enough about people's performance it's that the process of grading fixes their attention on their performance (p. 202). 

   To some degree, Kohn's criticism of grades was a true situation that I had faced in the past. In one of my Honors English courses, I had repeatedly come to my teacher because I was unsure on how to improve upon my timed essay writing. I consistently received low scores, which were indicated by a simple number on the first page of the essay. The teacher justified to the class that this was her method for grading 'holistically' and that comments would not be provided. Upon arriving at the teacher's support hours, I was given a few words of advice and was directed to look towards the essays in which I had higher grades, see what I did well, and go from there. However, this advice did not satisfy me, as I was on a downward trajectory with my writing and I wasn't going to emulate my first ever essay. The content in class got a bit more difficult over time and I needed to adapt my strategies rather than try to recycle a prior original work. I inevitably acquired a helpful tutor which restabilized my grade significantly as well as prepared for me the AP exam. But I digress.                 

   Kohn then suggests that tests, as a form of evaluation, should be less punitive and more informative. In particular, a classroom should be an environment in which students feel safe to admit they are wrong or don't understand something so that they can ask for help. 

"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 will take place" (p. 203). To summarize, grades cannot be justified on the grounds that they motivate students, because they actually undermine the sort of motivation that leads to success. Using them to sort students undercuts our efforts to educate. And to the extent we want to offer students our feedback about their performance - a goal that demands a certain amount of a caution lest their improvement in the task itself be sacrificed - there are better ways to do this than by giving grades.

   The advantages cited to justify grading students to not seem terribly compelling at closer inspection. But the disadvantages only become more pronounced the more familiar one is with the research. Earlier in this post, I cited evidence showing that students who were motivated by grades or other rewards typically don't learn as well, think as deeply, care as much about what they are doing, or choose the challenge themselves at the same level as those who are not grade orientated. But the damage doesn't stop there. "Grades dilute the pleasure performance that a student experiences on successfully completing a task. They encourage cheating, strain the relationship between teacher and student, and reduce a student's sense of control over his own fate" (p. 204). Again, notice how it is not only those who are punished by F's but also those who are rewarded with A's that who bear the cost of grades.

   Furthermore, Kohn outlines the gradual process by which the system of education can progress away from grading and towards the children's interest and genuine learning. His seven suggestions to teachers are as follows (pp. 208-209):

                      

 1. ...Limit the number of assignments for which you give a letter or number grade, or better yet, stop giving grades altogether. Offer substantive comments instead, in writing or in person. 

                     

  2. If you feel you must give them a mark...at least limit the number of gradations. For example, switch from A/B/C/D/F to check-plus/check/check-minus.

                  

  3. Reduce the number of possible grades to two: A and Incomplete. This theory here is that any work that does not merit an A isn't finished yet. ... Most significantly, it restores proper priorities: helping students improve becomes more important than evaluating them. 

                     

  4. Never grade students while they are still learning something; even more important, do not reward them for their performance at that point. Pop quizzes and the like smoother the process of coming to understand because they do not give students the time to be tentative.

                      

 5. Never grade for effort. Grades by their very nature make students less inclined to challenge themselves. Specifically, grading by a student's effort feels like an attempt to coerce them to try harder.          

                      

 6. Never grade on a curve. Under no circumstances should the number of good grades be artificially limited so that one's student's success makes another's less likely. "It is not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a normal; distribution, rather, it is a symbol of failure - failure to teach well, failure to test well, and failure to have any influence at all on the intellectual on the intellectual lives of students" (from Milton et al, 1986, p. 285).   

                      

 7. Bring students in on the evaluation process to the fullest extent. This doesn't mean let them mark off their own quizzes while the instructor reads off the answers. It means working together with them to determine the criteria by which they are learning can be assessed and having them do as much as much of the actual assessment as is practical.  

The abolition of grades may upset some parents, but one reason so many seem obsessed with their children's grades and test scores is that this may be their only window into what happens at school. If you want them to accept the shift away from grades, these parents must be offered alternative sources of information about how their children are faring. Plenty of elementary schools function without grades, at least until children are ten or eleven (p. 210).  

   It is ambitious, but by no means impossible, to free high school students from the burden of grades. The major impediment in doing so is the fear that it would spoil student's chance of getting into college. 

Given that the most selective colleges have been known to accept home-schooled children who have never set foot in a classroom, it is difficult to believe that qualified applicants would be rejected if, instead of the usual transcript, their schools sent thoughtful qualitative assessments from some of the student's teachers explaining how the school prefers to emphasize learning over sorting, tries to cultivate intrinsic motivation rather than a performance orientation, and is consequently confident that its graduates are exquisitely prepared for the rigors of college life (p. 210).     

    Kohn mentions as a side note that he once had the opportunity to address an entire body of students and faculty at an elite prep school.

Already, I knew, they had learned to put aside books that appealed to them so that they could prepare for the college boards. They were joining clubs that held no interest for them because they thought their membership would look good on transcripts. They were finding their friendships strained by their struggles for scarce slots at Ivy League. What some of them failed to realize is that none of this ends when they finally get to college. It starts all over again: they will scan the catalog for courses that promise easy A's, sign up for new extracurriculars to round out their resumes and react with gratitude rather than outrage when teachers when professors tell them exactly what they need to know for exams so that they can ignore the rest. Nor does this mode of existence end at college graduation. The horizon never comes closer. Now they must struggle for the next set of rewards so that they can snag the best residences, the choicest clerkships, the fast-track positions in the corporate world. Then comes the most prestigious appointments, partnerships, vice presidencies, and so on, working harder nose stuck in the future, ever more frantic. And then, well into middle age, they will wake up suddenly in the middle of the night wondering what happened to their lives. When I was finally speaking,  I looked out into the audience and saw a well-dressed boy of about sixteen signaling me from the balcony. "You're telling us not to just get in a race for the traditional rewards," he said. "But what else is there?" It takes a lot to render me speechless, but I stood on that stage clutching my microphone for a few minutes and just stared. This was probably the most depressing question I have ever been asked. Here, I guessed, was a teenager who was enviably successful by conventional standards, headed by greater glories, and there was a large hole where his soul should have been. It was not a question to be answered so much as an indictment of grades, of the endless quest for rewards, or the resulting attenuation of values, that was far more scathing than any argument I could have offered." (p. 206).            

   Returning from the tangent, - and subsequently wrapping up this post - the available research shows that encouraging children to become fully involved with what they are working on and to stop worrying about their performance contributes to "a motivational pattern likely to promote long-term and high-quality improvement in learning" (p. 211). In this sense, students can use their mind to "discover something" rather than "learn something". The benefit of this is that children can see success and failure, not as reward and punishment, but as information. School can gradually shift their focus towards promoting intrinsic motivation by allowing for active learning, explaining the purpose of assignments so that children can value their work, eliciting curiosity, and welcoming mistakes. As for teachers' beliefs in learning, there is obviously a wide range of assumptions and practices to be found. 

   It is impossible to wish away the pervasiveness of Skinnerian techniques in American schools. But a recent national survey of elementary school teachers found fairly widespread understanding that rewards are not particularly effective at getting or keeping children motivated. The fact that extrinsic tactics are frequently used despite the knowledge this knowledge may reflect pressure to raise standardized test scores or keep control of a class. If teachers understand that rewards are not helpful for promoting motivation to learn, perhaps this is not the overriding goal of educators. If so, then a renewed call to emphasize the importance of motivation is what we need. We can get children hooked on learning- if that is really what we are determined to do.     

   And this concludes my blog series on Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards. Next week, I am going to begin with Conformity and Deviation by Berg and Bass.  

   If you're interested in the book, you can pick it up from Amazon: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.           

         

What are Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation?

Previously, I have mentioned the more complex aspects of motivation, such as achievement motivation, and how it relates to achievement goals. But for today I will articulate on a simple yet significant distinction in motivation literature which is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic Motivation occurs when an individual is motivated by something external such as a reward, a desire to avoid punishment, money, good grades, etc. This is a very common method for getting others to accomplish or do something specific as a means to promote appropriate behavior or achievement.    

Intrinsic motivation is the type of motivation that exists because of internal factors such as engaging task because it is personally rewarding. For example, the individual believes that the task at hand is very exciting or enjoyable. This contrasts the previous type of motivation since no external rewards are involved.    

Though everyone desires a sense of personal independence and therefore value intrinsic motivation over extrinsic motivation - namely since intrinsic motivation leads to higher productivity- extrinsic rewards are also essential. Extrinsic motivation is helpful in motivated those who have no initial interest in a subject and can also provide a structure for people who already have internal motivation to be aided by an external force. In this way, external rewards can potentially incentivize people to promote efficiency alongside what they are already doing.

Do you want to easily find out which one you are? I created an online quiz that you can take here!

https://quiz.fbapp.io/where-1676319

Question #4 - Internal or External?

From your opinion, was your education motivated by internal motivation or external rewards?

Literature Review: Punished By Rewards (Part Three)

   Continuing on with Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards, I will explain five reasons for why rewards seem to fail in the long-run whenever they are implemented as a form of motivation. In later posts, I will further explain the implications of rewards and offer alternatives to them.  

   As we have previously elucidated, those trying to earn a reward end up doing a poorer job than on many tasks than people who are not. "Thinking about a reward, as it turns out, is worse than thinking about something else equally irrelevant to the task" (p.49). The issues Kohn describes are more than explanations for why people don't perform as well when they expect to get rewarded; they are also serious critiques raising concerns about the use of rewards beyond what they do to productivity. In all, a strong case is articulated against the underlying applications of pop behaviorism. 

    The author's first point is that rewards behave almost identically to punishment in terms of their psychological effect on someone. To begin, it is taken as truth that punishment as a means to change someone's behavior should be avoided whenever possible both for practical and for moral reasons. Kohn addresses readers who already hold this view and therefore try to use rewards instead. The present assumption is that to induce behavior change one must either provide negative reinforcement or its alternative: rewards. However, "the dichotomy is a false one: our practical choices are not limited to two versions of behavior control. The differences between the two strategies are overshadowed by what they share" (p.50). Kohn goes on by describing that rewards and punishments are not opposites but rather two sides of the same coin. In many respects, rewards and punishments are fundamentally similar because each tactic produces a very similar pattern. They proceed from "basically the same psychological model, one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior" (p. 51). This is not to say that behaviorists fail to distinguish between the two; in fact, Skinner argued fervently against the use of punishment in most circumstances. "The theory of learning and, ultimately, the view of what it is it be a human being are not significantly different for someone who says "Do this and you'll get that and someone who says "Do this and here's what will happen to you" (pg 51). 

   Kohn mentions that in one study in 1991, elementary teachers in thirteen schools carefully observed over a period of four months. The results revealed that the use of punishments and rewards were highly correlated; this indicated that if one teacher used one they were more likely to use the other, not less. It doesn't prove anything about the inherent nature of rewards but rather offers an answer to the question of how rewards and punishments are related. He also states that rewards can function punitively because rewards act as controlling as punishments, even if they control by seduction. The compelling aspect of this relationship is that rewards punish since "if reward recipients feel controlled, it is likely that the experience will assume a punitive quality over the long run, even though obtaining the reward itself is usually pleasurable" (p.51).  The comparison may be far-fetched until we consider the ultimate purpose of rewards and how manipulation is experienced by those on the receiving end. Kohn provides a helpful analogy of rewards and punishments to a fly being lured by honey and vinegar. The key thing that we should consider is not whether more flies can be caught with honey than vinegar but why the flies the are being caught in either case - and how this feels to the fly.

Next, Kohn mentions how rewards rupture relationships in ways that are demonstrably linked to learning, productivity, and the development of responsibility. The effects are evident with respect to vertical relationships (teachers and students) and horizontal relationships (those among peers). Considering the relationships of workers and peers, cooperation not only makes tasks more pleasant but in many cases it is virtually the prerequisite for success. "More and more teachers and managers are coming to recognize that excellence is most likely to result from well-functioning teams in which resources are shared, skills and knowledge are exchanged, and each participant is encouraged and helped to do his or her best" (p.54). The central message of most classrooms is the old slogan "I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do". "This training in individualism persists despite considerable evidence that when students learn together in carefully structured groups, the quality of their learning is typically much higher than what even the sharpest of them could manage in solitude." (p. 54). Kohn states that rewards do nothing to promote this collaboration or sense of community since they actually lead to an undercurrent of "strife and jealousies" whenever people scramble for goodies. Rewards in this sense are not conducive to developing and maintaining the positive relationships that promote optimal learning or performance. In the example of a teacher rewarding the highest performing students with a specific privilege for scoring well on a test, how is the reward likely to affect the way other students perceive them? How inclined will someone be to help someone else with an assignment and feel a sense of community when students are set against each other? "The central message that is taught here - the central message of all competition, in fact - is that everyone else is a potential obstacle to one's own success" (p. 55). 

   I will be honest to say that I have encountered this phenomenon myself. It's not uncommon to have teachers grade a test based on a normalized curve that tries to change one's score relative to other's performance. A many of times occurred in which, before a curved test, a student would ask me about a particular concept for clarification and I would purposely feign that I was unsure about his question myself as a means to boost my own grade in the grand scheme of things. Let this be more of a reflection of an often ego-centric state that schools can place students in rather than anything of my own nature. At the rigorous - albeit worthwhile- curriculum at BASIS, students are often pitted against each to obtain the greatest grades for themselves. But I digress. 

   Kohn continues by stating that competition creates anxiety of a type and level that typically interferes with performance. This can manifest in multiple ways. Some students who have no reason to apply themselves except to defeat their peers will be discouraged if they believe have no chance of winning. Additionally, "According to a series of studies by psychologist Carole Amens, people tend to attribute the results of a contest, as contrasted with the results of noncompetitive striving, to factors beyond their control such as innate ability or luck" (p.56). This results in a diminished sense of empowerment and less responsibility future student performances. Other than deploying competitiion teachers can provide a collective reward. "If all of us stays on our best behavior we will have an ice cream part at the end of the day". An excited murmur in the room soon fades with the realization that any troublemaker could spoil it for everyone else. This is one of the most transparent manipulative strategies that one in power can use. "It calls forth a particularly noxious sort of peer pressure rather than encouraging genuine concern about the well-being of others" (p. 56). And pity the poor child whose behavior was cited as the reason for the party being canceled. Will the others resent the teacher for tempting and disappointing them or for setting them up against each other? Of course not. They will turn furiously on the designated demon. That, of course, is the whole idea: divide and conquer. 

   Not only do punishments and rewards affect relationships among people of comparable status,  they also alter the sort of relationship between the person who gives a reward and the one who gets it. For example, someone who is raising or teaching children probably wants to create a caring alliance with each child, to help them feel safe enough to ask when problems develop. This is possibly the single most fundamental requirement for helping a child to grow up healthy and develop a set of good values. "For academic reasons too, an adult must nurture such a relationship with a student if there is to be hope of the student's admitting mistakes freely and accepting guidance" (p. 57). The reasons why punishments and rewards are ineffective is because they interfere with building a critical relationship characterized by trust, open communication, and a willingness to ask for assistance. To be precise, "if your parent or teacher or manager is sitting in judgment of what you do, and if that judgment will determine whether good things or bad things happen to you, this cannot help but warp your relationship with that person" (p.57). Rather than working collaboratively to grow you will be striving for approval of what you are doing so that you can get the goodies. For example, in business, the primary basis for compensation is the boss' whim, the only real incentive is to stay on his good side. The presence of rewards is, of course, only one factor that affects the quality of relationships but it is often too overlooked in its tendency to cause flattery to be emphasized in place of trust or a feeling of being evaluated rather than being supported. 

   Kohn's third reason in the downside of rewards is that they ignore reasons and don't address the root cause of the problem. "Except for the places where their use has become habitual, punishment and rewards are typically dragged out when somebody thinks something is going wrong. A child not behaving a certain way; a student is not motivated to learn; workers aren't doing good work- this is when we bring in reinforcements" (p.59). The major issue with the application of rewards is that does not pay attention to the reasons that the trouble developed in the first place. When you threaten or bribe a person you can overlook why the student is ignoring his homework or why the employee is doing an indifferent job. Kohn provides an example of a child that will not stay in its bed. The first option one has is to punish the child: "If you are not back in bed by the count of three, you won't be watching television for a week". The next method uses rewards: "if you stay in bed until morning for the next three nights, I'll buy that teddy bear you wanted". But the nonbehaviorist would wonder how anyone could presume the solution without knowing first why the child keeps popping out of bed. Without much thought, we can imagine several possible reasons for this behavior. Perhaps she is being put to bed too early and isn't sleepy yet. Maybe she feels deprived of quiet time with her parents, and the evening offers the best opportunity to talk with them. Perhaps there are monsters under her bed. Or maybe she can just hear people talking in the living room. "The point is we don't know what is really going on but the behaviorist's solution doesn't require us to" (p. 60). Rewards are not solutions to the problem since they act as gimmicks or short fixes that ignore the reasons without looking below the surface."Often it takes no psychological sophistication to identify what is going wrong - only a willingness to do something other than dangle a goody in front of people"(p. 61). 

   The fourth reason for the ineffectiveness of rewards is that they discourage risk-taking. Kohn argues that rewards cause people to the quickest route to completing the task at hand and in doing so people are placed in a narrow framework to work with. "The underlying principle can be summarized this way: when we are working for a reward, we do exactly what is necessary to get it and no more" (p. 63). Risks become avoided more often because the objective is not to engage in an open-ended encounter with ideas; it is simply to get the goody. To reference behaviorism once again, imagine a rat in a maze trying to find its way to the cheese. The rat does not stop to weigh the advantages of trying another route, starting off on a path where the cheddar smell is less pronounced in the hope of finding a clever shortcut. Instead, the rat just runs towards where it thinks its lunch waits as fast as its tiny legs can take it. "The safest, surest, and fastest way out of the maze is the well-worn path, the uncreative route" (p. 64). This causes people to take the stereotypical or repetitive way of approaching problems causing individuals to be less flexible and innovative. 

    Lastly, Kohn articulates that the most significant reason for why rewards fail is because they kill intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation means enjoying what one does for its own sake while extrinsic motivation is external means for motivating people such as rewards, grades, money, etc. Few readers would be shocked to know that extrinsic motivators are a poor substitute for a genuine interest in doing something. Kohn cites in detail several studies in which indviduals who were rewarded became less interested in a task after the end of the experiment. For example, in one scenario in the 1970s when preschoolers were rewarded to play learning games their desire to continue doing so after being rewarded diminished even below their initial interest in the game. This applies even to activities that schoolchildren considered to be fun. One class of preschoolers had the chance to draw with Magic Markers which they found very appealing. However, when some were rewarded for their drawings they became less interested in playing with the Magic Markers before the reward was offered. "Despite the difference in design, the two experiments converged on a single conclusion: extrinsic rewards intrinsic motivation" (p.71). Over the next two decades, scores of other of other studies confirmed this conclusion, "Although various factors do have an impact on the strength of this effect, the central finding has been documented beyond any reasonable doubt." (p. 71). 

   Kohn cites an old joke that cites this phenomenon as well as any study can. It was a story of an old man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds who jeered at his senility. One afternoon, the old man came up with a brilliant plan. He met the children on his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments at him would receive a dollar. Amazed and excite the boys showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man paid everyone. "Do the same tomorrow", he told them, "and you'll get twenty-five cents for your trouble." The kids thought that this was still pretty good and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers. "From now he announced," he announced, "I can give you only a cent for doing this". The kids looked at each other in disbelief. "A penny?" they replied scornfully. "Forget it" and they never came back again. Multiple further scientific examinations of how rewards affect intrinsic motivation have turned up additional evidence of the extent of their destructive power. "A single, one-time reward for doing something you used to enjoy can kill your interest in it for weeks. It can have that effect on a long-term basis, in fact, even if it didn't seem to be controlling your behavior at the time you received it" (p. 74). Kohn explains that the reason for this effect is that anything presented as a prerequisite for something else - that is, as a means towards some other end -comes to be seen as less desirable. In essence, "Do this and you'll get that" automatically devalues the "this". Rewards are usually experienced as controlling, and we tend to recoil from situations in which our autonomy has been diminished.      

   To conclude, rewards are often salient foes in education, business, and parenting for the innocuous reasons that they act almost identical to punishments, they imbalance relationships to create perceived inequality, they ignore reasons, discourage risk-taking, and finally diminish intrinsic motivation for doing tasks for its own sake. 

   If you're interested in the book, you can pick it up from Amazon: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.

                               

Literature Review: Punished By Rewards (Part Two)

      Resuming from my previous post on Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards, I will now provide examples to show the effectiveness of rewards. In the next post, I will list and articulate the reasons why rewards seem to fail in the long run, and in later posts, provide alternatives to rewards.  

     Imagine a scenario in which a boy began to leave home when his mother calls out him. If you help me clean the kitchen this afternoon, she says, I'll take you to your favorite restaurant tonight. The boy then closes his door and finds a sponge. Then imagine another scenario in which on a teenage girl's list of favorite activities, working on math homework ranks just below having a root canal. Her father announces that if she finished the problem set on page 228 before eight o'clock, he will give her five dollars. The girl promptly pulls out her book.
     What has happened here? Both the boy and the girl complied with someone's else's wishes, engaging in an activity they were otherwise not planning to do (at least not at the moment) in order to obtain something they valued. In each case, one person used a reward to change another's behavior. The plan worked, and that, most of us say, is all we need to know. But let's probe further. Rewards are often successful at increasing the probability that we will do something. At the same time, though, as I will try to show in the rest of this post,  they also change the way we do it. They offer one particular reason for doing it, sometimes displacing other possible motivations. And they change the attitude we take toward the activity. In each case, by any reasonable measure, the change is for worse. The trouble may be not that it doesn't work but that it works only too well, and in this, we pay a substantial price for their success. 

    For whom are rewards effective? Many of the of the early (and highly successful) applications of the principles of behavior modification have involved animals (such as pigeons), children, or institutionalized adults prisoners or mental patients. Individuals in each of these groups are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease. Notice that this is not a moral objection; it is a statement of fact about how behavior is easier to control when the organism you are controlling is already dependent on you. In part, this is true because a dependent organism can be kept in a state of need. Laboratory animals are typically underfed to ensure their responsiveness to the food used as a reinforcer. Likewise, in order to make people behave in a particular way, it must be needy enough so that rewards reinforce the desired behavior. People who have some degree of independence will also respond to rewards on occasion, but it is more difficult to make this happen in a predictable, systematic way. 

     For how long are rewards effective? The short answer is that they work best in a short term. For behavior changes to last, it is usually necessary to keep the rewards coming. Assuming your child is reinforced by candy, you can induce him to clean up his room for as long as you keep providing sweets. In practice, however, this raises several problems. What if he becomes satiated with sugar so that the reward eventually stops being rewarding to him? Alternatively, what if his demands to be paid off escalate ( in frequency if not in quantity) beyond your desire or ability to meet them. Most important, do you really want him to help around the house only as long as you have a supply of M&M’s on hand?
     In the real world, even if not in the laboratory, rewards must be judged on whether they lead to lasting change - change that persists when there are no longer any goodies to be gained. We want to know what happens to productivity, or to the desire to read, once the goodies have run out. In theory, it is possible to keep handing out rewards pellets forever. In practice, though, this is usually impractical, if not impossible, to sustain. What's more, most people with an interest in seeing some behavior change would say it is intrinsically better to have that change take root so that rewards are no longer necessary to maintain it.
     If it does make sense measure the effectiveness of rewards on the basis of whether they produce lasting change, the research suggests that they fail miserably. This new should not be shocking; most of us, after reflecting carefully, will concede that our own experience bears this out. However, what is not always recognize is, first, just how utterly unsuccessful rewards really are across various situations, and second, just how devastating an indictment is contained in this fact.

   To start with, let us consider elaborate behavior modification plans such as token economies   (where markets that can be redeemed for privileges or treats are dispensed when people act "appropriately"). Theoretically, these programs should have unusually high prospects for success since they are typically implemented in laboratory-like settings - closed environments with dependent subjects. In the first systematic review of the research done on token economies, conducted in 1972, two avid proponents of the idea stated that:

   "The generalization of treatment effects to stimulus conditions in which token reinforcement is not given might be expected to be the raison d'etre of token economies. An examination of the literature leads to a different conclusion. There are numerous reports of token programs showing behavior change only while contingent token reinforcement is being delivered. Generally. removal of token reinforcements results in decrements in desirable responses and a return to baselines or near-baseline levels of performance".

     Translation: when the goodies stop, people go right back to acting the way they did before the program began. In fact, not only does the behavior fail to generalize to conditions in which reinforcements are not in effect - but reinforcement programs used each morning generally don't even have much effect on patient's behavior during the afternoon.

      One study conducted in a classroom should convey a feel for this kind of research. Over the course of twelve days, fourth and fifth graders were rewarded for playing with certain math-related games and were not rewarded for playing with others. (None of these activities were inherently more interesting than any other). When the rewards started, the kids promptly gravitated to the games that led to a payoff. When the rewards disappeared, their interest dropped significantly, to the point that many were now less interested in them than were children who had never been rewarded in the first place. Researchers concluded that the use of powerful systematic reward procedures to promote increased engagements in target activities may also produce concomitant decreases in task engagement, in situations where neither tangible nor social extrinsic rewards are perceived to be available. 

     In one dieting study, some subjects were promised a twice-a-week reward of five dollars each time the scale showed good news, while others got nothing. Those who were paid did make more progress at the beginning, but then gained back the weight- and then some- over the next five months. By contrast, those who had not been rewarded kept getting slimmer. A similar study published ten years later offered little solace for behaviorists: after a year no difference was found between the payment and nonpayment groups. (Actually, there was one difference: many of those who had been promised money for shedding pounds failed to show up for the final weigh-in). 

     Losing weight and keeping it off are inordinately difficult so it may be unfair to reject pop behaviorism just because it hasn't worked miracles here. The trouble is that it hasn't done much better elsewhere, assuming we are looking for long-term gains. Take smoking cessation. A very large study, published in 1991, recruited subjects for a self-help program designed to help people kick the habit. Some were offered a prize for turning in weekly progress reports; some got feedback to enhance their motivation to quit; everybody else (the control group) got nothing. What happened? Prize recipients were twice as likely as the others to return the first week's report. But three months later, they were lighting up again more often than those who receive the other treatment - and even more than those in the control group! Saliva samples revealed that subjects who had been promised prizes were twice as likely to lie about having quit. In fact, for these who received both treatments, "the financial incentive somehow diminished the positive impact of the personalized feedback." Not only were rewards unhelpful; they actually did harm. 

     At what, exactly, are reward effective?  To ask how long rewards last, and to learn that they rarely produce effects that survive the rewards themselves, is to invite curiosity about just what it is that rewards are doing. Why don't people keep acting the way they were initially reinforced for acting? The answer is that reinforcements do not generally alter the attitudes and emotional commitments that underlie our behaviors. They do not make deep, lasting changes because they are aimed at affected only what we do. What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance, and this they do very well indeed. If your objective is to get people to obey an order, to show up on time and do what they're told, then bribing or threatening them may be sensible strategies. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless. In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless - they are actually counterproductive. 

     In 1961, a graduate student at the university of Kentucky found something she didn't expect. For her dissertation, Louise Brightwell Miller arranged a series of simple drawings of faces so that pairs of nearly identical images would be flashed on a screen. Then she brought 72 nine-year-old boys into her laboratory one at a time and challenged them to tell the two faces apart. Some of the boys were paid when they succeeded; others were simply told each time whether or not they were correct. Miller expected that the boys would do a better job when there was money at stake. Instead, she found that those who were trying to earn the reward made a lot more mistakes than those who weren't. It didn't matter how much they were paid (one cent or fifty cents) or whether they were highly motivated achievers (as measured by a personality test). The discovery left her scratching her head: "The clear inferiority of the reward groups was an unexpected result, unaccountable for by theory or previous empirical evidence" she and her adviser confessed. 

     In a different study, some undergraduate students, instructed to complete a specific construction task, were informed that they could earn anywhere from $5 to $20 if they succeeded; others weren't promised anything. Even though the subjects were older and the assignment quite different, the results echoed Miller's: when the task was more challenging, those who were working for the financial incentive took nearly 50 percent longer to solve the problem. As the 1970's wore on, still more evidence accumulated. Preschoolers who expected an award for drawing with felt-tip pens drew at least as many pictures as those who didn't expect an award, but the quality of their drawings was judged to be appreciably lower. (That rewards can have one effect on quantity and another on quality has been noticed by other researchers too).      Another group of college students took longer to solve a problem requiring creativity when they were rewarded for doing so. And in a particularly intriguing experiment, sixth-grade girls who were promised free movie tickets for successfully teaching younger girls to play a new game wound up doing a lousy job as tutors; they got frustrated more easily, took longer to communicate ideas, and ended up with pupils who didn't understand the game as well as those who learned from tutors who weren't promised anything. 

     By the 1980's, anyone who kept up with this sort of research would have found it impossible to claim that the best way to get people to perform well is to dangle a reward in front of them. As the studies became more sophisticated, the same basic conclusion was repeatedly confirmed. College students exhibited "a lower level of intellectual functioning" when they rewarded for their scores on the more creative portions of an intelligence test.
     A few years later, Teresa Amabile, a leading student on creativity, published two reports that clinched the case against the use of rewards. In the first, young creative writers who merely spent five minutes thinking about the rewards their work would bring (such as money or public recognition) wrote less creative poetry than others who hadn't been reflecting on these reasons for pursuing their craft. The quality of their writing was also lower than the work that they themselves had done a little while earlier. Again, rewards killed creativity, and this was true regardless of the type of task, the type of reward, the timing of the reward, or the age of the people involved. Other investigators, meanwhile, have been looking at people's attitudes toward rewards. Ann Boggiano and Marty Barrett found that children who were extrinsically motivated - that is, concerned about things like rewards and approval they can get as a result of what they do at school - use less sophisticated learning strategies and score lower on standardized achievement tests than children who are interested in learning for its own sake. The reward-driven children do more poorly even when they are compared with children whose scores the previous year were identical to their own.
    

      I have described these studies individually rather than just summarizing the basic finding because without the supporting details of the research the conclusion might be hard to accept - at least until the results appeared so consistently that they had no choice. But before going on the examining the reasons for these results, let us take a moment to sort them out and think about what they imply and why they seem to be so startling. Recall the three questions posed at the beginning of this chapter: For whom are rewards effective, for how long, and at what? We know that some people will do a better job at some things when there's a goody at stake, but few of us have stopped to consider just how limited the circumstances are in which this is true. For whom do rewards work best? For those who are "alienated from their work" according to Deutsch. If what you've been asked to do seems or simple, you might decide to make a real effort only when there is something else, something else outside the task itself, to be gained. For how long do rewards work? Most of the research on this question concerns behavior change, the sort of effect discussed in the preceding post. Virtually all of the studies concerned with performance look at how well people do at a task immediately after getting, or being promised, a reward. In order for rewards to have any hope of boosting performance over a long period of time, we typically have to continue giving them out, or at least holding out the possibility that more will follow.
     

     We come, finally, to the key questions: at what sort of tasks do people do a better job when they are rewarded? And "better in what sense? By now we have already seen enough evidence to guess the answers. Rewards usually improve performance only at extremely simple - indeed, mindless - tasks, and even then they improve only quantitative performance. One of the most influential papers on the topic of rewards (influential, that is, for the very few social psychologists who are specialists in the field) reached the following conclusion based on research conducted up until the mid-1970's: Incentives will have a detrimental effect on performance when two conditions are met: first, when the task is interesting enough for subjects that the offer of incentives is a superfluous source of motivation; second, when the solution the task is open-ended enough that the steps leading to a solution are not immediately obvious. This analysis by Kenneth McGraw provides us with a good point of departure to figure out when rewards are likely to fail. Subsequent investigations, for example, have confirmed that a Skinnerian approach is particularly unlikely to prove useful when it is creativity we are trying to promote. But the research I have described in this section includes enough examples or impaired performance at rather straightforward tasks - or at least a failure to enhance performance at these tasks- that we cannot casually assume it makes sense to reach for reinforcements for everything that doesn't demand creativity.

     "Do this and you'll get that" turns out to be bad news whether our goal is to change behavior or improve performance, whether we are dealing with children or adults, and regardless of whether the reward is a grade, a dollar, a gold star, a candy bar, or any of the other bribes on which we routinely rely. Even assuming we have no ethical reservations about manipulation other people's behaviors to get them to do what we want, the plain truth is that this strategy is likely to backfire. As one psychologist read the available research, people who are offered rewards tend to choose easier tasks, are less efficient in using the information available to solve novel problems, and tend to be answer orientated and more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problems. In the next post, we will examine why this is all true.  

     If you're interested in the book, you can pick it up from Amazon: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes!

     

Question #2 - Beliefs

To what extent are the beliefs you hold originally your own or adopted from others such as peers, parents, and education?