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!