Question #4 - Internal or External?

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

Quote #4- Leo Tolstoy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

-Leo Tolstoy 

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.

                               

Third Week of Voluntary Educational Servitude

 
   Hello once again! This week I had the opportunity to assist in ASU's Language and Literature fair which meant I could represent my national heritage. The event consisted of countless individuals arriving to visit the facility, primarily high school students touring the ASU campus. Interestingly, the students each had their own faux passport as part of a personal assignment that they had to complete for their field trip. I had tons of people asking me questions, eager faces, and restless ones trying to complete their scavenger hunt.  The ones trying to complete the scavenger hunt were most interesting because they were obviously motivated by external rewards - they just wanted the stamp in their passport. Though there was certainly a higher level of effort, it was more fun than being an office caddie - and I was able to get my name written in four different languages by people in the other language departments (namely Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic).

But don't be forlorn about my progress on the psychological study for my senior project, it will be soon underway!



    

What are Achievement Goals?

Methods of motivation and goals play a significant part in academic development. Research suggests that only 25% of the variability in children’s achievement outcomes can be accounted for by their scores on tests of intelligence (Neisser et al., 1996). “A likely source of some of the additional variability is the specific achievement-related beliefs that children bring to the learning context: How talented am I in science? Am I am poor reader because I’m not trying hard enough, or am I just not very smart? How well do I want to perform in math and how hard will I strive to meet this standard? Indeed, considerable empirical evidence exists to support the claim that children’s beliefs about their intellectual competencies and views about the importance of school success have a powerful impact on academic behaviors and outcomes” (Eccles, Wigfield, & Schiefele, 1998).  

 Achievement goals are competence-based aims that individuals create as means to take action they are motivated to pursue.  Individuals typically have motives for their actions, so we can thus analyze goals from an orientation point of view. An important distinction in achievement goal literature is the difference between performance and mastery goals. We can differentiate between people's reasons for doing well as either ego or task related. Specifically, task (mastery) goals reflect perceived competence in terms of task mastery or evaluative standards. In this approach, individuals are learning for its own sake. Meanwhile, Ego-related (performance) goals reflect performance relative to the performance of others. A performance goal orientation is characterized by questions such as "Can I do better than others?" or "Will I look smart?"

On the other hand, a student with a learning goal orientation would more likely ask questions like "Can I improve my knowledge on this subject?" or "How can I do this task?"Studies within the achievement goal theory show that the pursuit of mastery goals was associated with various positive outcomes, including intrinsic motivation, self-regulated learning, and deep-level learning, whereas performance goals were found to be positively related to surface processing but unrelated or negatively to deep-level processing or self-regulated learning.

 Performance goals were found to predict academic performance in some research, but other studies failed to confirm these findings. As a result of conflicting data, further divisions in goals were created to include the idea of mastery approach goals (MAp), mastery avoidance goals (MAv), performance approach goals (PAp), and performance avoidance (PAv) goals. The rationale was that competence can be valued as a positive outcome to be achieved or incompetence can be valued as a negative outcome to be avoided.

 PAp goals are believed to yield positive effects, especially on achievement, because the external focus that characterizes these goals leads people to select strategic study strategies that yield high achievement. In contrast, PAv goals hinder learning and achievement, because the concern for failure is likely to disrupt the learning process, undermine the pleasure of learning and achievement, and result in low performance. Mastery goals appear to be primarily predictive of achievement that reflects deep learning.

This chart below provides a basic representation of the distinctions:

Achievement goal theory continues with autonomous and controlling goals and further subsets of goals. This desired to look at goals from "why" rather than the "what". 

Since its development, significant contributions have been made to the research and practice in education and psychology. Achievement goal theory has provided an influential framework for conceptualizing student motivation. Though complex, analyzing goals and people's intentions for their actions can allow for greater insight into motivation, learning, and achievement.

Question #3 - Rewards

Consider your educational progress so far: How would you say rewards factored into it?

Quote #3- Noam Chomsky

If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

-Noam Chomsky   

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!

     

Week Two of the Internship!

   My internship continued this week with the same adrenaline-filled zeal for getting to work on time. Luckily, I got a transportation upgrade to the intercampus shuttle since ASU West campus is nearby, which means more time to sleep in the morning. Additionally, I have extended my services by beginning to tutor students in Romanian, finding that they needed the greatest amount of support in pronunciation.

In other news, I discovered that my tentative survey would not need to be under stringent supervision by an ethics board unless I intend to publish my findings in a journal. However, I may undertake the authorization process anyway, simply to learn what the ethics approval procedure entails.

All in all, I have found that there is a positive correlation between time spent on shuttles and the amount of remaining gas in my car, which makes me content.            

What is Conformity?

The earliest definition of conformity is "yielding to group pressures" (Crutchfield, 1955). It occurs when group pressure can successfully influence an individual to comply with the group through a change in belief or behavior. A modern definition of conformity shows that it hasn’t changed much over the years, except in perspective. Cialdini (2004) states that conformity refers to “the act of changing one’s behavior to match the responses of others."

Conformity can come in a few types of forms. Other than compliance or acceptance to group pressure, an individual can internalize beliefs of the group and adopt behaviors consistent with their value system. Another method of conforming involves identifying with the group, by establishing a self-defining relationship to it or another person. For example, this occurs when one fulfills a social expectation of a specific role, e.g. police officers.

Why do people conform? The main reasons people conform is for social rewards such as approval, success, wealth, acceptance into certain groups, etc. Furthermore, there are eight personality traits related to conformity: submissiveness, lack of self-confidence, lack of intelligence, lack of originality, authoritarian-minded, lacking motivation, conventionality and a desire for social approval.

Why does conformity matter? This ubiquitous social force occurs through us every day and understanding its implications gives us tremendous insight into society and ourselves. It is neither good nor bad since society's foundation is based upon it but individuals should be wary of their own self-autonomy. Conformity is such a powerful influence in society that it would be difficult to understand human behavior without it.

Question #2 - Beliefs

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

Quote #2 - Friedrich Nietzsche

The surest way to corrupt the youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.  

-Friedrich Nietzsche 

Literature Review: Punished By Rewards (Part One)

     As part of my duties in conducting a Senior Research Project, I will read course texts and articles related my to project on achievement motivation and conformity. So to begin, this week I will read part of Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.  This blog will discuss the main concepts of the book so far, with some relevant examples. (This will a lengthy post since the book best explains motivation through an exposition of society and its tendencies to reward others compared to approaching the topic of motivation from a definitive angle.)  

     In society, the method of choice of getting anyone to do something is to provide a reward to people when they act the way we want them to. According to Kohn, "Scholars have debated this phenomenon and traced its development to the intellectual tradition known as behaviorism. The core of pop behaviorism lies in the simple eloquence of "Do this and you'll get that". We take for granted that this is the logical way to raise children, teach students, and manage employees" (p. 3).

    However, Kohn takes the ambitious aim to argue that there is something profoundly wrong with this doctrine - that its assumptions are misleading and that the practices it generates are both "intrinsically objectionable and counterproductive". He states that, "To offer this indictment is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with most of the things used as rewards; the problem doesn't rest in bubble gum nor in money, love, or attention. But what's concerning is the practice of using these things as rewards. The real trouble lies when we take what people want or need and offer it on a contingent basis in order to control how they act" (p. 4). Kohn's premise is that "rewarding people for compliance is not the "the way the world works" as many insist. It is not a fundamental law of human nature. It is but one way of thinking and speaking, of organizing our experience and dealing with others. ... It actually reflects a particular ideology that can be questioned. The steep price we pay for the uncritical allegiance to the use of rewards is what makes this story not only intriguing but also deeply disconcerting" (p. 4)

     Survivors of introductory psychology courses will recall that there are two major varieties of learning theory: classical conditioning (Pavlov's dogs) and operant or instrumental conditioning (Skinner's rats). Classical conditioning begins with the observation that some things produce natural responses while Operant conditioning, by contrast, is concerned with how an action is controlled. Skinner, who preferred the term reinforcement to reward, demonstrated that when a reinforcement follows a behavior, that behavior is likely to be repeated. In the end, Skinnerian theory formalizes the idea of rewards; that "Do this and you'll get that" will lead an organism to do "this " again. 

     Behaviorists tend to see the psychological word as scientists would see it. As a behaviorist sees humanity, humans are different than other animals only in the degree of their sophistication. To quote Watson's words on the very first page of Behaviorism, "Man is an animal different from other animals only in the types of behavior he displays". Most people like to think that the existence of uniquely human capacities would raise serious questions about reducing humans to sets of behavior. But Burrhus Fredric Skinner insisted that "organisms (including us) are nothing more than "repertoires for behaviors", and these behaviors can be fully explained by outside forces he called environmental contingencies. A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect" (p. 5-6). 

     Kohn argues that there are terrible consequences of patterning psychology after the natural sciences. "Psychology's subject matter is reduced to the status of the subject matter of physics and chemistry. When we try to explain things, we appeal to causes" (p. 9). Kohn believes that very notion is against how we think of humanity in our daily lives. "When most of us try to account for human behavior, though, we talk about reasons; a conscious decision rather than an automatic response to some outside force, usually plays a role" (p. 9). However, for behaviorists like Skinner, human actions are completely accounted for by external causes. Would this mean values, emotions, and ideals are mere illusions?

     American thinking is largely based upon these scientific ideals. Kohn gives an anecdote from an American businessman, who said, "All that matters is the measurable outcome, and if that is judged a failure, the effort by definition was not good enough." Kohn goes on to say that, in the American mind, if something "can't be quantified, it's not real" (p. 9). He says that this thinking typifies the American mindset. "It is no accident that behaviorism is this country's major contribution to the field of psychology, or that the only philosophical movement native to the United States is pragmatism. We are a nation that prefers acting to thinking, and practice to theory; we are suspicious of intellectuals, worshipful of technology and fixated on the bottom line. We define ourselves by numbers - take-home pay and cholesterol counts, percentiles and standardized tests. By contrast, we are uneasy with intangibles and unscientific abstractions such as a sense of well-being and intrinsic motivation to learn" (p. 10)

A thorough criticism of scientism would take us too far afield. But it is important to understand that practice does rest on theory, whether or not that theory has been explicitly identified. Behind the practice of presenting a colorful dinosaur sticker to a first grader who stays silent on command is a theory that embodies distinct assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the possibility of choice, and what it means to be a human being. 

     Some social critics have a habit of overstating the popularity of whatever belief or practice they are keen to criticize, perhaps for dramatic effect. There is little danger of doing that here because it is hard to imagine how one could exaggerate the extent of our saturation in pop behaviorism. Regardless of political persuasion or social class, whether it be a Fortune 500 CEO or a preschool teacher, we are immersed in this doctrine; it is as American as rewarding someone with apple pie. To induce students to learn we present stickers, stars, certificates, awards, trophies, membership in elite societies, and above all grades. If the grades are good enough, some parents then hand out bicycles or cars or cash thereby offering what are, in effect, rewards for rewards. Educators are remarkably imaginative in inventing new, improved versions of the same basic idea. At one high school, for example, students were given gold ID cards if they had an A average, silver cards for a B average, and plain white cards if they didn't measure up - until objections were raised to what was widely viewed as a caste system.  A full century earlier, a system developed in England for managing the behavior of school children assigned some students to monitor others and distributed tickers (redeemable for toys) to those who did what they were supposed to do. This plan, similar to what would later be called a "token economy" program of behavior modification, was adopted by the first public school in New York City in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was eventually abandoned because, in view of the school's trustees, the use of rewards "fostered a mercenary spirit" and "engendered strife and jealousies".  A few years ago, some executive at the Pizza Hut restaurant chain decided - let us assume for entirely altruistic reasons - that the company should sponsor a program to encourage children to read more. The strategy for reaching this goal: bribery. For every so many books that a child reads in the "Book It!" program, the teacher provides a certificate redeemable for free pizza. But why stop with edible rewards? One representative congratulated West Georgia College for paying third graders two dollars for each book they read. "Adults are motivated by money - why not kids?" he remarked, managing to overcome the purported aversion to throwing money at problems. Politicians may quibble over how much money to spend, or whether to allow public funds to follow students to private schools, but virtually no one challenges the fundamental carrot-and-stick approach to motivation: promise educators pay raises for success or threaten their job security for failure - typically on the basis of their student's standardized test scores- and it is assumed that educational excellence will follow. 

    

     To induce children to "behave" (that is, do what we want), we rely on precisely the same theory of motivation - the only one we know - by hauling our another bag of goodies. These examples can be multiplied by the thousands, and they are not restricted to children. Any time we wish to encourage or discourage certain behaviors  - getting people to lose weight or quit smoking, for instance - the method of choice is behavioral manipulation. But don't the widespread use of rewards suggest that they work? Why would a failed strategy be preferred? The answer to this will become clearer later on as its explained how and why they fail to work. For now, it will be enough to answer in temporal terms: the negative effects appear over a longer period of time, and by then their connection to the rewards may not be at all obvious. The result is that rewards keep getting used. Whacking my computer when I first turn it on may somehow help the operating system to engage, but if I had to do that every morning, I will eventually get the idea that I am not addressing the real problem. If I have to whack it harder and harder, I might even start to suspect that my quick fix is making the problem worse. Rewards don't bring about the changes we are hoping for, but the point here is also that something else is going on: The more rewards are used, the more they seem to be needed. The more often I promise you a goody to do what I want, the more I will cause you to respond to, and even to require, these goodies. More substantive reasons for you to do your best tend to evaporate, leaving you with no reason to try except for obtaining a goody. In short, the current use of rewards is due less to some fact about human nature than to the earlier us of rewards. Whether or not we are conscious that this cycle exists, it may help to explain why we have spun ourselves ever deeper in the mire of behaviorism. But aside from some troubling questions about the theory of behaviorism, what reasons do we have for disavowing this strategy? That is the question to which we now turn. 

     The belief that rewards will be distributed fairly, even if it takes until the next lifetime to settle accounts, is one component of what is sometimes referred to as the just "world view". The doctrine has special appeal for those who are doing well, first because it allows them to think their blessings are well-deserved, and second because it spares them from having to feel too guilty about (or take responsibility for) those who have much less. The basic idea is that people should get what they deserve, what social scientists refer to as the equity principle, seems unremarkable and, indeed, so intuitively plausible as to serve for many people virtually as a definition of fairness. Rarely do we even think to question the idea that what you put in should determine what you take out. But the value of the equity principle is not nearly as self-evident as it may seem. Once we stop to examine it, questions immediately arise as to what constitutes deservingness. Do we reward on the basis of how much effort is expended (work hard, get more goodies)? What if the result of hard work is failure? Does it make more sense then, to reward on the basis of success (do well, get more goodies)? But "do well" by whose standard? And who is responsible for the success. Excellence is often the product of cooperation and even individual achievement typically is built on the work of other people's earlier efforts. These questions lead us gradually to the recognition that equity is only one of several ways to distributed resources. Different circumstances call for different criteria. Few school principles hand out more supplies to the teachers who stayed longer the night before to finish a lesson plan; rather, they look at the size and requirements of each class. Few parents decide how much dinner to serve to each of their children on the basis of who did more for the household that day. In short, the equity model applies to only a limited range of the social encounters that are affected by the desire for justice. To assume that fairness always requires that people should get what they "earn" - that the law of the marketplace is the same things as justice - is a very dubious proposition indeed. The assumption that people should be rewarded on the basis of what they have is not as much a psychological law about human nature as it is a psychological outcome of a culture's socialization practices. 

    Not long ago, Kohn mentions a teacher in Missouri justify the practice of handing stickers to her young students on the grounds that the children have "earned" them. This claim struck me as an attempt to deflect attention away from - perhaps to escape responsibility for - the decision she had made to frame learning as something one does in exchange for a prize rather than intrinsically valuable. But how any stickers does a flawless spelling assignment merit? One? Ten? Why not a dollar? After the fact, one could claim that any rewards "earned" by the performance, but since these are not needed goods that must be handed out according to one one principle or another, we must eventually recognize that not only that the size of the reward is arbitrarily determined by the teacher but that the decision to give any reward reflects a theory of learning more than a theory of justice. When we repeatably promise rewards to children for acting responsibly, or to students for making an effort to learn something, or to employees for doing quality work, we are assuming that they could not or would not choose to act this way on their own. If the capacity for responsible action, the natural love of learning, and the desire to do good work are already part of who we are, then the tacit assumption to the contrary can fairly be described as dehumanizing. Now there are circumstances, especially where children are involved, in which it is difficult to imagine eliminating all vestiges of control. But anyone who is troubled by a model of human relationship founded principally on the idea of one person controlling another must ponder whether rewards are as innocuous as they are sometimes made out to be. 

     Clearly, punishments are harsher and more overt; there is no getting around to control in "Do this or else here's what will happen to you." But rewards simply "control through seduction rather than force." The point to be emphasized is that all rewards, by virtue of being rewards, are not attempts to influence or persuade or solve problems together but simply to control. In fact, if a task is undertaken in response to the contingency set up by the rewarder, the person's initial action in choosing the task is constrained. This feature of rewards is much easier to understand when we are being controlled than when we are doing the controlling. This is why it is so important to imagine ourselves in the other position, to take the perspective of the person whose behavior we are manipulating. It is easy for a teacher to object to a program of merit pay - to say how patronizing it is to be bribed with extra money for doing what some administrator decides is a good job. It takes much more effort for the teacher to see how the very same is true of grades or offers of extra recess when she becomes the controller. By definition, it would seem, if one person controls another, the two individuals have unequal status. The use of rewards (or punishments) is facilitated by the lack of symmetry but also acts to perpetuate it. If you doubt that rewarding someone emphasizes the rewarder's position of greater power, imagine that you have given your next-door neighbor a ride downtown, or some help moving a piece of furniture, and that he then offers you a five dollars for your trouble. If you feel insulted by that gesture, consider why this should be, what the payment implies. If rewards not only reflects differences in power but also contributes to them, it should be surprising that their use may benefit the more powerful party, the rewarder. This point would seem almost too obvious to bother mentioning except for the fact that, in practice, rewards are typically justified as being in the interests of the individual receiving them. Who benefits? - is always a useful question to ask about a deeply entrenched and widely accepted practice. In this case, it is not merely the individual rewarder who comes out ahead; it is the institution, the social practice, the status quo that is preserved by the control of people's behavior. If rewards bolster the traditional order of things, then to de-emphasize conventional rewards threatens the existing power structure.                

     To conclude, it is ironic that a semi-starved rat in a box, with virtually nothing to do but press on a lever for food, captures the essence of all human behavior. Also, while it may seem that reward-and-punishment strategies are inherently neutral, this is not completely true. If it were, the fact that these strategies are invariably used to promote order and obedience would have to be explained as a remarkable coincidence. Giving people rewards is not an obviously fair or appropriate practice across all situations; to the contrary, it is an inherently objectionable way of reaching our goals by virtue of its status as a means of controlling others.   

     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.

(More exposition and analysis in subsequent posts!)                                              

     

First Week of My Internship. Fortis Ad Finem!

My internship for my senior project is at Arizona State University's Romanian cultural department, in the School of International Letters and Cultures. Being that my predominant motive for conducting this internship is to facilitate a psychological study, I am taking advantage of the ample opportunities for me to observe others.      

Besides withstanding rush hour traffic with the utmost discernment of people's intentions, there has also been time for more incisive analysis of the past week. I attended several of my on-site mentor's lectures and got a feel for my subjects. Concurrent to attending classes, I was introduced to a multitude of advisers in the Language and Literature building. From there, I obtained the honor of fulfilling many trivial but necessary administrative tasks for the department (notably scanning Arab manuscripts for hours on end). 

After an hour and fifteen minutes driving there, only to arrive with eight minutes left to park my car and run upstairs to the class; and forty-five minutes coming back each night, I realized that my university experience is probably going to be one that centers around time. I also realized that an on-campus housing situation is highly preferable.

Well Begun Is Half Done ~ Greek Proverb

What is Achievement Motivation?

Motivation is defined as the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. Motivation is what causes us to act, whether it is getting a glass of water to reduce thirst, or reading a book to gain knowledge.

Achievement motivation functions as a subjective and internal psychological drive, enabling individuals to pursue work they perceive to be valuable and eventually achieve their goals. From this, achievement motivation can best be defined as the need for success or the attainment of excellence. Other than being seen as an intrinsic need to excel, it has also been viewed as a desire to do well relative to a standard of success, such as through competition.

Understanding and harnessing such a psychological feature would provide a tremendous amount of productivity and utility in all possible social sectors. Since students form values, self-concepts, and beliefs about their abilities at a young age, the development of achievement motivation has significant implications for later careers and routes of success. With a greater and growing impetus on achievement in today’s world, the influence of motivation in the field of achievement motivation has been noteworthy to attaining specific goals.

Question #1 - Individuals

How does society primarily define individuals? What is the purpose of an individual in society?

Quote #1 - Leonardo Da Vinci

Looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking    

-Leonardo Da Vinci on the human mind 

Introduction

Greetings from Beyond the System!

Have you ever wondered why there seem to be two types of successful people? There is the first type, ones with hidden connections, and the second, mavericks with ingenious creative minds.

Do you see the difference between these two paths for success, and how they fit into our social system? If you don't my hope is that you will as you delve deeper into this blog.

 This blog site will capture, with the most unfolding exhilaration that a psychological study could ever contain, my thoughts, experiences, and analyses. My intentions for this expedition going forward is to detail my progress in my Senior Project, on Achievement Motivation and Conformity and my delightful internship, all while amusing and illuminating the minds of those who read this blog.

Through this paradigm-defying journey, we will bring the notion of the system and its truths to light. Here you will find a compelling compilation of convincing facts, deeply illuminated with critical analysis, which will challenge you to rethink how you view the system.

~May you realize the limits so that you may transcend them! 

I.D.T.