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.
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