Alfie Kohn - Punished by rewards: the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, As, praise, and other bribes

Afterword copyright 1999 by Alfie Kohn
Copyright 1993 by Alfie Kohn

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kohn, Alfie.
Punished by rewards : the trouble with gold stars, incentive
plans, A's, praise, and other bribes / Alfie Kohn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-618-00181-6
ISBN 978-0-618-00181-1
1. Reward (Psychology) 2. Motivation (Psychology)
3. Behaviorism (Psychology) I. Title.
BF505.R48K65 1993
153.8'5dc20 93-21897 CIP

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

To Alisa

I came very close to failing Introduction to Psychology. This was at a school, you should understand, where the word psychology meant "the experimental study of animal physiology and behavior," and the only thing we students were required to do, apart from sitting through lectures, was to train caged rats to press a little bar. We reinforced them with Rice Krispies for doing this, and since they had been starved to 80 percent of normal body weight, they would have done almost anything for a little cereal.

I was successful, then, in carrying out the assignment, but less successful in figuring out the reason I was doing it. In a rather sophomoric act of rebellion (which was only appropriate given that I was in my second year of college at the time), I turned in a lab report written from the rat's point of view. The report described how, merely by pressing a bar, it had trained a college student to engage in breakfast-feeding behavior. The instructor was not amused, and as I say, I barely passed the course. But that didn't stop me from immediately writing a parody of a psychology journal article for the school paper. I had the article's author claiming a 100 percent success rate in conditioning his rats to avoid pressing Lever B (which caused a three-hundred-pound anvil to drop suddenly from the top of the cage), proudly noting that not a single rat had touched that lever more than once.

In retrospect, I think it can fairly be said that I did not take well to behaviorism when first introduced to it. Nor did it grow on me as the years went by. By the time I had moved to Cambridge, home of B. F. Skinner, I decided it was time to ask him some of the questions that I had furiously scrawled in my copies of his books. I invited him to come speak to a class I was teaching and, to my surprise, he agreed and even gamely smiled for the Instamatics held by awed students.

A few months later I hit on the idea of writing a profile of Professor Skinner for a magazine, which gave me the opportunity to interview him twice more. In these sessions he patiently answered all my questions. I found myself admiring the fact that while his age had dulled his eyesight and hearing, it had not muted his evangelical fervor for behaviorism. (Excerpts from those interviews are reprinted in Appendix A of this book.)

Eventually I recovered from my preoccupation with Skinner's ideas, but then only to become increasingly concerned about the popular version of behaviorism, whereby we try to solve problems by offering people a goody if they do what we want. When, for example, I began to discover in my researches an extensive collection of evidence demonstrating that competition holds us back from doing our best work, it soon became clear that one of the reasons for its surprising failure is its status as an extrinsic motivatora Rice Krispie, if you will. Later, investigating the question of altruism, I found studies showing that rewarding children for their generosity is a spectacularly unsuccessful way of promoting that quality.

Gradually it began to dawn on me that our society is caught in a whopping paradox. We complain loudly about such things as the sagging productivity of our workplaces, the crisis of our schools, and the warped values of our children. But the very strategy we use to solve those problemsdangling rewards like incentive plans and grades and candy bars in front of peopleis partly responsible for the fix we're in. We are a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box we have reinforced ourselves into.

I headed back to the libraries and found scores of studies documenting the failure of pop behaviorism, studies whose existence remains unknown to all but a few social psychologists. No wonder there had never been a book written for a general audience that showed how rewards undermine our efforts to teach students or manage workers or raise childrenmuch less a broader critique that looked at all three arenas. This is what I set out to write, well aware that such a challenge to conventional thinking would be even more unsettling than a lab report written from the rat's perspective.

Of this book's twelve chapters, the first six lay out the central argument. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the behaviorist tradition, the prevalence of pop behaviorism in our society, and some reasons for its widespread acceptance. Chapter 2 weighs arguments about the intrinsic desirability of rewarding people, first challenging the claim that doing so is morally or logically required, and then proposing that there is actually something objectionable about the practice.

Chapter 3 moves from philosophical arguments to practical consequences, summarizing the research evidence showing that rewards simply do not work to promote lasting behavior change or to enhance performance; in fact, they often make things worse. Then, in chapters 4 and 5, I explain why this is true, offering five key reasons for the failure of rewards, all of which amount to serious criticisms of the practice apart from their effects on performance. Chapter 6 examines one particular reward that few of us would ever think to criticize: praise.

The second half of the book examines the effect of rewards, and alternatives to them, with respect to the three issues I've mentioned: employees' performance, students' learning, and children's behavior. This part of the book is arranged so that readers primarily interested in only one of these topics won't have to wade through discussions of the other two. Workplace issues are discussed in chapters 7 and 10, educational issues in chapters 8 and 11, and the question of children's behavior and values (which is relevant to teachers as well as parents) in chapters 9 and 12. Serious readers will find that the endnotes provide not only citations for the studies and quotations but additional thoughts, qualifications, and discussion of the issues raised in the text.

Because this project is both ambitious and controversial, the only sensible thing to do at this point is try to place some of the blame for my conclusions on the people who helped me. I was first introduced to research on the detrimental effects of rewards (particularly with respect to creativity) by Teresa Amabile. My views on raising and teaching children have been mightily influenced by the wisdom of Eric Schaps and Marilyn Watson. I continue to take advantage of every chance I get to exchange ideas with these three people, all of whom I consider friends.

I have also spent hours badgering a number of other writers and researchers, picking their brains, challenging their ideas and inviting them to reciprocate. For some reason they agreed to this, even though most of them didn't know me. I'm very grateful to Rich Ryan, Barry Schwartz, John Nicholls, Ed Deci, Mark Lepper, Carole Ames, and the late B. F. Skinner (who, of course, would have been appalled by the result). Friends who have pressed me to think harder about these issues over the years include Lisa Lahey, Fred Hapgood, Sarah Wernick, and Alisa Harrigan.