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 Reward, the carrot, the dollar, or a
feeling of accomplishment? So far this site tends to agree
with Skinner that reward is far preferable to punishment. But extrinsic
reward has its own drawbacks. To see this we will need to highlight the
differences between extrinsic and intrinsic reward.
  
Extinction and extrinsic reward withdrawal. Although
extrinsic reward can be shown to take some time to diminish, it has
been shown in scientific research that if children originally pursued
some activity out of natural inclination but they are then instructed
and rewarded by a teacher to perform the same activity, then they will
stop performing once the external contingencies are removed. Extrinsic
reward it turns out, is not so dissimilar to punishment in that when
external contingencies (i.e. the rewards) are removed, the behavior
tends to diminish. It may also be possible that the withdrawal of the
reward is seen as a kind of punishment.
It
can be said, as a general rule, that when most students emerge from
being under the contingencies of school, whether punitive or rewarding,
few show a desire to read books or in any other way pursue the subjects
they were taught in those schools. Not only that, but few adults do any
systematic reading for the purpose of learning about anything. Those
who continue to learn in later life tend to do so only because their
vocation requires that they keep abreast of current research so that
they can continue to do that work well. Doctors are of course, good
examples of those who must continue to learn in order to do their job
well.
Only a fairly small number of
people in the world continue any kind of learning for their own
enjoyment after they have left school. Most of those who do, probably
limit themselves to very restricted fields (i.e. a hobby) or simply
allow themselves to be kept informed by the media, newspapers, TV etc.
learning only incidentally without intention. Those who develop a
lifelong love affair with learning are indeed a tiny minority. However,
this site is of the opinion, that life long learning and the desire to
indulge in it, is an ideal that all humans can, and should, be able to
strive for and achieve. It also may be increasingly essential for the
future survival of humanity. For this to happen though, people need to
be motivated to learn, not by outside rewards, but rather by the
internal pleasure that comes from learning. They need to be
intrinsically motivated.
 A debasement and corruption
of the act of learning. The main reason for rejecting
extrinsic rewards as motivators is a philosophical one. The fact is
that learning is and should be a noble activity. It is through learning
that the world changes and can be improved. When we give prizes for
this and rewards for that, we distort our own perception of why we
learn.
 Prizes.
People should learn for the joy and satisfaction of understanding; they
should want to make a contribution for the betterment of the world;
instead many people treat learning and knowledge as only a meal ticket
or something that will bring a reward. The danger is that of people
seeing the value of learning only in how they can use it to get
something for themselves. The real importance of learning then becomes,
not so we can understand, but rather how to convince others into
believing we possess expertise or that we know. We find ourselves
obsequiously trying to gain recognition often through wealth rather
than improving the world and making our mark on it. The bit of paper
with a degree on it become more important than the actual knowledge
that is supposed to be behind it. In his book John Holt puts it like
this:
 "Not by what we say but by what we
do, by the way we hand out rewards and prizes, we convince many young
people that it is not for the joy and satisfaction of understanding
that we learn but in order to get something for ourselves; and what
counts in school and college is not knowing and understanding, but
making someone think you know and understand; that knowledge is
valuable-, not because it helps us deal better with the problems of
private and public life, but because it has become a commodity that can
be sold for fancy prices on the market. School has become a kind of
racket, and success in school and hence in life, depends on learning
how to beat it."
Making
the pleasurable not pleasurable. Schools and teachers are
often so in love with the idea that things must be explained and tested
that often the pleasure of achievement is negated or diminished for
students. John Holt in his book
"How Children learn" gives a wonderful example of this when a
group of boys learned to play softball by watching and imitating
others. He said.
"They learned, as I say, by watching
the older boys who did it best, and trying to do what they did. As a
mater of fact, they learned, on the whole, much better than the boys at
another school, at which I taught, where teachers tried to teach
softball. The boys at this school spent a great deal of their sports
time standing around watching while someone 'explained' something to
them. I was still then under the spell of the idea that if you are
determined enough you can teach anything. I remember a couple of boys
that I was trying to teach to bat and throw. I can still see their
sullen faces, feel their limp, uncooperating muscles, practically hear
their thoughts. Here was school brought right out into the play-yard,
where they were supposed to be having fun, or at least a moments
respite from school. Small wonder we did not get very far. If instead
they had had a chance to play with and see, and imitate bigger boys,
how much better it might have gone."
Rewards that interfere with enjoyment.
Maria Montessori tells a story about giving children rewards for doing
good work that emphasizes this attitude of children learning and
reward. She tells about how early in her work she had tried to give
children rewards such as sweets for their good work only to be rebuffed
and have the sweets not eaten. In her book
"The Secret of Childhood"
she says:
"I thought that an exercise of such patient
waiting would be a trial for the children, so I brought with me bits of
candy and chocolates to reward the children as they came up. But they
refused the sweets. It seemed almost as if they were saying , 'Do not
spoil this beautiful experience.'"
"It was a long time before I persuaded
myself that there was an intrinsic reason behind the children's refusal
of candy. This refusal seemed extraordinary to me, since children are
notoriously eager for sweets, that I decided on a further test. I
brought some candy to school with me, but the children refused it or
put it in their pockets of their smocks. Since they were very poor, I
thought perhaps they wanted to take the candy back to their homes. 'The
pieces I gave you', I told them, 'you can take home, but these are for
you.' They took the candy but again put it in their pockets without
eating it."
It seems likely that the
children refused the sweets or at least delayed tasting them so that
the pleasure from the sweets would not be associated with, and thus
contaminate, their accomplishments in the school, and thereby diminish
those accomplishments. The fact is, the pleasure of accomplishment was
likely to be felt as more pleasurable than the taste of the sweets.
Maria Montessori put it like this.
"Of their own accord the children refused
these useless, exterior delights as they rose higher in spiritual life."
The founder of
"Summerhill" A. S. Neill declared that
promising a reward for an activity is "tantamount to
declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake."
Praise, pressure and
motivation. Another way praise can be demotivating is, if (as
we usually do) we praise only good work. Thus when we do not praise, by
implication, the work must be bad. John Holt puts it like this:
"We
say, 'You are the kind of sensible, smart good, etc., etc. boy or girl
who can easily do this problem, if you try.' But if the work fails, so
does the concept. If he can't do the problem, no matter how hard he
tries, then, clearly, he is not sensible, smart or good. If when Johnny
does good work, we make him feel 'good' may we not without intending
it, be making him feel 'bad' when he does bad work?"
Of
course all the other children who hear us praise Johnny
feel bad because they assume that they must have done bad work. You
might be starting to appreciate that the subtleties of applying an
extrinsic reward system are far more complicated and destructive than
first assumed.
Intrinsic
reward & motivation.
Intrinsic motivation as
discussed elsewhere, is the reward that comes from within as a natural
consequence of certain feelings. These feelings are the reward in
themselves that automatically accompany the learner's actions.
Elsewhere this site has provided a whole series of words that convey a
state of being that gives pleasurable kinds of feelings. Perhaps the
most important of these words are 'accomplishment' and 'achievement'.
Everybody understands that the person that has accomplished something
is rewarded by his own internally produced feelings of accomplishment.
'Praise' the good, the
bad and the ugly.
John
Holt asks a very important question about praise as follows:
"Do children really need so much praise? When a
child, after a long struggle, finally does the cube puzzle, does he
need to be told that he has done well? Doesn't he know without being
told, that he has accomplished something?
In fact, when we praise him, are we not perhaps horning in on his
accomplishment, stealing a little of his glory, edging our way into the
limelight, praising ourselves for having helped to turn out such a
smart child? Is not most adult praise of children a kind of self
praise?"
The ugly praise.
Teachers, parents and adults in general, like children, want to feel
they are achieving something. They want to avail themselves of this
internal pleasure and reward. To this end they will excessively praise
some piece of student work and with it the child. Praise you might
think in this kind of situation would be pleasurable and motivating to
the student, but it is not. When adults do this, they are almost always
praising themselves and their part in the child's achievement. By doing
this, they diminish the child's own part in the achievement. Children
often do not know how to explain the feeling of loss they feel when
they are being praised like this, but they somehow know they are being
denied a pleasure they should be able to enjoy by right. John Holt
strips his own soul bare with the following self revelation:
"I think of that marvelous
composition that Nat wrote about the dining-room in his house. I find
now, to my horror, that in thinking with satisfaction about that comp,
I am really congratulating myself for my part in it. What a clever boy
this! and what a clever man am I for helping to make him so!"
 'Praise' the bad and the
good of it. We now know from years of research that praise
can have both negative (detrimental) and positive (enhancing) effects
on creativity, competence, interest and intrinsic motivation. Praise
like criticism is instrumental in the formation of the non rational
myths that guide our footsteps through life. Carol Dweck has drawn our
attention to two of these myths of life which she calls mindsets. She
points out that there are two beliefs that decide whether we are
successful, happy and have a meaningful life. She calls one the growth
mindset and the other the fixed mindset. Simply put one belief is that
things change, grow and become and the other is that things are fixed
permanently and do not change.
Rationally of course we all
understand that all things change all the time, but these mindsets are
not rational they are beliefs deeply embedded in our psyches. These
mindsets feed on life experiences and to a large extent what others
tell us about ourselves and the world. Every time we criticize or
praise someone we are reinforcing one or the other of these mindsets.
In
her book
"Mindset" in a chapter on where mindsets come from Carol
Dweck has this to say:
"No parent thinks, 'I wonder what I can do today
to undermine my children, subvert their effort turn them off learning,
and limit their achievement.' Of course not. They think, 'I would do
anything, give anything to make my children successful.' Yet many
things they do boomerang. Their helpful judgments, their lessons, their
motivating techniques often send the wrong message."
The
bad praise. When teachers, parents and adults in general, say
"you are" they are reinforcing the view that things are a particular
way that does not change. "You are such a good girl." "You're
brilliant." "You're a genius." You're so talented." "What a clever boy
you are." "You are a natural athlete." "You are so good at sports."
"You are so funny." "You're so strong." "You are so beautiful." "You
are so graceful." "You're so smart. You got an A without studying." All
these statements are writing on your mental map of reality that there
is something about you that is fixed and unchanging. Another way of
praising is to use "you have" this perhaps less damaging but also is
reinforcing a fixed mindset. "You have such good ideas." "You have no
fear." "You have a good swing." These imply that no effort is required
and that you can coast through life without improvement. This can work
fine for a long time, but life is such that eventually you will be in a
situation where your talent is not enough and you will fail. You will
not expect this praise when you fail, but without it you will be lost.
The
good praise. There are three kinds of good praise. Growth
praise which helps you to change and become more than you are at the
moment. Critical praise which can enable you to be aware of weaknesses
and overcome them. Acknowledgement praise which can help you judge your
own works and actions as to what is good.
1 Growth praise.
In terms of Carol Dweck's mindsets good praise means the reinforcing of
the idea that you can change what you are. If you seem less intelligent
you can learn and become more intelligent. If you are not so beautiful
you can do something about it, use make up, dress in beautiful clothes,
lose weight or have cosmetic surgery. How do you convey this? You
praise the process not the person. Praise what the person did or is
doing well and not what they are. Praise the process and especially the
effort. Here are some examples of good praise from Carol Dweck's book
"Mindset":
"I like the way you tried
all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
You thought of a lot of different ways to do it and found the one that
worked."
"I like that you took on
that challenging project for your for your science class. It will take
a lot of work - doing the research, designing the apparatus, buying the
parts, and building it. Boy you're going to learn a lot of great
things."
"I really admire the way you
concentrated and finished it."
"You
put so much thought into this essay."
Growth praise is also praise that identifies and highlights any
improvement. Contrasting past incompetence with current competence or
contrasting past competence with current greater competence is a sure
way of encouraging a growth mindset.
"I
have just looked back at your work last year and I am astonished by how
much your work has improved and how much effort you have put into doing
better."
2
Critical praise.
As you will learn below rewards can be good when they contain
information that can lead to improvement. Praise is the one type of
reward that is in fact easy to make informative. The information in the
praise presented above by Carol Dweck is all about reminding people
that they were successful because they put in the work. This one kind
of information that can be in good praise and perhaps it is the most
important kind. It is possible, however for praise to be specifically
about the work or actions being praised. Both these kinds of praise
tend to sound a bit like a mixture of praise and criticism because it
is difficult to give helpful information without being critical. Here
are some examples:
"I know that school used to
be easy for you and you used to feel
like the smart kid all the time. But the truth is that you weren't
using your brain to the fullest. I am really excited about how you're
stretching yourself now and working to learn hard things."
"I
think you are ready to concentrate on composition and design as you
have now mastered the art of the paint brush."
"It
might be an idea to go back to working on accuracy for a while before
developing more power. I see you have developed much more power in your
serve. But this makes it hard to control the accuracy of the ball."
I
think what you really need to do is find what you are still weak at and
focus on improving that. I see your overall play has improved immensely
over the last year. You are now faster, more accurate, stronger and
have much more stamina than before. You may be temped to think you can
coast for a while, but that would be a fatal error."
"You
need to challenge yourself. You probably think you are flying so high
at the moment with all those achievements you have made that you don't
need to work hard any more. But if you do you will find every thing
will become boring."
3
Acknowledgement praise. Finally there is the kind of praise
that is about work and actions but provides information only about
personal cultural or social judgment i.e. whether the work or action is
judged to be good or not. This kind of praise if presented truthfully
and not ingenuously as in flattery also tends to increase intrinsic
motivation. Here are some examples:
"My
word, what a beautiful painting."
"Great
work, that's a magnificent structure."
"That
was a most delicious dinner."
Rewards
and the current research.
Many people have the wrong idea about extrinsic rewards.
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Some people think that extrinsic rewards encourage
people to give their best efforts - they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards improve people's performance - they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards change people's behavior for the better - they do
not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards help people to work harder - they do not if the
rewards stop.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards help people to do better work - they do not over
time.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards help people to work faster - they do not in the long
run.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards help people to think - they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards encourage people to be bold and take risks - they do
not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards usually encourage people to learn - they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards help people to concentrate or focus on what is
important -they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards incline people to be interested is what is being
rewarded - they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic rewards generally improve or increase people's creativity -
they do not.
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Some people think that
extrinsic
rewards motivate people to do all of the above - they do not.
There is now an array of experimental data that shows conclusively that
the above statements are true. In 1961 graduate student
Louise Brightwell Miller conducted a discrimination experiment where
nine-year-old boys were split into two groups one group of which was
offered money if they succeeded in telling two faces flashed on a
screen apart and the other group was not offered money. Surprisingly
the children who were not offered money did much better at the
discrimination.
The following year another
graduate student Sam Glucksberg conducted an experiment
where two groups of graduate students were asked to work out how to
mount a candle on a wall with limited available resources. Again the
students in one group were offered varying amounts of money if they
succeeded while the students in the other group were not offered
payment. Again the students
who were offered payment did more poorly than those who were not
offered payment.
These two graduate students
had stumbled on something that nobody before had previously thought to
do, and that was actually check if rewards actually improved
performance. Behaviorists assumed that rewards improved performance,
and because it seemed like common sense, nobody had bothered to check.
In the 1970s experiments
along these lines were coming thick and fast. The new experiments
confirmed the previous experiments and showed that they were not
flukes.
In the mid 1970s an
influential analysis of these experiments by Kenneth McGraw provided us
with McGraw's rule which is as follows:
"Incentive will
have a detrimental effect on performance when two condition are met:
first, when the task is interesting enough for subject that the offer
of incentives is a superfluous source of motivation: second, when the
solution to the task is open-ended enough that the steps leading to a
solution are not immediately obvious."
This turned out to be a very
conservative conclusion. In his book
"Punished by Rewards" Alfie Kohn has the following to say:
"But McGraw's rule
may understate the failure of rewards by suggesting that they miscarry
only when used with interesting and creative tasks. I think it is more
accurate to say that they are most likely to have a detrimental effect,
or to have the most pronounced detrimental effect with these tasks."
"'Do this and
you'll get that' turns out to be bad news whether our goal is to change
behavior or to 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."
 The effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation.
 In 1999 Edward Deci, Richard
Koestner and Richard Ryan published a meta analysis of 128 experiments
dealing with rewards and found that tangible or extrinsic rewards had a
significant negative effect on intrinsic motivation. This
effect appeared with participants ranging from preschool to college
level. It showed up with activities ranging from word games to
construction puzzles. It was apparent regardless of the type of
rewards, which ranged from dollar bills to marshmallows.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan created their own theory of motivation and
thus of learning called Self-determination Theory. This was presented
in their book
"Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior".
The research by Ryan and Deci showed several things about rewards.
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Acknowledgement.
It was found that extrinsic rewards, if they were perceived to be given
as acknowledgements of competence, and not as part of some condition,
would not, in fact, cause intrinsic motivation to decrease.
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Praise. Praise
in particular was in fact found to be very effective increasing
intrinsic motivation, if it was confined to the quality of work and the
improvement that had been accomplished. In other words if the praise
was truly informational positive feedback and not seen as an attempt to
control.
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Unexpected.
Unexpected rewards were not found to decrease intrinsic motivation.
This probably because unexpected rewards from others are not generally
perceived as being a form of control by those others.
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Conditional.
Conditional rewards were found to always cause intrinsic motivation to
decrease. "If you do something you will get a reward", tended to
completely turn people off doing that something regardless of whether
the reward was forthcoming.
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Expected.
Expected rewards were likewise found to decrease intrinsic motivation.
This probably because expectation of reward from others is normally
seen as a form of control by that other.
Information and control. Ryan and
Deci theorized that reward had two aspects, an informational aspect and
a controlling aspect.
Why don't rewards
work?
Why don't rewards work as reinforcement as the behaviorists would
expect? The answer is, that reinforcements do not generally alter the
attitudes and emotional commitments that underlie our behaviors. As
Alfie Kohn explains in his book
"Punished by Rewards": "They do not make deep and
lasting changes because they are aimed at affecting only what we do."
Rewards do motivate people, they motivate them to comply, but when they
are removed the reason to continue evaporates. Alfie Kohn continues: "If
your objective is to get people to obey an order, show up on time and
do what they are told then bribing or threatening 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 good values, then
rewards like punishments, are absolutely useless." Rewards
are worse than useless, they are counter productive. Rewards in fact
demotivate where the rewards are contingent upon a particular action or
outcome. This has been called the over-justification effect. When we
perceive we are being motivated by external rewards, our previous
motivation to perform an action for the joy of doing it, is somehow
discounted and in fact tends to disappear.
The effects of extrinsic reward on creativity. Harvard
Business School social psychologist Teresa Amabile and her colleagues
have been studying the effects of reward on creativity for over 20
years. In that time she and her colleagues have conducted many
experiments on various groups of people ranging in age from elementary
school children to university students. In addition she has also
studied these effects on working artists and innovative workers in
industry. Although the findings she has uncovered are not as straight
forward as many might have hoped, she has uncovered a clear tendency
for rewards generally to have a marked negative effect on creativity.
Without trying to describe the many experiments she conducted, this
site will try in the following to convey the major findings in this
work. Anyone wishing to examine the experiments and how they were
conducted can readily do this by reading her seminal book
"Creativity in Context". The findings are as follows:
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Rewards that
constrain reduce creativity. Extrinsic rewards as they are
usually used involve some form of constraint upon the artist or
innovator and this sort of reward clearly demonstrates a significant
reduction in all kinds of creative productivity. When the creator has
no choice as to what work he will do or how he will do it creativity is
diminished. He who pays the piper calls the tune. But
he will get a better tune if the musician does the choosing. Likewise
contracts and deadlines have a negative effect on creativity. This, of
course, is subject to the creator's perception that these measures are
controlling. Perhaps it is better to say that the perception of others
trying to control one's work significantly reduces creativity.
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Rewards that are
conditional on engagement in an activity reduce creativity.
Extrinsic rewards that are conditional on engagement in an activity
clearly demonstrate a significant negative effect on creativity. If you
engage in this activity you will get a reward but your work will be
less creative.
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Rewards that are
performance conditional on an activity reduce creativity.
Extrinsic rewards that are conditional on reaching a set standard of
quality, or which were evaluated to have reached a level of competence,
clearly demonstrate a reduction in creativity. If you produce a work of
sufficient competence or judged to have reached a set standard, you
will be rewarded but your creativity goes down.
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Expected rewards
decrease creativity. Rewards that are expected were found to
decrease interest and thus significantly reduce creativity. While
expectancy alone was not as significant as the more constraining and
controlling sorts of rewards they were still significant in reducing
creativity.
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Rewards given when
creators are already interested reduce creativity. The more
interested the creator was initially the greater the reduction in
creativity that was found.
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Some rewards
increase creativity. Some types of rewards either have no
effect on creativity or increase creativity.
Rewards that have been found to have a positive effect on creativity
are as follows:
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Informational
rewards increase creativity. Rewards that conveyed
information to the creator
that attested to the creator's competence or improvement, (informative
praise) were found to significantly increase or improve creativity.
However, it was also found that, if praise was given in a controlling
manner, it caused creativity to decrease.
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Rewards
that reduce future evaluation increase creativity. Rewards
that gave the creator greater independence from the evaluation of
others was found to significantly increase or improve creativity.
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Rewards
that allow the creator greater freedom in creation increase creativity.
Rewards that allowed the creator to have greater control in the future
over what activities they will engage in and how they will engage in
them, were found to significantly increase and improve creativity.
Rewards that increase the creator's choice and freedom to work how he
wants and work on what he wants, significantly increase and improve
creativity.
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Rewards
that are not expected increase creativity. Rewards that were
unexpected and thus unconditional and not controlling were found to
significantly increase and improve creativity.
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Creators can be
immunized against the negative effects of extrinsic rewards.
Amabile realized that in the real world rewards for the most part were
inescapable. So she set about to discover if the negative affects of
reward on creativity could be ameliorated or overcome by those giving
rewards, and those receiving rewards. Amabile and her team discovered
these negative effects could indeed be immunized against as follows.
They set up a program to
allow one group of participants to be trained through modeled behavior
to accentuate intrinsic motivation and depreciate extrinsic rewards.
The participants were exposed to a discussion where people expressed
the view, that while a promised reward might be important as in getting
a degree or good grades, that those rewards were never the most
important thing to them when they are working creatively. The
participants were then asked to reflect on feelings they may have had
that were similar to those expressed in the discussion. They then found
that students who had been immunized in this way not only do not suffer
a reduction of creativity under conditions of extrinsic reward but in
fact exhibited an increase in creativity. It comes as no surprise then
to discover that a study of working artists showed they tended to hold
just such views as presented in the discussion, and the more vigorously
they held those views, the more creative their commissioned works
tended to be.
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The
saliency of extrinsic rewards could be decreased thus
increasing creativity. One of the most important things that
Amabile and her colleagues discovered was that the prominence or the
noticeable-ness of an extrinsic reward, (its saliency), played a major
part in whether it had a negative effect on
creators.
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The
saliency of intrinsic rewards could be increased thus
increasing creativity. Likewise Amabile and her colleagues
discovered that the prominence or the noticeable-ness of intrinsic
reward (its saliency) played a major part in how positive an effect it
had on creators.
The essentiality of
intrinsic motivation to creativity. This site is of the
opinion that extrinsic reward makes the effort of creation seem cheaper
and of less worth, thus diminishing the feelings
of accomplishment and achievement that are essential to intrinsic
motivation. It is intrinsic reward and not extrinsic reward that is
essential for the spark of creativity. When intrinsic motivation is
stifled, so is the person's willingness to explore new avenues and new
ideas. Although teaching involves using extrinsic or intrinsic
rewards, it is clear that if extrinsic rewards are to be additive with
intrinsic reward and thus strengthen intrinsic motivation, they must be
informational, non evaluative, unrestricting and unexpected. More
importantly extrinsic rewards should be made where possible less
salient to help immunize against their detrimental effect. Likewise
intrinsic rewards should, where possible, be made more salient to
immunize against the effect of extrinsi9c rewards. To some extent these
principles are applicable to all learning, but they are particularly
applicable to creative activity. Thus intrinsic rewards, because of
their motivational consonance with creative process, fuel the
generation of useful ideas. In
their book "The Innovation Paradox" Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes put
it like this:
"'People will do precisely
what they are asked to do, if the reward is significant.' There's no
better way to discourage innovation. The manager's job isn't to guess
what prizes will reward success best. It's to figure out how to make
jobs so satisfying and so challenging that doing them becomes its own
reward."
"Money is great stuff to have, but when
it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of
money too much. It constipates the whole process." Stephen
King
Money & the
equitable compensation for work. It is important to note
however, that creative people usually feel very strongly about being
adequately compensated for their work. As indicated above, not all
extrinsic rewards have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation declines when explicit reward is contingent on
creative production. Rewards that are provided as a testament to the
creative person's ability or competence can and do prove to be highly
effective, if not in motivating, at least in keeping creative people
happy and willing to continue working for their employer. Obviously
creative people require considerable remuneration and incentives to
even consider working for somebody other than
themselves.
 
Clearly
if someone else gets rewarded or recognized for something a creative
person has done, this will also have a negative impact on that creative
person's intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic reward, ideal motivation.
The beauty of intrinsic pleasures is that they always work and always
reward. A person would have to be brain damaged for them not to work.
Learning a skill, overcoming an obstacle, completing a work of art,
doing a good deed, are all actions that are instantly rewarded by a
mechanism within our own minds and bodies. These rewards are unfailing
and rely on no external contingencies in the environment.
Perhaps the most important thing about intrinsic
motivation is that there is no intrinsic failure. Failure is a concept
we build up out of a kind of extrinsic punishment and reward where
others expect something of us and we are unable to perform as those
others wish. Only as babies are we truly free of this kind of pressure,
and it is as babies we learn fastest and most surely. A baby is almost
entirely motivated by internally generated rewards or intrinsic
rewards. Babies will often reject both help and the offer of extrinsic
reward. In
"The Self Respecting Child" Alison Sallibrass gives some
examples she says:
"Many mothers
realize that it is in their own long-term interests to let a child
struggle to dress himself when he wants to do so, but one must
frequently give a child credit for more sense than he appears to have
when he voluntarily persists with what is a patently frustrating
activity - and let him carry on."
"For a period
when Ruth was about ten months old and had learned to crawl and pull
herself up and stand alone, her toys were neglected; she was impatient
of being held in arms, and eager only to get to the floor and use her
new powers. She crept happily about for hours from chair to chair, from
person to person, getting to her feet at each, and setting herself down
cleverly again; smiling and crowing at each success. She ran away from
us on hands and knees laughing, if she thought we were about to pick
her up."
John Holt watched babies a lot and reports the
following in
"How Children Fail":
"These quiet summer days I spend
many hours watching this baby. What comes across most vividly is that
she is a kind of scientist. She is always observing and experimenting.
She is hardly ever idle. Most of her waking time she is intensely and
purposefully active, soaking up experience and trying to make sense out
of it, trying to find how the things around her behave, and trying to
make them behave as she wants them to.
...Watching this
baby it is hard to credit the popular notion that without outside
rewards and penalties children will not learn. There are some rewards
and penalties in her life; the adults approve of some things that she
does and disapprove of others. But most of the time she lives beyond
praise and blame, if only because most of her learning experiments are
unobserved. After all who thinks about the meaning of what a baby is
doing so long as she is quiet and contented? But watch a while and you
will see that she has a strong desire to make sense of the world around
her. Her learning gives her great satisfaction, whether anyone notices
or not."
In truth babies do not need punishment or reward
to motivate them as they are already motivated, and become more
motivated as intrinsic reward follows their every achievement. The
following words of John Holt from his book
"How Children Fail" cannot be said often enough
and should be inscribed somewhere for all humans to see.
"A baby does not
react to failure as an adult does, or even a five-year-old, because she
has not yet been made to feel that failure is shame disgrace, a crime.
Unlike her elders, she is not concerned with protecting herself against
everything that is not easy or familiar; she reaches out to experience,
she embraces life."
"Every
act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury
to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware
of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons,
especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all." Thomas
Szasz Psychologist
Extrinsic Reward? Not too Much. Extrinsic
reward should not be necessary. When children are undamaged they do not
need rewards in order to learn. The desire and the need to learn is our
most basic need. However, because children are usually socially
suffocated, sometimes extrinsic rewards are needed to restore
confidence and overcome fears and anxiety. Teresa Amabile's research
shows that people who have no interest in a particular creative
activity can have their creativity increased by use of judicious
extrinsic reward. Just remember however, that when we reward someone we
automatically punish the others and the one rewarded is himself
punished on other occasions by not being rewarded.
Not all extrinsic reward is bad.
Extrinsic reward has been shown in studies to be helpful when it is
informational, when it is unconditional and when it is not expected.
Extrinsic reward of this sort can be helpful, but is something that
should be done in private if possible, and only when it seems to be the
only way of moving a learner forward. It should be used only as a kick
starter. Remember also that children can be encouraged in other ways
than praise. They can be directed to work harder, they can be informed
that they need to put in more effort and they can be oriented into
persisting longer.
Not all intrinsic
reward is good. It would make things simple if all intrinsic
reward was healthy and life enhancing. Unfortunately our brains cannot seem to
distinguish between information that builds and expands our model of
reality and that which does not. John Naish in his book
"Enough" draws attention to this problem. The disjointed
unconnected information that impinges on us, unasked for, from the new
media is trying to reach us with messages all our waking hours. It
comes from cell phones, TV, radio, signs etc. everywhere we look. The
absorption of this information provides us with an intrinsic reward
just as if we had really learned something. This blur of scrambled
useless data is not the learning that this site is recommending to
enhance you life, this is the opposite. Just as hard drugs can be a
substitute for real life experience, this type of intrinsic reward can
substitute for real leaning, and be softly killing you with
its easy pleasant buzz.
Intrinsic Reward? Yes! Despite
the the warning above there is no alternative to intrinsic reward in
motivation. Yes indeed. Intrinsic reward always works. Intrinsic reward
normally increases activity, creativity, and learning. The pleasure
obtained from actively pursuing knowledge is both healthy and immensely
pleasurable. Unfortunately this hands off approach leaves the learner
in control, rather than the instructor. Intrinsic reward is, in normal
circumstances, all that is needed to enable interest and motivation to
induce further learning. The following words all stand for concepts
that illustrate mental states that invoke intrinsic reward.
Accomplishment; Achievement; Goodness; Uniqueness; Perfection;
Necessity; Justice; Richness; Wholeness; Completion; Usefulness;
Orderliness; Creativity; Productivity; Competence; Skillfulness; Worth;
Self Actualization; and Learning. Perhaps more importantly intrinsic
reward is embedded in the feeling of flow that is obtained when
challenges are met with abilities and skills that match and overcome
those challenges.
Life Long Learning. In the end
intrinsic reward is what can make learning truly pleasurable which in
turn produces people who are life long learners.
"I
would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than
educate people and hope they were entertained." Walt
Disney
"It's
kind of fun to do the impossible." Walt Disney
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