Punished By Rewards

Furthermore, research indicates that (1) the bigger the reward, the easier the task that people choose;40 (2) when the rewards stop, those who received them earlier continue to prefer to do as little as possible;41 and (3) easier tasks are selected not only in situations where rewards are offered but by people who are, as a general rule, more reward oriented.

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 oriented and more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of a lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problems.41

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 to the task is open-ended enough that the steps leading to a solution are not immediately obvious.3