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

A few years later, Teresa Amabile, a leading student of 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 could bring (such as money and 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.3

with Miller's experiment, some of the students were informed that they could earn anywhere from $5 to $20—quite a lot of money in 1962—if they succeeded; others weren't promised anything. Even though the subjects were older and the assignment quite different, Glucksberg's 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.

a continued dependence on rewards can create a range of practical problems, including an increase in demands (for money rather than M&M's), as managers trying to implement incentive programs on a permanent basis have discovered

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 this chapter and the two that follow, 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 the worse.

withheld from, those who are undeserving. Many of us have watched people become uneasy, if not positively furious, when they believe some offense—including one committed by a child—has not been punished severely enough

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 cause you to respond to, and even to require, these goodies. As we shall see, the other, more substantive reasons for you to do your best tend to evaporate, leaving you with no reason to try except for obtaining a goody. Pretty soon, the provision of rewards becomes habitual because there seems to be no way to do without them. In short, the current use of rewards is due less to some fact about human nature than to the earlier use of rewards

have been taught that ethical conduct will be rewarded and evil acts punished, even if it does not happen in this lifetime: "When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be ... recompensed at the resurrection of the just" (Luke 14:13–14). We have also been taught that good acts or hard work should be rewarded, and this position, as I will argue later, leads some people to incline toward pop behaviorism regardless of the results it produces.