Why Rewards Kill the Fun and Unmotivate People
Reward and punishment are two of the primary tools we use to change behavior. Whether it be giving a friend the silent treatment or paying a child when he gets good greades, incentive techniques are widespread, and their efficacy is well-documented (read Chapter 2 of one of my favorite books for a fun look). But rewards in particular are not all they’re cracked up to be: often, they actually deteriorate the experience they try to promote.
The main problem is the replacement of internal motivation with external ones. If you try to get a child to raise his hand before speaking by giving him a cookie every time he does, the child quickly learns that the cookie is the main reward associated with raising his hand. The core ideals that make raising a hand valuable – respect, for one – will not be part of the thought process.
“Giving students extrinsic rewards for engaging in learning tasks makes the implicit statement that the activity was not worth doing on its own merits.” – Alfie Kohn
A reward system is like an evil carrot.
The worst part of this implicit message is that it retroactively affects a situation where a person has already developed an intrinsic motivation. So if, for example, a student loves reading and you create an incentive program for reading, you can destroy the internal love of reading. Once the switch is made from internal motivation to external motivation, the behavior can only be sustained by continuing to offer the reward. So once the reading incentives stop, the student stops reading.
Why? It’s just the way we’re wired. If an activity has an external reward, we see the reward as a measure of the value of the activity. This is a psychological reaction that makes biological sense. If our ancestors were to go somewhere to find food, and one day the food were gone, would it make sense to keep traveling to that spot? No.
Don’t let this confuse you, though, because punishments do permanently change behavior, even if they are taken away. We develop permanent aversions to negative situations for the same underlying biological reasons. If primitive man were to encounter a wolf, he wouldn’t be likely to return, would he?
So people can be conditioned by negative reinforcement, but not by positive reinforcement. We all have encountered this in our personal lives when we promise ourselves some kind of reward for working out, or for waking up on time, but as the days pass we find that the reward is no longer enough to keep us exercising or pulling ourselves out of bed.
Think about a time when you earned a reward, whether or not someone else gave it to you. Think first about the thing you did for the reward, then think about the reward itself. Which is the positive memory? Which thing feels like “work?” If you’re like most people, whatever you did to earn the reward has probably become a chore in your recollection.
That’s the reason that those self-rewards aren’t very effective. Getting that treat over and over becomes less and less rewarding each time, while doing the task becomes more and more cumbersome. At some point it’s just not worth it any more. Then we fail.
The only way to overcome that challenge is to build an intrinsic motivation for whatever it is you want to do. Don’t let an external reward become a source of motivation – don’t even tempt yourself to let that happen by creating one, because it invariably will. By creating that reward, you send yourself the same message that a child would get: that the thing isn’t worth doing in its own right.
The key to creating a positive habit in you or in someone else is to tie the positive response directly to the achievement, rather than to the reward. You should be happy because you went to the gym. You should relish the good burn, the sweat on your forehead, and the pride of making it through a tough workout. You shouldn’t be happy just because you let yourself eat a piece of key lime pie afterwards.
The same principle goes for others. Direct praise for a good behavior is much more effective than a prize if you want to train a child. At first, it may not seem that way – the allure of a reward system is that it is always immediately and perfectly effective – but over time the results will be more noticeable and dramatic. Enjoyment and motivation can come from within rather than from without, and those personal motivators are the only ones that will always endure.
(photo credit: Brettf)
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