On Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards

I recently finished Punished By Rewards. I read it over the last three months, and so it has become just as much a meditation on my own experience and perceptions as it has been about taking in the author’s points.

Kohn’s basic argument is that behaviorist principles, used in family, education, and the workplace, undermine the good aims of who use them. For example, if a library program is designed with the aim of getting children to become lovers of reading, and children are rewarded with free pizza when they complete a certain number of books, Kohn points out that kids tend to pick the shortest, easiest books, because the goal for them has become getting the pizza, not enjoying the books. It is not the love of reading that is reinforced, but the idea that reading is an unpleasant chore and children need to be pushed to do it by external motivators. He cites study after research study (many which set out to prove the opposite) showing that offering “positive reinforcements” to produce certain desired behaviors has the long-term effect of lessening the likelihood of the desired behavior. Even in the short term, numerous studies show that children and college students tend to be less interested in meeting a new learning challenge when there is a reward attached, and more interested in activities which attract them simply by the nature of the thing. He demonstrates that rewarding people for “doing good” is psychologically identical to punishing people for “doing bad” (which moderns are more likely to reject as benighted); that rewards insert alienation and resentment in the relationship between the giver and receiver of the reward; that rewards ignore the needs of the human heart (or the reasons why behavior is being exhibited that others deem in need of modification); and that rewards discourage risk-taking and creative growth.

Here is a quick smattering of quotes, pulling out some of the key themes I found meaningful:

If you have been promised a reward, you come to see the task as something that stands between you and it. The easier the job is, the faster you can be done with it and pick up your prize. It's logical, all right, but the practical implications are staggering. Our workplaces and classrooms, saturated in pop behaviorism as they are, have the effect of discouraging people from taking risks, thinking creatively, and challenging themselves. (p. 65)

All of us start out life intensely fascinated by the world around us and inclined to explore it without any extrinsic inducement. It is not part of the human condition to be dependent upon rewards; in fact, there is no reason to think that anyone is born with an extrinsic orientation....

Ryan and his colleges put it this way: "Given particular out conditions and approaches to education, an inner world will eventually emerge which conforms to and matches it." If people's "extrinsic-ness" is really a result of internalizing the orientation of their environments, then it should vary depending on one's experience. This is exactly what we find: teachers who use controlling techniques such as extrinsic motivators tend to produce students who are more extrinsic, while those who emphasize students' autonomy produce students who are more intrinsic.

Most American schools marinate children in behaviorism, so that result, unsurprisingly, is that children's intrinsic motivation drains away. (p. 91)

Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children's dependence on us. It gets them to conform to our wishes irrespective of what those wishes are. It sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will elad us to smile and offer the positive words they crave. Rudolph Dreikurs saw this back in the 1950s: praise, he said, can "lead to a dependency on approval. Overdone, it promotes insecurity as the child becomes frightened at the prospect of not being able to live up to expectations." (p. 104)

"How do I get these kids motivated?" is a question that not only misreads the nature of motivation but also operates within a paradigm of control, the very thing that is death to motivation. "I never use the expression 'motivate a child,' " says Raymond Wlodkowski, who specializes in the topic. "That takes away their choice. All we can do is influence how they motivate themselves."

But influence them we can -- and must. The job of educators is neither to make students motivated nor to sit passively; it is to set up the conditions that make learning possible. (p. 199)

Bruner likes to talk about the teacher's role as helping students approach what they are doing with a mind to "discovering something rather than 'learning about' it." The benefit of that, he continues, is that "the child is now in a position to experience success and failure not as reward and punishment, but as information." This is a critical distinction. Feedback indicating that a student "is on a right track ...[or] the wrong one" is what produces improvement.... But the capacity to see success and failure as feedback is even more important, and that requires teachers (and parents) to stress the task itself, not the performance. (p. 211)

While I was in the process of reading this book, I stumbled onto a biography of myself that I wrote for a psychology class in my Senior year of high school. My 17-year old memory was that as a young child I was deeply motivated to gain my teachers’ attention and approval. This was no doubt true; my parents were in the midst of divorcing and I tried to "self-medicate" with my school performance. Reflecting on this, I realize how much I came to view positive attention as a reward (rather than something innately due me, unconditionally). I had it rather easy because I was a quick learner and I was quiet, and I had a decent school system. But, by middle school I had swallowed the belief that my value was conditional, based on my performance. (It was confusing to me, though, because I never felt I was exerting myself. It was like being told I did a great job at having blue eyes. My performance didn’t even seem like something I controlled!) My screaming need, and therefore what I pursued, was the social reward – either pleasing the teacher or beating out other kids to feel “better” than they. Learning? Challenging myself? Oh, I kept getting good grades for the most part, but it all became like a game. I didn’t really care whether I learned. And besides, if I made good enough grades, who cared? What else mattered but that symbolic reward?

A few mental snapshots from my experiences:

In my 7th grade math class we did self-paced independent work. My goal was finishing as many books as I could to be as far ahead of others as I could. One particular book taught a concept I was not interested in (because it was difficult for me). I took the pretest, slammed through the book, and took the posttest a day or two later. I had scored better on the pretest! But I had gotten the nasty thing out of my hair and was on to something different, something easy. I had no desire to master math or learn. On the evaluation I took home for my mom’s signature, the teacher wrote “I think she is trying to race through the books.” And that was that.

One quarter, my 8th grade history teacher gave me a C with the comment that, for me, I was doing only average work. He was right; he saw through my “going through the motions” approach to school. Yet, it scandalized me, because I was not a “C” person, and he had made no other comment, no other interaction with me to elaborate on his observation or on his view of what I should do differently. His effort probably could have made an impact, had I been able to take the risk to pursue him on it. That was not how I had learned to relate to teachers, unfortunately.

These and many other experiences show me that rewards like grades really can draw away from the actual goal of education. They refocus the attention of both student and teacher onto whether the goody has been obtained, not on the needs or potential of the child. And they blunt the horizon of learning, declaring an artificial “finish line” or point of supposed satisfaction that perhaps is completely unsuited to that particular child.

Another extremely interesting facet of Kohn’s book was the discussion of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I had not realized this is controversial for behavioralists, who, strictly speaking, do not posit the existence of an I within the biological matter called a person which can have motivation – for them, there is nothing within that can motivate! Hence the necessity to rely on external reinforcements to teach desired behaviors. I cannot be more diametrically opposed to this presupposition!

It was very powerful for me to reflect on my own experience of the areas and degrees of my intrinsic or extrinsic motivations throughout my education. I discovered writing – story writing, letter writing, research writing, you name it – when I was very young, and I found I had much to gain from exercising my abilities. By age 10 I wrote something nearly every day. Mostly this was personal, not school, work. This work later helped me connect with a desire to learn, at least in subjects where words came into play.

I also remember a 6th grade scene that might count as “the” thing I learned that year. My class was discussing our city’s water, and the teacher asked if anyone knew the source of our drinking water. Students answered with one or the other of our city’s lakes. I raised my hand to offer that I knew our water came from a well.

I don’t know if the teacher had intended this beforehand, but the discussion quickly became a psychological experiment. When I answered “a well,” the teacher made a scoffing, dismissive sound, and went on to go up and down the rows asking every student for his or her answer. Every single kid in the class said either Lake Mendota or Lake Monona. Then the teacher came back to me, telling me I was the only one who had said something different. Didn’t I want to change my answer? I said no, because I knew I was right. The teacher then revealed to all that my answer was indeed correct.

Perhaps this is more a factor of my personality than my motivation, but has always been vitally important to me to stick with what I know to be true, regardless of what other people say or think. That experience was a huge concrete illustration to me that letting one’s internality be overridden by momentary external pressure is a losing gamble.

In college I remember hearing fellow students say things to our professors like “I’m not sure what you want for this paper.” It used to make me absolutely cringe. For them, the project was for the professor. For me, writing a paper was like making a new boyfriend. (And it was about the closest thing to it I ever had!) It was about discovering some work, or some author, or some topic, opening myself to it, interacting with it, perhaps raking it over the coals, then telling the story of our relationship as I had come to understand it in this way that I had found to share my heart with “the world.” And, ok, so it was normally only the professor who read it, but it was the work of my heart and soul, meant for “the world” in some sense! And this other student just wanted to know how to spew out what the teacher “wanted.” Fortunately I had professors who objected to the very question, as I did! This is your education, honey! What do you want to say through your effort?

The serious problem I had was that my intrinsic motivation was powerful in only selected areas. I was scared stiff in other areas of my life – like as soon as I stepped out of a classroom -- where risking, creativity, and relating to other humans was necessary. I had learned to be a good student, but I had not learned to step out and try something that I wasn’t naturally good at, for fear of failure. In this regard, despite my grades, I have to say my education did not completely succeed in giving me what is most important -- the ability to meet challenges with confidence. However, now I see education as a lifelong process, so I'm still working on it!

One of my goals in my children’s education is to preserve their intrinsic motivation, their willingness to try things, and to learn from both failure and success -- to grow from everything. Kohn’s book reminds me that any true growth requires great patience and a lot of time. Perhaps we reward or bribe each other toward goals because we lack patience for each other and trust in the innate human desire to know and grow. And, perhaps, we do it because we sometimes refuse to accept how we are limited.