rewards kill resonance

I belong to a staff book club at my school.  We choose a book to read and get together at lunch twice a month to discuss a couple of chapters.  The book we are reading right now is Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve.

Full disclosure: I already heart Alfie Kohn.  I first saw him at a conference in Vancouver in 2000 and talk about resonance! He was hyper and working the room of at least 500 with more energy than a monkey washing a kitty.  And I hung on his every word because here was someone talking my language - I had found my educational philisopher-king.  Since then I have read most of his books, and I do have a quibble with him here and there - but overall, don't expect much Alfie criticism to come from this corner.

In preparation for our next book club meeting I was reading chapters 7 and 8 of The Schools Our Children Deserve.  It focused on one of Kohn's recurring themes - motivation and how rewards interfere with motivation.

You may remember an episode of Oprah some years back where she had Kohn on as a guest.  They did a little experiment. One by one, twenty children were brought to an office building and introduced to an adult pretending to work for a toy company.  The children were then asked to  help evaluate new games for the toy company. Half the children were offered five dollars for each game they tested. Rewards were not mentioned to the other half.  After playing with the games for awhile a researcher then entered the office and asked the children for some feedback.  Having obtained the feedback, the researcher then left the child alone in the room- where unbeknownst to them, they were being videotaped. All ten children who had not been offered any reward went back to playing with the games. Only one of the ten who had been rewarded with cash went back to playing, the rest of the rewarded children sat and did nothing until they were told they could leave.

Why?  Kohn theorizes that as soon as we are offered a reward for a task the implication is that the task is not worth doing in and of itself.   Rewards can demotivate us from doing that which we may be naturally inclined to do.

As he explains in the book:

One popular myth about motivation, then, is that it can be done to others.  The other, even more basic misconception is one we encountered while looking at high-stakes testing - the idea that there is a single thing called motivation, a single substance that people possess to a certain degree. The reality, remember, is that there are qualitatively different types of motivation. What determines how effectively students will learn isn't how motivated they are.  It's how they are motivated. The type of motivation referred to as "extrinsic" - which we find, for example, when kids are led to read books so they can get some goodie - turns out to be not merely ineffective but counterproductive. It tends to reduce 'intrinsic" motivation - that is, an interest in reading itself.

Interesting, then, that so many weight loss and fitness programs promote the rewards mindset.  For example, Weight Watchers hands out gold stars, keychains, ribbons and charms when you lose certain percentages of weight towards your goal.   The mucho macho Leanness Lifestyle uses "leverage", a slight variation on rewards whereby you put up, for example, $250 of your own money and only get it back if you accomplish your goal.

Is this approach just killing the intrinsic motivation produced by the increased sense of well-being that accompanies getting to a healthy weight?  But what about the people for whom this approach seems to work? I believe it works for them *in spite of* the rewards, not because of them.  I believe they already had intrinsic motivation, and that that was what brought them the success. 

Comments

[Kimberly33]

Hey there, lady!

Here's an interesting article on praise that you might find interesting: http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

Short version: praising effort in a specific manner (e.g. "Wow, you really worked hard to try to answer that problem, that's great!") increases interest and improves results. Praising results, decreases motivation and results don't increase as much. The idea is that when kids are praised on the results, they become protective of them--so they won't risk not being "smart" and only do things that they are confident about. The kids praised for their effort enjoy the process, take on more challenges, and aren't discouraged but motivated to do better when they fail at a task.

[liannemarie]

Kimberly - I'm so excited you mentioned that article! I have had that one in my delicious links for a few months but had forgotten about it. It's perfect! Thanks. It deserves it's own post.

[(((((HUGS))))) sandi]

OH.WOW. Just your little short blurb and I am seeing MY OWN motivational troubles! I am definitely gonna hafta check that book out.... (((((HUGS))))) sandi