Part III: Rewards don't really work

I'm now through Chapter 3, on the effectiveness of rewards. The first part of the chapter shows that when an incentives program is used, and then that rewards program ends, people exhibit worse behavior than those in control groups who were never offered rewards. This was found to be true when behaviorist programs were used to promote weight loss, smoking cessation, use of seat belts, and use of math-related games in elementary school. At the very beginning, for a brief time, those getting rewards would do better than those offered nothing. But once the payments stopped coming in, these folks (as compared to controls) lost less weight, were more likely to smoke, were less likely to use seat belts, and were less likely to engage in games that used math.

No surprise, really. Can't you just hear the thought process? "Why should I bother... it's not like I'm getting paid for it anymore."

When you're given the extrinsic motivator, you don't have to find your own reasons, or talk yourself into making an effort. You're getting paid, that's why you're doing it; and when you stop getting paid, then why do it at all? If you're asked to attempt some behavior change and you're not paid, then you develop your own reasons ("It's for my health" or "I could use the extra help in math"). And when it's your own personal reason, it persists.

Apparently this happens so often in studies of incentives programs that (p. 40): "...behaviorists have had to invent a neutral-sounding name for it: it is technically known as the 'contrast effect'." In other words, there is a backlash when you take away a reward you had previously offered.

Even more fascinating is the detrimental effect rewards have on performance, even while the rewards are still being given. This one is harder to wrap one's mind around, considering the continuing popularity of rewards systems in schools. For instance, on one NEA page of 25 ideas to motivate young readers, 8 of the 25 involve explicit rewards, while several others involve less tangible incentives, such as having your drawing hung up on the wall.

The popularity of incentives notwithstanding, the 1970's and 80's were full of research indicating that performance in the presence of a rewards system is worse than performance when no incentive is offered. This might be hard for some people to believe, so I'm going to give a list of examples from Chapter 3. These are all treatment (rewards) vs. control group experiments.

• Nine-year-old boys asked to determine the difference between pairs of similar faces made more errors if paid for their successes than if they were not paid. Payments of 1 cent or of 50 cents both produced inferior performance compared to the control group.
  
• Undergraduate students were less able to construct a candle holder and attach it to a wall, when given various materials, when they were paid anywhere from $5 to $20. In fact, it took them 50% longer to devise a suitable holder, compared to unpaid controls.
  
• Children did less well on a word memorization task when given an M&M after each success, as compared to children who merely saw a visual indication of their successes.
  
• Undergraduates were asked to examine three patterns and identify the most dissimilar of the three. Those who were paid did significantly worse than those who received no incentive. The researcher, baffled, doubled the reward, but received the same result.
• Students were being trained to write headlines for a student paper, following specific rules. Some of them began to receive payment for each headline produced, and the ongoing improvement in the quality of their headlines ceased. Students who had never been paid continued to improve.
  
• Fourth graders performed more poorly on a task even when allowed to choose their preferred reward, a particular toy or type of candy.
  
• High school students were given 5 different tasks, some creative and some testing their memory. Regardless of the type of task, performance was lower in the rewarded subjects than in the control group.
• Preschoolers rewarded for each completed drawing produced more drawings than controls, but objective observers judged their drawings to be of lesser quality than those made by unrewarded children.
• Sixth grade girls promised movie tickets for teaching a game to younger girls were less successful as tutors than comparable girls offered nothing. Those promised tickets became frustrated more easily, were less efficient at communicating ideas, and had pupils who understood the game less well than pupils taught by unrewarded girls.
• Third graders promised a toy for working on some "games" (actually an IQ test) tested lower than those promised nothing.
• Young writers instructed to spend five minutes merely thinking about the rewards their writing might bring them (money, fame, etc) wrote less creative poetry than others who had not been instructed to ponder rewards. The quality of the poetry in the treatment group was also judged to be lower than previous work done by the same students.
  

Two further conclusions, both quite surprising and with broad implications, have come out of recent research on rewards and performance (p. 45):

After conducting six separate studies, Morton Deutsch concluded that "there is no evidence to indicate that people work more productively when they are expecting to be rewarded in proportion to their performance than when they are expecting to be rewarded equally or on the basis of need."

In other words, merit-based bonuses, commissions, tips, and all those competitive payment structures which create so much stress and destroy camraderie generally do not work. (I guess it's more about destroying worker solidarity and cementing the power of management than it is about improving quality.)

Secondly (p. 45):

Ann Boggiano and Marty Barrett found that children who are extrinsically motivated -- that is, concerned about things like rewards and approval they can get as a result of what they do in school -- use less sophisticated learning strategies and score lower on standardized achievement tests than children who are interesting in learning for its own sake. The reward-driven children do more poorly even when they are compared with children whose scores the previous year were identical to their own.

So the more rewards (tangible or social) given by the school or parents for higher grades and test scores, the worse performance will be, and the more simplistic the learning strategies students will employ. Most people would find this hard to believe, but I guess I could direct them to the 41 research references footnoted in Chapter 3.

One researcher summed all this up in fairly damning language (p.48):

[Those offered rewards] choose easier tasks, are less efficient in using the information available to solve novel problems, and tend to be ... more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problems.

It seems clear that rewards should not be used in schools. To reward a child for reading a book, for instance, is to imply that reading is unpleasant drudgery. When the rewards end, we would expect the child to be less interested in reading than if they had never been paid. And they will tend to choose easier books and will read them with less attention and comprehension. It's a shame, then, that each year an estimated 22 million K-6 students are rewarded with pizza coupons for reading books.

It's a shame that the NEA website is positively peppered with enthusiastic emails from teachers about the latest rewards program they're using (candy, toys, paper money, tokens-- you'll find it at NEA.org). What are they teaching in teaching schools, if not that rewards programs produce only short-lived results and actually impair learning? Is this not an important pegagogical point?

Some homeschoolers feel there must not be enough discipline in schools, because just look how kids act these days. My answer to that is, when you see kids-- which is usually when they are not in school-- well, then they're not being paid for good behavior like they are when they're in the classroom. So why behave well? What's in it for them? Where's the paycheck?

It's not lack of discipline. It's misguided Skinnerian discipline that is eroding real maturation and the development of social behaviors and personal responsibility. Similarly, we don't need yet more time in school, yet more homework to be turned in for tokens; we need the eradication of rewards for learning.

Once again I'll return to something my mom, as a college writing instructor, once overheard a student saying: "Man, I can't wait till I graduate and I never have to learn another thing." That's a student who has been thoroughly taught over two decades that learning is drudgery, that you must be forced by law to do it, that you must be praised or threatened all the way through, bribed with the promise of a higher salary. Some kids probably feel they'll have more dignity and autonomy if they simply refuse to be taught at all, since learning occurs by coercion, however subtle much of this coercion may be.

(Suddenly it seems less surprising to me that 11 percent of young adult Americans in a 2002 survey could not find the United States on a world map.)