Book Review: Punished by Rewards

While brows­ing in a book­store back in the US last Novem­ber, I came upon the book Pun­ished By Rewards: The Trou­ble with Gold Stars, Incen­tive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn.  It sounded pretty inter­est­ing so I pur­chased it and pretty much devoured it.  Before writ­ing a review, I fig­ured I bet­ter read it again a lit­tle more slowly, which is why I’m just now get­ting a review out to you.

In this book, the author dis­cusses the sci­ence of applied behav­ior­ism (the use of praise/rewards and pun­ish­ments to con­trol behav­iors) and how, when applied to humans as a moti­va­tional tech­nique, it doesn’t work.  Accord­ing to Kohn, this is pretty accepted in the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity, with applied behav­ior­ists even offer­ing only that applied behav­ior­ism prob­a­bly doesn’t hurt motivation.

The book then goes on to describe how rewards have become com­mon­place in the busi­ness world, the class­room, and in par­ent­ing.  A cou­ple of exam­ples he describes: Employ­ees get bonuses, and even­tu­ally they’ll come to expect them and feel pun­ished if they don’t receive a bonus any­more, or don’t get as high a bonus as they were expect­ing.  I can’t count the num­ber of friends and fam­ily mem­bers who’ve com­plained and con­sid­ered quit­ting because their bonus wasn’t high enough and the depart­ment idiot got X much more than them.  Kids are graded (he’s against this) and often chil­dren with the high­est grade on a test will get an award like Stu­dent of the Week (I got it once in 7th grade French class), set­ting them up as com­peti­tors instead of fos­ter­ing team work and col­lab­o­ra­tion.  On this sub­ject, he writes:

Every­one else is a poten­tial obsta­cle to one’s own suc­cess.  If the reward sys­tem sets peo­ple up as one another’s rivals, the pre­dictable result is that each will view the oth­ers with sus­pi­cion and hos­til­ity and, depend­ing on their rel­a­tive sta­tus, per­haps with con­tempt or envy as well.

Why do we use rewards?

Because they’re eas­ier — in the short term.  Here is a longer excerpt address­ing this question:

Rewards do not require any atten­tion to the rea­sons that the trou­ble devel­oped in the first place. You don’t have to ask why the child is scream­ing, why the stu­dent is ignor­ing his home­work, why the employee is doing an indif­fer­ent job.  All you have to do is bribe or threaten that per­son into shap­ing up…

A mother in Vir­ginia wrote to me not too long ago to chal­lenge my crit­i­cism of behav­ioral manip­u­la­tion.  “If I can­not either pun­ish (or allow con­se­quences) or reward (bribe) my chil­dren… what do I do when my almost three year old… wan­ders out of her room again and again at bed­time?” she asked.  Fair enough: let us con­sider three pos­si­ble ways of deal­ing with a child who will not stay in bed.  Behav­ior­ist A favors “con­se­quences”: “If you’re not back in that bed by the time I count to three, young lady, you won’t be watch­ing tele­vi­sion for a week!” Behav­ior­ist B favors rewards: “If you stay in bed until morn­ing for the next three nights, honey, I’ll buy you that teddy bear you wanted.”

But the non­be­hav­ior­ist won­ders how any­one could pro­pose a solu­tion with­out know­ing why the child keeps pop­ping out of bed.  With very lit­tle effort we can imag­ine sev­eral pos­si­ble rea­sons for this behav­ior.  Maybe she’s being put to bed too early and sim­ply isn’t sleepy yet.  Maybe she feels deprived of quiet time with her par­ents, and the evening offers the best oppor­tu­nity for her to cud­dle or talk with them.  Maybe she’s still wound up from what hap­pened a few hours ear­lier and needs to rehearse and clar­ify the day’s events to try to make sense of what hap­pened.  Maybe there are mon­sters under her bed.  Or maybe she can just hear peo­ple talk­ing in the liv­ing room.  (Is there any­one too old to remem­ber how all the excite­ment seemed to start after we were put to bed?)

The point is we don’t yet know what’s really going on… Each of the pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for why this girl doesn’t stay in bed at night would seem to call for a dif­fer­ent solu­tion. (This is one of the rea­sons it is dif­fi­cult to give a sim­ple reply to peo­ple who demand to know what “the alter­na­tive” is to using rewards.) Rewards are not actu­ally solu­tions at all; they are gim­micks, short­cuts, quick fixes that mask the prob­lems and ignore rea­sons.  They never look below the surface.

Rewards don’t really work

Kohn explains that rewards and pun­ish­ments are con­trols used to try to manip­u­late the behav­ior of oth­ers, and no one likes to be on the receiv­ing end of manip­u­la­tion.  I sure don’t.  And while they might work in the short term, in the long term they tend to have either no, or the oppo­site, effect.  He cites stud­ies that found that kids told they were toy testers and given incen­tives to play with cer­tain toys did not play with them after their “test-periods” were over, while kids in con­trol groups not given incen­tives played just as much with the toys after­wards.  In another study he cites, kids given tutor­ing and money for good grades per­formed more poorly aca­d­e­m­i­cally than kids just given tutor­ing.  In the After­word, Kohn writes about rewards in business:

Not a sin­gle con­trolled study has ever found that the use of rewards pro­duces long-term improve­ment in the qual­ity of work.  In fact, exper­i­men­tal sim­u­la­tions con­tinue to sug­gest that the oppo­site is true.

Rewards in schools:

In 1995 two researchers… designed a two year exper­i­ment in which “ado­les­cent girls at risk of school fail­ure” were offered finan­cial incen­tives for improv­ing per­for­mance.  The result: con­trary to the exper­i­menters’ pre­dic­tion, these stu­dents ended up doing worse with respect to both grades and school absences than did girls who received social and edu­ca­tional ser­vices with­out any rewards.  More remark­ably, they also did worse than the con­trol group — that is, the girls who were just left alone! As we’ve seen in other stud­ies, offer­ing rewards proved to be not merely inef­fec­tive but actu­ally counterproductive.

And on reward use in parenting:

We live in a cul­ture where the high­est com­pli­ment a par­ent can receive is that his or her kid is “well behaved” (read: docile).  When strangers in restau­rants tell us how “good” our daugh­ter is, they don’t mean that she is admirable in an eth­i­cal sense but merely that she hasn’t been a nui­sance to them.  No won­der peo­ple declare matter-of-factly that it’s sim­ply unre­al­is­tic to do with­out treats and threats: these tac­tics may indeed be nec­es­sary if our goal is to pro­duce chil­dren who spend their lives just doing what they’re told.

Final thoughts

This book really res­onated with me.  I did poorly in school and absolutely hated con­trol­ling teach­ers.  I fig­ured out the absolute min­i­mum it took for me to pass a class and that’s all I would do.  My high school GPA upon grad­u­a­tion was 2.7 out of 4.0.  I would just pass any course that was required, then ace my elec­tives. And I’m not talk­ing elec­tives like art, I went to a total nerd school.  I got a D in Eng­lish, in His­tory, in Cal­cu­lus, in Physics, then got As in classes like Robot­ics, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, and AP Government.

I went to col­lege at VCU, a lower ranked state school, because of this, and my under­grad­u­ate work was only slightly bet­ter (mainly because the course­work was a lot eas­ier).  It wasn’t until grad­u­ate school that I cared about study­ing.  Once I was fully in charge of pick­ing my course­work, I didn’t have any prob­lems with grades any­more.  My Mas­ters GPA at VCU was 3.8 and my GPA while I was a PhD stu­dent in sta­tis­tics at Duke Uni­ver­sity was a 4.0.

The chores my par­ents paid me to do while I was grow­ing up are the chores I absolutely hate doing now.  They’re the ones I’ll do dead last, the ones I’ll leave till they are past being an absolute neces­sity.  I have no prob­lem scrub­bing the bath­room and mop­ping the floors, but wash­ing the dishes?  Vac­u­um­ing?  NO WAY!

What the author said about using rewards really made sense to me.  Before read­ing this book, any­time Oliver did any­thing good, I’d praise him enthu­si­as­ti­cally, “Wow!  That’s so great!  What a good boy you are!”  Now, if I’m really amazed, I’ll praise him, but if he’s build­ing a tower for the hun­dredth time, I’ll just do as Kohn sug­gests and say, “You did it!”, let­ting him make his own judg­ment about what he did.

The author has also writ­ten a book Uncon­di­tional Par­ent­ing: Mov­ing from Rewards and Pun­ish­ments to Love and Rea­son, which focuses more on the par­ent­ing aspect.  I’ve been told it’s a good read, but is more the­ory than prac­ti­cal advice.  It’s on my wish­list now any­ways, so maybe later on this year you’ll get a review of that book.

What are your thoughts on using praise and rewards?

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Tagged as: advice, Alfie Kohn, Books, kids, Parenting, praise, Punished by Rewards, review, rewards