Punished by Rewards

Almost everyone grew up hearing that, to get someone to do something, all you need is to offer a prize or threaten a punishment. Alfie Kohn spends the entire book challenging that formula. For him, reward and punishment look like opposites, but they are siblings: both are ways of controlling someone else's behavior.

The central thesis is unsettling. Prizes can buy obedience for a while, but they usually worsen the quality of what the person does and erase interest in the task itself. The book backs this up with decades of research done in laboratories, schools, and companies.

Think of the child who only cleans her room when she gets extra allowance. Did she learn to clean, or did she learn to charge? That is the doubt the author wants to plant in you right from the start, before any study. The rest of the book tries to show that the doubt is well founded.

Kohn shows that our faith in prizes is born from behaviorism, the school of psychology that dominated much of the twentieth century. Its most famous name is B. F. Skinner, who trained pigeons and rats to repeat actions by giving food right after the desired behavior, the so-called reinforcement.

The problem, the book says, is in the leap that follows. If it works with a pigeon in a box, many people concluded it works the same way with children, students, and employees. Except people interpret what happens to them, grow suspicious of intentions, and have their own reasons for acting.

The author points out that conditioning explains well how to train an animal to press a lever. It explains little about why someone devotes themselves to learning, creating, or caring for other people. For him, popular psychology inherited a training tool and treated it as a theory of human motivation.

One of the most cited studies in the book was done in the 1970s by Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett. Preschool children who loved to draw were divided into groups. One group was promised a good-player award certificate if they used the markers. Another knew nothing about it, and a third received the certificate as a surprise.

Weeks later, the children had markers available again during free play. Those who had been told about the prize drew far less than the others, and their drawings were rated as lower in quality. The pleasant surprise, with no prior deal, had no such effect.

The lesson is not that gifts are harmful. The problem is the logic of doing something in order to get something. Play turned into a job, and a job is something you do only up to the point where the pay is worth it. This study became the iconic image of the book's thesis, cited in classes and lectures to this day.