Kids become less intrinsically motivated to do something when they expect a reward — grades, gold stars, special privileges — for doing them. In fact, when you take away the reward they’ll stop doing things they were previously interested in doing on their own. It’s called the overjustification effect (Lepper et al., 1973; summary here).
There’s been a lot of research demonstrating the effect. An overview of the research in 1995 (Tang and Hall, 1995) found that the effect extends across all age groups.
The primary theory that explains the effect is called Cognitive Evaluation Theory, and is very well summarized here. This theory suggests, however, that extrinsic motivation may not be bad in all situations, because praise and rewards can also server as a useful indicator to a student of their competence.
When students are able to recognize mistakes and analyze them, they will learn faster and deeper. Jonah Lehrer summarizes a new study that shows that people learn faster when they spend the effort to learn from their mistakes.
When people notice that they’ve made an error, they have an instinctive negative reaction. Then we have the choice to either ignore the error or spend some time considering it – and learning from it. Guess who learn faster?
This research is based on Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, which shows that it’s better to praise effort rather than intelligence. A willingness to work hard (grit) is a much better attitude for learners. It turns failures into learning experiences, while focusing on intelligence actually discourages people from trying things at which they might fail.
… people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
Teasing can be a way to diffuse embarrassing situations, but its effect depends very much on the context and the culture. The outstanding question is how we differentiate positive teasing among friends from verbal attempts to bully. Part of the answer to this question lies in the effect: does the teasing contribute to group cohesion, or does it isolate and exclude?
… tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation.
— Desi et al., 1999.
Edward Deci (and others) published a paper (pdf) in 1999 that analyzed a whole bunch of earlier studies on how extrinsic rewards affect motivation. Their conclusion is that rewards are generally bad because rewards prevent people from learning how to motivate themselves.
… the primary negative effect of rewards is that they tend to forestall self-regulation. In other words, [expectation of rewards] undermine people’s taking responsibility for motivating or regulating themselves
— Desi et al., 1999.
So while they may work in the short term, rewards do long-term damage.
When institutions—families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example—focus on the short term and opt for controlling people’s behavior, they may be having a substantially negative long-term effect.
— Desi et al., 1999.
They also find that rewards can push you into a negative feedback loop, because to properly administer a reward you usually need increased monitoring and you produce more competition. Both of these undermine intrinsic motivation so you’re left with using more extrinsic rewards. (think also of high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind).
So what to do? Desi et al. report that:
intrinsic motivation … requires environmental supports. …the necessary supports are opportunities to satisfy the innate needs for competence and self-determination.
(Note: I found out about this article while reading Daniel Pink’s, Drive).
Carol Dweck’s book on the importance of your mindset. Fixed mindset – not good; Growth mindset – effort creates ability –> reward effort, perseverance, and character. When you praise you praise growth qualities like effort, and not fixed qualities like intelligence. It sounds like it ties in with all of the research on praise and rewards. It’s a book I should read.
[S]elf-esteem is but a division of self-importance, which is seldom an attractive quality. That person is best who never thinks of his own importance: to think about it, even, is to be lost to morality. Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else’s place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance. – Dalrymple, 2010.
Self-respect is earned, while self-esteem is not. That at least is the argument of Theodore Dalrymple, who defines this interesting distinction between self-esteem and self-respect based on his observations as a prison psychiatrist. What people want is a “just appreciation of one’s own importance and of one’s own worth.” To assume that one is entitled to respect because of one’s intrinsic strengths is destructive because it says that you don’t have to do anything to get respect. But respect is earned. Both importance and worth are values that are ascribed by others, by society, and to earn them requires effort and achievement. Self-respect is the appraisal of oneself based on one’s contribution to society.
It’s an interesting argument in semantics at the very least, but the fundamental argument at least aligns with the proper way to use praise and rewards. By praising the effort you acknowledge the importance of work in achieving goals, building self-respect, rather that praising intrinsic abilities (“you’re so smart”) that engender a sense that the student is entitled to do well.
One has only to go into a prison … to see the most revoltingly high self-esteem among a group of people … who had brought nothing but misery to those around them, largely because they conceived of themselves as so important that they could do no wrong. For them, their whim was law, which was precisely as it should be considering who they were in their own estimate. – Dalrymple, 2010.
Theodore Dalrymple is a conservative in the dictionary sense of the word. He argues the importance of tradition and personal responsibility. He also strongly believes that healthy culture must satisfy the need of people to belong to something larger than themselves. So much so, that despite being an atheist, he argues that religions, some types of religions at least, have an important role in society.
Looking through the Greater Good Science Center‘s blog post on how to raise kind children, I was struck, as I usually am, by the somewhat counter-intuitive finding that we should not reward good behavior (helping in this instance).
Very young children who receive material rewards for helping others become less likely to help in the future compared with toddlers who only receive verbal praise or receive no reward at all. This research suggests that even the youngest children are intrinsically motivated to be kind, and that extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency. – Carter (2010)
While I have not yet looked to see if there is any direct research on this topic with regards to adolescence, this is part of the Montessori philosophy. Lillard (2007; Ch. 5) has an entire chapter on Extrinsic Rewards and Motivation that gets to the same point. She cites the research that gets to the specific point that extrinsic rewards, rewards that come from the outside such as praise, tend to demotivate once the rewards are removed.
Engaging in a well-liked activity with the expectations of a reward led to reduced creativity during that activity and to decreased voluntary participation in that activity later. (Lepper et. al., 1973) in Lillard (2007; Ch. 5)
Rewards have negative effects when they are clearly stated, expected, and tangible; read this book and you’ll get $5; or do this work and you will get better grades. However, rewards can work if you’re dealing with subjects that students find uninteresting and there is a very clearly specified set of steps that they can learn by rote.
“[R]ewards are often effective at the moment of their offering, so if there are no long-term goals, rewards help without causing harm down the road.” Lillard (2007; p. 157)
Rewards can help with basic learning, like memorizing facts, but intrinsic motivation is essential for tasks that require higher-level more creative thinking.
I try to praise or give tangible rewards very rarely, though it is often hard. Students look for praise sometimes (and sometimes for the oddest things), so when I do complement I try to use what Carter calls growth-mindset praise and say something like, “See, practice really pays off.” Praise the effort, not some intrinsic value the students have.
