| blob | 50194925f1310bdeb3716eed515ffa18da45a513 |
1 STUDIES FIND REWARD OFTEN NO MOTIVATOR
3 Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain
5 By Alfie Kohn
6 Special to the Boston Globe
7 [reprinted with permission of the author
8 from the Monday 19 January 1987 Boston Globe]
10 Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium
11 provided this notice is preserved.
13 In the laboratory, rats get Rice Krispies. In the classroom the top
14 students get A's, and in the factory or office the best workers get
15 raises. It's an article of faith for most of us that rewards promote
16 better performance.
18 But a growing body of research suggests that this law is not nearly as
19 ironclad as was once thought. Psychologists have been finding that
20 rewards can lower performance levels, especially when the performance
21 involves creativity.
23 A related series of studies shows that intrinsic interest in a task -
24 the sense that something is worth doing for its own sake - typically
25 declines when someone is rewarded for doing it.
27 If a reward - money, awards, praise, or winning a contest - comes to
28 be seen as the reason one is engaging in an activity, that activity
29 will be viewed as less enjoyable in its own right.
31 With the exception of some behaviorists who doubt the very existence
32 of intrinsic motivation, these conclusions are now widely accepted
33 among psychologists. Taken together, they suggest we may unwittingly
34 be squelching interest and discouraging innovation among workers,
35 students and artists.
37 The recognition that rewards can have counter-productive effects is
38 based on a variety of studies, which have come up with such findings
39 as these: Young children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely
40 to draw on their own that are children who draw just for the fun of
41 it. Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games
42 less and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards.
43 Employees who are praised for meeting a manager's expectations suffer
44 a drop in motivation.
46 Much of the research on creativity and motivation has been performed
47 by Theresa Amabile, associate professor of psychology at Brandeis
48 University. In a paper published early last year on her most recent
49 study, she reported on experiments involving elementary school and
50 college students. Both groups were asked to make "silly" collages.
51 The young children were also asked to invent stories.
53 The least-creative projects, as rated by several teachers, were done
54 by those students who had contracted for rewards. "It may be that
55 commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is
56 done out of pure interest," Amabile said.
58 In 1985, Amabile asked 72 creative writers at Brandeis and at Boston
59 University to write poetry. Some students then were given a list of
60 extrinsic (external) reasons for writing, such as impressing teachers,
61 making money and getting into graduate school, and were asked to think
62 about their own writing with respect to these reasons. Others were
63 given a list of intrinsic reasons: the enjoyment of playing with
64 words, satisfaction from self-expression, and so forth. A third group
65 was not given any list. All were then asked to do more writing.
67 The results were clear. Students given the extrinsic reasons not only
68 wrote less creatively than the others, as judged by 12 independent
69 poets, but the quality of their work dropped significantly. Rewards,
70 Amabile says, have this destructive effect primarily with creative
71 tasks, including higher-level problem-solving. "The more complex the
72 activity, the more it's hurt by extrinsic reward," she said.
74 But other research shows that artists are by no means the only ones
75 affected.
77 In one study, girls in the fifth and sixth grades tutored younger
78 children much less effectively if they were promised free movie
79 tickets for teaching well. The study, by James Gabarino, now
80 president of Chicago's Erikson Institute for Advanced Studies in Child
81 Development, showed that tutors working for the reward took longer to
82 communicate ideas, got frustrated more easily, and did a poorer job in
83 the end than those who were not rewarded.
85 Such findings call into question the widespread belief that money is
86 an effective and even necessary way to motivate people. They also
87 challenge the behaviorist assumption that any activity is more likely
88 to occur if it is rewarded. Amabile says her research "definitely
89 refutes the notion that creativity can be operantly conditioned."
91 But Kenneth McGraw, associate professor of psychology at the
92 University of Mississippi, cautions that this does not mean
93 behaviorism itself has been invalidated. "The basic principles of
94 reinforcement and rewards certainly work, but in a restricted context"
95 - restricted, that is, to tasks that are not especially interesting.
97 Researchers offer several explanations for their surprising findings
98 about rewards and performance.
100 First, rewards encourage people to focus narrowly on a task, to do it
101 as quickly as possible and to take few risks. "If they feel that
102 'this is something I have to get through to get the prize,' they're
103 going to be less creative," Amabile said.
105 Second, people come to see themselves as being controlled by the
106 reward. They feel less autonomous, and this may interfere with
107 performance. "To the extent one's experience of being
108 self-determined is limited," said Richard Ryan, associate psychology
109 professor at the University of Rochester, "one's creativity will be
110 reduced as well."
112 Finally, extrinsic rewards can erode intrinsic interest. People who
113 see themselves as working for money, approval or competitive success
114 find their tasks less pleasurable, and therefore do not do them as
115 well.
117 The last explanation reflects 15 years of work by Ryan's mentor at the
118 University of Rochester, Edward Deci. In 1971, Deci showed that
119 "money may work to buy off one's intrinsic motivation for an activity"
120 on a long-term basis. Ten years later, Deci and his colleagues
121 demonstrated that trying to best others has the same effect. Students
122 who competed to solve a puzzle quickly were less likely than those who
123 were not competing to keep working at it once the experiment was over.
125 Control plays role
127 There is general agreement, however, that not all rewards have the
128 same effect. Offering a flat fee for participating in an experiment -
129 similar to an hourly wage in the workplace - usually does not reduce
130 intrinsic motivation. It is only when the rewards are based on
131 performing a given task or doing a good job at it - analogous to
132 piece-rate payment and bonuses, respectively - that the problem
133 develops.
135 The key, then, lies in how a reward is experienced. If we come to
136 view ourselves as working to get something, we will no longer find
137 that activity worth doing in its own right.
139 There is an old joke that nicely illustrates the principle. An
140 elderly man, harassed by the taunts of neighborhood children, finally
141 devises a scheme. He offered to pay each child a dollar if they would
142 all return Tuesday and yell their insults again. They did so eagerly
143 and received the money, but he told them he could only pay 25 cents on
144 Wednesday. When they returned, insulted him again and collected their
145 quarters, he informed them that Thursday's rate would be just a penny.
146 "Forget it," they said - and never taunted him again.
148 Means to and end
150 In a 1982 study, Stanford psychologist Mark L. Lepper showed that any
151 task, no matter how enjoyable it once seemed, would be devalued if it
152 were presented as a means rather than an end. He told a group of
153 preschoolers they could not engage in one activity they liked until
154 they first took part in another. Although they had enjoyed both
155 activities equally, the children came to dislike the task that was a
156 prerequisite for the other.
158 It should not be surprising that when verbal feedback is experienced
159 as controlling, the effect on motivation can be similar to that of
160 payment. In a study of corporate employees, Ryan found that those who
161 were told, "Good, you're doing as you /should/" were "significantly
162 less intrinsically motivated than those who received feedback
163 informationally."
165 There's a difference, Ryan says, between saying, "I'm giving you this
166 reward because I recognize the value of your work" and "You're getting
167 this reward because you've lived up to my standards."
169 A different but related set of problems exists in the case of
170 creativity. Artists must make a living, of course, but Amabile
171 emphasizes that "the negative impact on creativity of working for
172 rewards can be minimized" by playing down the significance of these
173 rewards and trying not to use them in a controlling way. Creative
174 work, the research suggests, cannot be forced, but only allowed to
175 happen.
177 /Alfie Kohn, a Cambridge, MA writer, is the author of "No Contest: The
178 Case Against Competition," recently published by Houghton Mifflin Co.,
179 Boston, MA. ISBN 0-395-39387-6. /