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    Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
    Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
    Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
    Audiobook13 hours

    Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes

    Written by Alfie Kohn

    Narrated by Alfie Kohn

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summed up in six words: Do this, and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in the same way that we train the family pet.

    Unfortunately, attempts to manipulate people with incentives ultimately fail and even do lasting harm. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other rewards. What's more, they tend to lose interest in whatever they have been manipulated with rewards to do.

    Over the years, this groundbreaking book has persuaded countless parents, teachers, and managers that rewards and punishments are actually two sides of the same coin, and it's a coin that doesn't buy very much. Kohn explains what it means to work with people instead of doing things to them-at home, at school, and at work. Seasoned with humor-and containing new studies and stories in an Afterword written for the book's revised edition-Punished by Rewards presents an argument unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 20, 2017
    ISBN9781541476394
    Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes
    Author

    Alfie Kohn

    ALFIE KOHN's published works include Punished by Rewards, No Contest: The Case Against Competition, Beyond Discipline, and What to Look for in a Classroom. Described by Time as "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of educational fixation on grades and test scores," he has traveled across the country delivering lectures to teachers, parents, and researchers.  

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    Reviews for Punished by Rewards

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    • 3/5
      Insightful and provocative. Makes thoughtful and evidence-based argument against punishment and rewards but weak job in providing paradigm for different approaches.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      As a Behavior Analyst, using a non-aversive approach to ABA / PBS is best, which is in line with Alfie Kohn’s philosophy. Everything is driven by positive and negative reinforcement, but not everything is driven by engineered rewards. Without fade out strategies, engineered rewards don’t serve the recipient’s best interest because no alternative skills are developed.
      As a behavior analyst, I love ABA except for the punishment—not torture or abuse—procedures such as response cost or time-out. One of the biggest flaws in the scientific research method for ABA / Skinner’s experimental psychology is precisely this: feedback from the recipient (or parent) about the intervention applied to them is not considered to be relevant data, and is therefore excluded in the conclusions made about the efficacy (and appropriateness, as per BACB ethical guidelines) of that intervention.
      And of course the complete rejection of mental phenomena such as cognitions and emotions (since they’re unobservable) which completely goes against universal intuition, cognitive science, clinical psychology, philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology), quantum physics, sociology, anthropology, law, medicine, etc.

      I like Skinner’s subscription to environmental determinism, that is, not being able to opt out of the Law of Behavior (rules, pairing, reinforcement, punishment) imposing itself on us. But to say that we are determined only by the external environment and never the internal environment is, not only bonkers, but clinically unrealistic, impersonal, detached, and unrelatable. E.g., my writing this current sentence is determined only by—positively reinforcing—outside factors and never by cognition or emotion.
    • 1/5
      The writer starts off by criticizing BF Skinners obvious Buddhism. Of this the writer is completely ignorant in recognizing. There is a tone of critiquing him personably which highlights the writers immaturity. The writer goes on to make personal comments about behaviorism without supporting those opinions with sound scientific evidence. Remember this writer also did not understand nor try to comprehend the science of Psychology. I have laughed out loud several times to the writers petty and immature comments that are fallacious in tone and nature.
    • 5/5
      I read this book over 15 years ago and its lessons remain relevant. I wish more people would take it into account when teaching teachers.
    • 5/5
      Punishments and rewards are so ubiquitous they disappear from critical inquiry:* Grades in academia* Awards, such as the Nobel Prize* Performance-based compensation* Grants based on deliverables* Fines and jail time in the criminal justice system* Repercussions in parentingIn his 1993 book, Punished by Rewards, social scientist Alfie Kohn exhaustively reviews hundreds of scientific studies on behaviorism. Counter to the collective faith in "pop behaviorism," he concludes thatPunishments and rewards definitively decrease performance.To elaborate a bit on some of the instances in which Kohn investigates this topic:* Letting people set their own rewards doesn't change their maleffect* Children raised with rewards have lower self-esteem and have less intrinsic motivation* Praise is no better* Performance-based rewards result in worse performance than volume-based rewards* The only instance where rewards don't have a negative effect on performance is when they are eternal and for menial task devoid of creativity or fulfillment (in such instances, we may be better off discontinuing such working conditions to begin with)To postulate a theory on the effect of rewards:In the long run, rewards actually deter the behaviors they seek to incentivize.Rewards compromise personal agency and contribute to feelings of being manipulated.So why do they dominate our societal infrastructure? Why do families and organizations continue to turn a blind eye to the devastating evidence that punishments and rewards are worse than doing nothing?Radical behaviorism has returned to infamy, heralded by Shoshana Zuboff's recent book on surveillance capitalism.You may have been hearing lately about B. F. Skinner, the founder of this school of thought. Skinner believed in a machine-mentality of humans. Given our plastic psychologies, humans can respond to rewards and be turned into machines, but this is not an ethical course of action.As Zuboff elucidates, Silicon Valley has become the poster child of pop behaviorism. Many founders have become disenchanted with the human-as-machine analogy.If rewards don't enhance performance, how are they useful?Rewards establish and reinforce hierarchies of power and control.They elevate the rewarder and demote the rewarded.A consideration for why this would be desirable is beyond the scope of this post.From its inception, the cryptocurrency space has been pervaded by a behaviorist tone.Section six in Nakamoto's whitepaper is entitled "Incentive," (which has a distinctly different implications than a word such as compensation).The term "reward" appears a dozen times in the Ethereum whitepaper.As I have explored before, the mainstream cryptocurrency community has a strong right-wing streak.So it might come as no surprise to many that token designers might aspire to engineer motivation in the participants of their economies.Given that the cryptocurrency space is still in its infancy and very much in an experimental phase not yet backed by definitive theory, what is at risk if we do not critically investigate our behaviorist bent?Cryptocurrency's dependency on a reward-mentality risks perpetuating a machine paradigm that extinguishes the possibility for creative solutions and emergent outcomes.Given the many existential threats currently faced by humanity, these are risk that we cannot afford. Conversely, what opportunity is there for the creation of new economies grounded in intrinsic motivation?At my startup, Regen Network, we come from a living-systems paradigm that seeks to develop the will and ableness of stakeholders in our network towards an aim of planetary regeneration. Given that we operate in the spheres of both regenerative agriculture and cryptocurrency, how can we leverage their strengths while reconciling their sometimes-divergent ideologies?* How do we create an economy where network participants are motivated by intrinsic will as opposed to extrinsic reward?* In a global economy pervaded by scarcity and insufficiency, how do we shift the economics of agriculture to compensate regenerative behavior, capitalizing regenerative agriculture and funding the right livelihood of land stewards?* How do we create a technology platform that enlivens human relationship with land (as opposed to further removing humans from a felt-sense of living systems)?These are some of the questions we're currently grappling with. We hope that others will join us in discernment and architecting of a regenerative world.
    • 4/5
      You would have to be a dyed-in-the-wool behaviorist or at least some kind of sociological conservative not to be persuaded by Alfie Kohn's compelling, if unnecessarily overlong, case against using rewards of any kind as a motivator. What amazes me is how easy it is to fall into the reward trap when interacting with others. And the scenarios seem universal whether you're in a classroom, at home or at work. Rewards and punishments are like a jackhammer to a problem—it will probably get the job done quickly, but in the clumsiest, messiest way possible.My recommendation for this book is to read the first 100 pages (all of Part 1, "The Case Against Rewards") and then skim the rest.