As one leading behavioral science textbook puts it, “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.” Take an industrial designer who loves his work and try to get him to do better by making his pay contingent on a hit product – and he’ll almost certainly work like a maniac in the short term, but become less interested in his job in the long term. Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each work-book page she completes – and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term. “When institutions – families, schools, businesses, and athletic teams, for example – focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behavior,” they do considerable long-term damage. “Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation,” they determined. proved so controversial – after all, they called into question a standard practice of most companies and schools – that in 1999 Deci and two colleagues reanalyzed nearly three decades of studies on the subject to confirm the findings. When you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. (Although I wish I could copy the whole chapter in here for you!) Here’s a quote from Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us †. If you aren’t careful, you can get in a situation where once the rewards disappear, the desired behavior does too.

I knew from books I’d read for my corporate job that extrinsic rewards are tricky. On the “positive parenting” end of the spectrum, I heard one solution over and over and over again: Sticker charts. One mom said she locked her kids in their rooms at night.Īfter reading that, I nearly hyperventilated with what if’s: What about needing to go to the bathroom? What if they got sick and threw up and no one was there to help? What if there were an emergency like a fire and I couldn’t get to her to unlock her door? I read books, scoured articles, pored over online forums. The world has no shortage of ideas for getting your kids to sleep through the night.

Childrens star charts free printable