Library Resource Description

Title: Punished by Rewards
Media Type: Book
Category: Behavior
Author: Kohn, Alfie
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
Most Recent Copyright Date: 1993
Status: Available

Complete Description

Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized 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.

In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. The more we use artificial inducements to  motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. Programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. Even praise can become a verbal bribe that gets kids hooked on our approval.

Rewards and punishments are two sides of the same coin - and the coin doesn't buy much. What is needed, Kohn explains, is an alternative to both ways of controlling people. The final chapters offer a practical set of strategies for parents, teachers, and managers that move beyond the use of carrots or sticks. Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, "Punished by Rewards" presents an argument that is unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss.