The Reward Myth

The idea that it's good to reward people for certain behavior is deeply embedded into our modern societies. In all segments of our lifes we're confronted with an intricate system of incentives and punishments, dangling carrots and guns to our heads, to extract from us certain preferable behaviors. Here's why this is wrong, devastating even...

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One of my readers recently wrote in a response this: "People with business ideas will not take the financial risks and substantial effort required to put them into practice without the promise of rewards." This idea is accepted by the overwhelming majority of any modern society, which shows how deeply rooted this reward myth is. And don't get me wrong here: it IS a myth. How do I know this? That's simple; we have a half century worth of scientific experimentation and research into this subject, and all these experiments and research show the opposite to be true: rewards and the prospect of rewards result in worse performance and less creativity. I could have titled this post "The Nightmare Of Behaviorism" or something to that effect, because that's exactly what our modern societies suffer from.

If we talk about freedom, doing things, anything, for a reward should let alarm bells ring in your head. This is the foundation of behaviorism, and behaviorism is all about control, the opposite of freedom. We live in a society that offers us a plethora of targets, incentives and punishments, we're surrounded by carrots and sticks, to force us into behavior and beliefs that safeguard the current status quo. This may be capitalism's single greatest achievement; it has produced societies full of people who are just smart enough to operate the machines and maintain the spreadsheets, but lack the creativity and critical thinking skills to recognize how thoroughly they're being screwed. Okay, that last sentence was paraphrasing George Carlin... But he was right, and a lot funnier than I am. I've written about the fallacy of incentives in Myths Of Our Economy: Bigger Rewards Produce Better Results last year, and about behaviorism, Pavlovian conditioning and B.F. Skinner's "enhancements" thereof in my post We're Being Gamed! Literally., some three years ago: go read them if this subject interests you.

Our conditioning starts at a young age with parenting and the grading system at schools; right from the start we're taught that certain behaviors will result in a reward of some sort, and that punishment awaits those who deviate from that preferred behavior. Like I said earlier: this system kills creativity and our willingness to take risks. We model our behavior as to safeguard the reward, we "play it safe". Going back to the entrepreneurs; they generally behave in the exact same way. There are of course exception to the rule, but they play it safe too, just like the rest of us, and won't risk anything before making sure the reward of profits will be realized somewhere in the near future. We see this everywhere in society, you'd have to be blind not to see it. Big Pharma doesn't invest in new medicines, but rather produce slightly modified version of long existing medicines. Hollywood rather produces remakes and sequels than risk profits on a novel idea by an experimental new film maker. Capitalism kills creativity, it hinders progress.

"If you reward people for doing a thing, they will keep doing that thing, and they will do that thing to the best of their ability. Right? Well, decades of research suggests otherwise. Study after study after study shows that if you reward someone for performing a task, regardless of the kind of task, the kind of reward and the age or gender of the person, they do worse." This is a quote from the video, which is followed by a slew of examples of these studies. Now, I know that this will be somewhat difficult to accept for some, as we've ll been raised in the belief that rewards and incentives are the key to motivation. But it's still wrong, something doesn't suddenly becomes true because the majority of people believe it to be true; the science disagrees. And even without the science, if you just stop and think about it a few minutes, this should become obvious: rewards narrow the focus on getting the rewards, rewards are an external influence on your behavior and therefore limit your freedom and creativity. We're told that failing is an important component in learning to become better and more creative, yet we've built a society that teaches us to fear failing and therefore to avoid risk. Please watch this video; I suspect it'll be an eye-opener for many of you... I'll leave you with another quote from the English professor, one that may begin to explain how we're being trapped in jobs we hate:

"If someone has to give you something extra to do a task, that must mean the task itself has no inherent value, right? I mean, imagine someone gave you a sandwich and then told you they'll pay you 5 dollars to eat it. You'd be pretty skeptical, right? You'd think there was something wrong with that sandwich, that there's some reason you wouldn't choose to eat it unless you were paid for it..."

So please watch the video until the end; Zoe Bee does a great job at explaining why this system of behaviorism is so destructive, how it breeds laziness and disinterest and how it kills creativity and risk taking. Towards the end it transforms into a passionate plea for worker coops, increased collaboration, freedom and democracy; this video truly is a gem, make sure you don't miss a second of it!

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