One recent afternoon, my son came home from middle school and unpacked three certificates of academic achievement printed out on cheerful purple and orange cardstock. He seemed mildly pleased with his awards, but something was bothering him: Every student in his class had received an award, except for one, a boy whose troubled behavior I had already heard much about. While all 27 students bounded outside for a celebratory group pic, this boy stayed alone inside the classroom to contemplate his disgrace.
I tried to imagine how this child must have felt-- the humiliation, the ostracization, the shame. Would he, I wondered, now be motivated to get his act together academically so as to be sure to win an award next time around? I doubt it.
Praise and rewards are ubiquitous in most schools. Teachers use them to motivate students and to steer them toward pro-social behavior. While punishments are threatened to deter misconduct, praise and rewards are applied with the aim of reinforcing “good” behavior. If that kind of behavioral conditioning sounds manipulative, it is. Many adults train children much in the way we train dogs, with treats for good doggies and stern disapproval and deprivation for naughty ones.
Behavioral conditioning dates back to the 1930s, when psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that rats rewarded with food pellets and deterred by electric shocks would learn to push the right lever. Similarly, teachers and parents dangle rewards to motivate children to obey and perform, but this approach requires a continuous ratcheting up of the rewards and punishments.
In kindergarten, stickers and time-outs usually do the trick (though not to great effect, according to teachers I've talked to, for students who have suffered trauma). By middle-school, it’s detention and expulsion. Ultimately, it takes high salaries and the threat of prison to keep behaviorally conditioned adults in line.
When people are praised and rewarded for their behavior and performance, they become conditioned to feel satisfied and worthy only when their efforts are externally validated. Their motivation is extrinsic in orientation, not intrinsic. And this extrinsic orientation keeps them on a motivational treadmill that comes to a halt as soon as the external control is withdrawn.
A slew of research in recent years has unearthed the dark side of 20th century “behaviorist” theory that favored the use of “positive reinforcement” to shape and control youth behavior. The research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck shows that children who are praised develop a “fixed mindset”, meaning they understand intelligence as a fixed trait, not as something that can be cultivated.
Children with a fixed mindset tend to avoid more challenging tasks for fear that they will underperform and be denied praise. Meanwhile, struggling students, like the boy in my son’s class, come to believe that their intelligence set point is immutably low.
Even for successful students, behavioral conditioning has an unintended side effect that is subtle but sinister: Praise denies youngsters the wonderful feeling that arises when we learn or master something. In that sublime “aha” moment, a light bulb clicks on, and we bask in its inner glow for a few golden moments. But slap a “good job” sticker over it, and the light is extinguished. Conditioned as such, we become praise junkies, focused on how authority figures evaluate our performance instead of on our own level of enjoyment in doing the task and our own evaluation of our abilities.
A related problem arises when we praise good citizenship. Rather than experiencing the profound satisfaction that comes when we act altruistically, we receive instead the shallow substitute of being informed that we are “good.” Schools routinely “catch students being good”, though research shows that children who are rewarded for pro-social behavior behave less altruistically than those who are left to their own devices without the contrivance of a carrot.
What kind of society develops when its constituents only help each other in the hopes of being rewarded? Look around: We reap what we sow in our schools.