E01 - The Reward Debate

Welcome to this podcast. My name is Eric Bailveld and I made this podcast series for my course Behavior and Environment 3, which I teach at Radbach University in our Psychology program. So welcome to our current students, but maybe you're someone else, maybe you're an alumnus who wishes to refresh your knowledge, or maybe you're just generally interested in the effects of rewards on behavior. For all of you, welcome and thanks for joining in. This is the first of four episodes. Today I will discuss different ways in which you can think of rewards. By that I mean that some people, psychologists, economists, managers, policy makers, educators, parents, view rewards as useful tools that can be used to streamline and fine tune other people's behavior for the better. Other people, and there are also psychologists, economists, managers, policy makers, educators, and parents, tend to be more skeptical. Debates about rewards can be difficult to resolve, as there are just so many strong opinions out there. And this is not so strange because rewards are just everywhere in life, and almost everyone has a long personal history with being rewarded by other people. But differently, everybody has their own story about rewards. In this podcast series I will use psychology to make sense of these stories. How do rewards shape people's behavior? This is the central question in this series. I will first give a few examples of the rewards that I'm talking about. Then to clarify further, I will define some of the central concepts such as rewards and incentives. I will then talk about why people, both inside and outside universities, are split on whether rewards are a good thing. So let me give a few examples of the different types of rewards. If you think back to your childhood, you can probably remember many instances of getting rewarded by other people. When I do this myself, I go back to the time I was like seven or eight, and I remember getting diplomas for every time I learned a new multiplication table. These diplomas would be like little pieces of paper that would have a little rhyme, such as "I feel like I'm in the candy store. Now I know the multiplication table for." And I think the teacher's intention was to stimulate me and my classmates to study these multiplication tables a little bit harder than we otherwise would have. And I think she succeeded. Grades are also a type of reward. If you are here especially to pass behavior and environment, well, that's the reward doing its job. Rewards are also there in parenting. I try not to do this too often with my own kids because it doesn't really feel right, and I also cannot recommend this for the long term. But sometimes, you really need your kids to cooperate fast, for example, if you need them to get dressed to get out of the house, for example. In those cases, the quickest ways to promise them ice cream or pancakes later, if they comply with your request, depending on whatever it is, you need to get done. Rewards also exist in public policy. If you return your bottles, your plastic bottles, you get your deposit money back. This is the way governments stimulate you to recycle your plastic. According to the Dutch government, it works okay but not good enough, which is why they are considering increasing the deposit or the stats you money as they call it. And of course, rewards are there in the world of work. Maybe you have a job or a side job where there are certain benefits to performing well. Or maybe you have a friend who works and seals, and your friend gets a bonus for every seal that they make. That's a reward too. Now, before I move on, let me give some definitions. The term reward is hard to define because it has been used in so many ways in science and in daily language. But to keep it somewhat simple, by a reward, I mean a desirable outcome that can be attained through behavior. All the examples I gave before fit this definition. The diploma I got as a kid for knowing the multiplication table, deposit money for bottles, and so forth. The term incentives is a bit narrower and it is often used in economics and management. Incentives are a subtype of reward. The special thing about incentives is that to call something an incentive, it has to be clear in advance what the behavioral criterion is. So when a car salesman gets a 5% bonus for every car they sell, and they notice in advance, the bonus is not only a reward, but it's also an incentive. I should note that psychologists also often use the term reinforcer. A reinforcer is something slightly different. It is an event or a stimulus that increases the probability of the behavior that just preceded it. So a reinforcer doesn't necessarily have to feel pleasant. It just needs to stimulate some behavior. I will talk about reinforcers in more detail in episode two. In this episode I focus on rewards, so all pleasant outcomes that can be attained through behavior. As all the examples I gave suggest, and this is also consistent with previous meta-analysis, rewards are just powerful tools to change people's behavior. So they can be very useful in many ways. They can be useful to stimulate people to recycle their bottles, expand more effort at school and at work and so forth. And I'm sure you can relate to this, so recall a time when you really wanted to attain something. Maybe there was an exam that was particularly important to you, or maybe something else was at stake that you valued, like maybe even a driver's license. At that time in your life most likely you worked very hard. The reward directed your behavior and intensified it. So far the story is pretty simple, so rewards are everywhere, and people, and organizations, and even governments use them. And that's not so strange because they are simply effective tools to change other people's behavior. But there's not a layer to the concept of rewards, which I will discuss now. To understand why people might oppose the use of rewards, we first need to discuss the role of humanism in society for a bit. Humanism is a perspective on life, and of course there are many other perspectives on life as well, such as Christianity and Islam. But humanism is kind of special because it's actually possible to be a humanist without even realizing it. Maybe people around you are humanists or maybe you are a humanist yourself. All of this is possible. Now, humanists have all kinds of beliefs, but there are two that I think are most central. The first one, and that kind of already follows from the name humanist, is that humanists believe that people have the amazing special stunning potential to achieve spectacular things, like doing science, like making art, and like creating advanced civilizations and so forth. The second belief is that to unlock this amazing potential of humans, you need to give these humans some space, and by that I mean you need to give them some freedom of choice. You need to allow them to freely choose their own path, not constrain them, and only then they will realize their potential. Now, humanist beliefs like these are very common. For example, if there are elections coming up, you will hear these beliefs in political campaigns from left to right. Most politicians have a lot of confidence in that people can achieve great things. They just differ in what they think is the best way to get there, but most of them think human civilization can be really amazing. And there are also humanist ideas in psychology. You probably heard about Meslow's pyramid, for example, which is super famous. So the idea is that if all people's needs are satisfied, people will reach this state called self-actualization. They will become their true self, and this may sound a bit fake, and that's because it is pretty fake. And this is in part why Meslow's pyramid is thought to be outdated. But these ideas do have a strong humanist successor in self-determination theory. This theory posits that people can flourish and grow when their basic psychological needs are met. So one of these needs in self-determination theory is called the need for autonomy. So also here psychologists assume that for people to grow and to bloom, you need to give them some space to make their own decisions. So these humanist beliefs are very common, and to be sure there's nothing wrong with them. Maybe your friends have these beliefs, and maybe you have them yourself. And I personally think you should be able to believe whatever feels right for you. So humanism is everywhere. So why am I telling you this? Well, the problem is that these humanist beliefs form a contrast with how rewards are being used in society. We use rewards to make other people behave in the way we want. So by using rewards, we take away a little bit of autonomy from these other people. And perhaps even worse, other people are using rewards to control my behavior. So they are taking away some of my autonomy. And that doesn't feel right if I believe I need autonomy to reach my potential and to bloom as a human being. So maybe this often It doesn't remain on the surface, but I think many people have some intuition that rewards are actually bad and that maybe they shouldn't be used. What is for sure is that when people say this out loud, they do get a big audience. Here is for example Alfie Kohn, who built a career by saying rewards are bad. And in this case, he talks about grades. We don't have to have grades. One, they make students less interested in whatever they're learning for a grade. Two, they become less likely to pick something more difficult. After all, if the point is to get an A, you're going to choose the shortest book or the easiest project because that makes it more likely you'll get the A. And three, when students are graded, they tend to do things in a more shallow or superficial fashion. They're less likely to really push and reflect and more likely to say, "Do we have to know this? Is this going to be on the test?" That's why the best schools do not grade students and the best teachers do everything in their power to help students forget the grades exist and sometimes let students pick their own grades. So we live in a society now where people don't get it. They ignore this research and they use grades to compel students to do stuff that they understandably have little interest in doing. If I'm a teacher and I don't have the skill to authentically engage students in science or history or literature, then I have to fall back on bribes and threats to make them do it. And here is another clip by Dan Pink, who wrote a New York Times bestseller essentially claiming that rewards are bad. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. Now this is strange, right? A larger reward led to poorer performance, how can that possibly be? Now what's interesting about this is that these folks here who did this are all economists at two at MIT, one at the University of Chicago, one at Carnegie Mellon, the top tier of the economics profession, and they're reaching this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics, which is that the higher the reward, the better their performance, and they're saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill, it's the other way around. Now to be sure, cone and pink, the people you just heard, are not scientists. They are basically influencers, but for adults. So we should take their ideas with a big grain of salt. For example, they only present studies that fit their story, also when these studies are reek. And they ignore studies that don't fit their story, even if these clearly exist. So this is not good science, it's not even science, it's incomplete, it's biased, it's overclaimed, but they do sound like experts, and they do have a large audience, so their message does land well. So you will often find people being overly critical, or even totally annoyed by the use of rewards. We're coming to the end of this first episode. I try to illustrate why there is so much debate about rewards and their usefulness. And that's because it's nuanced. On the one hand, there's just so much evidence that rewards are powerful tools to shape people's behavior. And of course, this can be done for the better. For example, I think there's nothing wrong with working hard on schoolwork, and there's also nothing wrong with recycling plastic bottles. So here I think it can be okay to use rewards to energize and direct people's behavior. On the other hand, perhaps because humanist beliefs are so widespread, many people do not appreciate being controlled. And you can argue that rewards do just that. And this is why you may often find people arguing against the use of rewards. Thanks for listening. In the next episode, I will explore BF Skinners' work on operand conditioning. And I will discuss how this great work is still relevant today.