Why We Should Avoid Rewards Even for Boring Tasks

By Alfie Kohn

I do not mean to imply that everything we have to do can be made enthralling, or that people who work at menial jobs have only themselves to blame when they become bored. Some tasks are less interesting than others. Rather, the point is that whatever opportunities do exist for reconfiguring a dull task are put at risk when rewards are used. Extrinsic motivators have the capacity to reduce interest not only in the task itself but in the strategies we might use to brighten the task.

Incidentally, it is important to distinguish between tasks that are inherently uninteresting from those that certain individuals happen not to be interested in. Even if people who are bored by a task seem to respond to a reward, it seems unwise to use artificial inducements to try to interest someone in an activity that other people already enjoy on its merits.⁵ It would be far more productive to ask why he or she is bored. (Perhaps the task is simply too easy or too hard for her, in which case adjusting the level of challenge would seem to make more sense than offering a bribe.) It also undermines the possibility that she will find herself intrinsically motivated at some later point.

Look at it another way: someone who is obliged to work on something uninteresting may, in fact, experience precious little sense of self-determination. The last thing this person needs is to be controlled further, which is what rewards do.

If, therefore, we assume it is acceptable to offer rewards when intrinsic motivation is low, we will end up giving them to some people who are already motivated, or for some activities that are already motivating. Decreased interest is the likely result. Getting people to finish boring tasks more quickly (by promising a reward) simply is not worth it if in the process we turn potentially interesting tasks into boring ones.

3. The practice of rewarding people conveniently spares us from asking hard questions about why we are asking people to do things that are devoid of interest in the first place. Let me immediately concede that there may be tedious jobs that must be done in order for a society, or even a household, to function. Likewise, there may be things we decide children ought to learn that hold little appeal for them at the time. But to acknowledge such necessity in the abstract is very different from assuming that every deadening job to which people are consigned every working day of their lives has to be done (or has to be organized as it is at present), or that every fill-in-the-blank waste-of-the-time assignment must be given to students just because that was what we had to do when we were in school.

4. Even when we have decided that a particular uninteresting task simply must be completed, artificial inducements are not our only option. There are other ways, less manipulative and more respectful, to encourage people to do things that they are unlikely to find intrinsically motivating. The rule of thumb for getting people to internalize a commitment to working at such tasks is to minimize the use of controlling strategies. Edward Deci and his colleagues have proposed a three-pronged approach: First, imagine the way things look to the person doing the work and acknowledge candidly that it may not seem especially interesting. Second, offer a meaningful rationale for doing it anyway, pointing, perhaps, to the long-term benefits it offers or the way it contributes to some larger goal. Third, give the individual as much control as possible over how the work gets done.⁸

NOTES

[For full citations, please see the Reference section of Punished by Rewards.]

2. Danner and Lonky, 1981, Experiment 2. The quotation appears on p. 1049.

6. Condry and Chambers, 1978, p. 64.

8. Deci et al., 1994.

To be notified whenever a new article or blog is posted on this site, please enter your e-mail address at www.alfiekohn.org/sign-up