Page 206 - The Power to Change Anything

Design Rewards and Demand Accountability 195

spouse have. You notice that she’s starting to pick up the habit
on her own, so you decide to reinforce it. To encourage her,
you create an incentive program. Every time she picks out a
book on her own and reads it, you give her five dollars. She
loves the plan, starts reading more, and after a while spends her
earnings on a new video game for her latest game system. In
fact, it’s not long until she’s able to buy several games, for which
she thanks you profusely.
After a while you think that you’ve rewarded reading enough
and that the pure pleasure of soaking in the words of some of
the world’s best authors has become its own reward. So you pull
away the incentive. Surely your encouragement has helped your
daughter learn to love reading good books even more. Most cer-
tainly she’ll now snuggle up with her favorite author’s latest work
without any encouragement from you.
But your plan backfires. The minute you stop paying your
daughter for reading, she turns to her video game system and
reads less than she did before you started the incentive program.
Apparently she has learned to earn money to purchase video
games, and the incentive you tried didn’t leave the impression
you wanted. She’s just like those nursery school kids. Where
did you and Dr. Lepper go wrong?
The explanation for this phenomenon, known as “the over-
justification hypothesis,” suggests that if people receive rewards
for doing something they initially enjoy, they conclude the
same thing an outsider watching them in action might con-
clude. When thinking about what’s happening, humans recog-
nize that they’re doing something and getting paid a special
bonus for doing it. They conclude that since they’re being
rewarded for the task, it must not be all that satisfying (why else
would someone offer a reward?), and therefore they’re doing it
for the bonus. And now for the dangerous part. Once the
reward is removed, the person believes that the activity isn’t as
much fun as he or she judged earlier, so he or she does it less
often.