Scott Teresi - Recommended Books to Read

Alfie Kohn cites a large body of research which refutes "pop behaviorism" and shows how rewards like candy, money, gratuitious praise, competitive activities, etc. are often manipulative and don't work well in motivating people to get things done, such as in school, in a job setting, in social interactions, or when raising kids. Kohn's, patient, rational tone makes the somewhat revolutionary idea easy to handle.
      If you want to change someone's behavior (you believe in one thing, and the other person doesn't), the best way to approach it is through an elaborate, empathetic process of bringing the other person around to your point of view, so they begin to believe in the same causes as you. Hopefully the cause becomes important enough so that they would actually be motivated of their own desires (whatever they may be) to carry things out for the cause. For instance, good teachers are able to make a subject so interesting that you begin to believe that you really want to learn it.
     External incentives, like rewards and punishments, undermine what psychologists call your "intrinsic motivation"—your natural interest in the problem. This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology—over 70 studies have found that rewards undermine interest in the task. (From this article by Alfie Kohn, via Aaron Swartz).
      The cost of rewards has to do with their effect on interest in the work itself. Incentives can help in the short term, and for getting people to do something faster, but they have a negative effect on the quality of the work and future motivation for doing it. "Subjects offered an incentive for doing a task (or, in some of the studies, for doing it well) actually did lower quality work than subjects offered no reward at all." While money matters up to a point, "when people are asked what is most important to them about work, money ranks well behind such factors as interesting work or good people to work with." "Extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation." [71]
      The first question people often ask is "if rewards are bad, what's the alternative?" In Part Three, Kohn digs into what the research really means for the workplace, classroom, and raising kids. "If what you want is to get a child, a student, or a worker to do what you say, then the answer... is that there probably is no alternative.... To induce short-term compliance, behavioral manipulation is the best we've got. If, however, your goal is to tap your employees' intrinsic interest in doing quality work, or to encourage your students to become lifelong, self-directed learners, or to help your child grow into a caring, responsible, decent person, then it makes no sense to ask 'What's the alternative to rewards?" because rewards never moved us one millimeter toward those objectives." [180]
      "A manager committed to making sure that people are able and willing to do their best needs to attend to three fundamental factors. These can be abbreviated as the "three C's" of motivation—to wit, the collaboration that defines the context of work, the content of the tasks, and the extent to which people have some choice about what they do and how they do it.... [This] same model is also a useful way of thinking about what happens at school and at home." [187]
      For tasks that are unlikely to be intrinsically motivating, Kohn provides some guidance. "The rule of thumb for getting people to internalize a commitment to working at them is to minimize the use of controlling strategies. He cites 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." [90]
      From Amazon.com: "Kohn derides rewards as bribes and offers instead the proposition that collaboration (teamwork), content (meaningfulness), and choice (autonomy) will serve to motivate both students and workers." A frequent ZMag contributor has a great summary and further perspective. Alfie Kohn's web site has more information. Read more about these topics in many articles Kohn has written. Aaron Swartz has a quick overview of Kohn's ideas. This PDF probably contains the most extensive information I could find about this book in digital form. This blog entry from Presentation Zen summarizes similar ideas probably more clearly than the links above, or this TED Talk by Dan Pink does it will with video. He says employees need "autonomy, mastery, and control" and businesses should use a Results-Oriented Work Environment.