Rewards and Punishments
Here an article by Denise Breton and Christopher Largent about conditioning by rewards and punishments. The page shows badly in my browser, so I'm taking the liberty of including the text at the bottom. They mention the extensive research of Alfie Kohn on the negative effects of reward/punishment conditioning. Here are some of the problems:
Rewards and punishments teach power-over relations. Thats the model. And when being on the receiving end of this model gets tiresome, we begin the mad race to be on top.
Rewards and punishments corrupt human relationships, starting with the relation between those "higher" and "lower" in the reward-punishment hierarchy. Those under cant tell the truth to those above them for fear of how "bad news" might further reduce their underling status. Even more commonly, those above dont want the truth to be told. A May 1999 Frontline on the military career of Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith, for instance, featured Smith confessing that during the Vietnam War (when he was a pilot), his superior wouldnt let him report that he had failed to achieve his bombing objective. The higher-ups didnt want the truth; they wanted only "were winning the war" reports.
Rewards and punishments teach image management. Appearing to be good is more important than being good.
Rewards and punishments require surveillance. We must be seen to be doing good or doing bad to get what we "deserve," so someone must be observing usall the time.
Rewards and punishments replace internal motivation with external motivation. This is a biggie, and the crux of it all. We dont do what our inner guides tell us, what we love to do, or what we feel is right. We do what rewards us outwardly. Our inner motivation, what we get from our souls, is not controllable. For us to be made controllable, we must be unplugged from our soul source, and something external must be put in its placesomething others can control. Given this agenda, rewards and punishments are inevitably soul-denying.
Rewards and punishments teach selfish manipulation: "Whats in it for me?" "Can I avoid being caught?" In Beyond Discipline (p. 22), Alfie Kohn quotes eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant: "If you punish a child for being naughty and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and discovers that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself."It is rather obvious, really. The conditioning approach pre-assumes that you are a mindless robot who can't tell right from wrong, so you need to be trained into the proper pavlovian responses. Right answer: you get a piece of cheese. Wrong answer: you get an electric shock. That is a horribly barbaric view, and a false one. But, seeing that this is the predominant method used in the world of educating us into knowing how to act, it is no great wonder at all that we're rather messed up.
Rewards and punishments hide real consequences, replacing them with artificial reward-punishment consequences. CEOs dont think about real-world consequencespolluted air and water or human suffering; they think about financial rewards.
Rewards and punishments replace inner integrity with the model that everyone "has a price." When people work only for rewards and behave selfishly, it doesnt mean that theyre bad people or that humanity is innately greedy. It means theyre behaving exactly the way the culture has programmed them to behaveand then told them that theyre bad for doing it. Hows that for crazy-making?Well, read the whole thing, this is vital stuff. And I'll give you a gold star.