Punished by Rewards (Kohn)
May. 18th, 2023 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn3/5. I must grudgingly give this book a score of 3 because I agreed broadly... mostly... with what he is saying (extrinisic rewards don't really work that well as a motivator), and this is an important concept, if you haven't read any parenting books (and I can imagine there being rather less of an overlap with readers of this book and other parenting books than the last pop psych book I read), and there were some interesting studies I hadn't seen before, but just about every page I'd be all "Yes BUT..." and "Okay BUT...," in large part because Kohn is wildly annoying.
It starts with Kohn's grand pronouncement that our society runs on the central idea Do this, get that, which is, he says firmly, not the way the world works a priori, it's a philosophy.
Me: But... that is actually the way the world does work? If you throw a ball straight up, it will come right back down and hit you on the head. You do a thing, there are consequences to the thing.
Kohn: Yeah, well, but if you were asking me I would say that's perfectly all right if you want to reduce humans to physics, but humans are obviously MUCH MORE COOL than that because we have, like, consciousness and free will and stuff.
Me: I'm... not even going to get into that with you. But even putting that aside... physics is still a thing? And also there are consequences to human interactions too --
Kohn: I'm talking about rewards EXTRINISIC to the task it rewards, like gold stars and money bribes to get A's, not INTRINSIC motivations.
Me: Okay, but you never actually said that in the first couple of chapters, I just had to infer that from the specific sorts of rewards you decry and how you talk about how great intrinsic motivation is. Also some of the things you class under intrinsic motivations actually seem to be natural consequences, but you seem to have this thing against this straw man that you call natural consequences --
Kohn: But you got my point, right? (*)
Me: FINE.
So... yeah... I agree that extrinsic rewards are not great as a motivator and can backfire! And that intrinisic motivations and natural consequences (more about this in a bit) are way better in general! And I agree totally that the fact that often one has to keep the extrinisic rewards going is an indicator that it's not something that works so well in general. And that often it just devolves into rules lawyering about "well, did THAT count as doing the task and can I get the reward?" Yes, I've been there, done that. So yes, I agree that he makes a very good case that forcing a tight coupling between extrinisic rewards and tasks, especially with the express purpose of controlling the kid, is not great.
That being said, there were many, many things that annoyed me NO END about this book.
-The thing that probably annoyed me the most is how the white male privilege here just basically oozes off the page: every several pages or so Kohn would say to me without saying to me that he has never been, say, a stay-at-home parent raising small children. For example, he reluctantly admits that it's probably not incredibly terrible to use rewards for toilet training, except insomuch as it reinforces the philosophy of "do this, get that." Which is good, because before I read that, toilet training was the counterexample I kept coming up with of "...but it actually works in this case and doesn't have any sort of bad long-term effects," but also I knew what he was going to say about it, which was that we should consider that instead of using rewards, perhaps it's the parent's problem for expecting the kid to toilet train before they're intrinsically motivated to. Which tells me HE HAS NEVER BEEN A STAY AT HOME PARENT PRIMARILY RESPONSIBLE FOR TOILET TRAINING. Seriously, though -- one of my strong use cases for extrinsic rewards(/punishments) is the case where the person involved will eventually be motivated intrinsically but needs a bit of extrinisic help to get over that initial hump -- which he doesn't seem to think is ever the case. Everyone I know who has more than one kid used extrinisic rewards at least once to toilet train, and no one I know still used them after the kid figured out that hey, not making a mess everywhere and not having to wear diapers is its own reward. (Also, it is the case that Kohn is all about how he's not going to deal with 'classical conditioning' -- that's the Pavlovian response whereby you hope to pair an artificial stimulus with a response -- but rather is concerned with 'operant conditioning' -- which is the "do this, get that" response he objects to -- and at least some of toilet training rewards is classical rather than operant, where you hand the kid a toy or candy as soon as they pee or poop. We are also currently trying to do classical conditioning with E. with a small reward (chocolate chip) when she uses her anger management techniques, at the suggestion of her fantastic therapist/coach (who, yes, is familiar with Kohn).)
But also toddlers are not mini adults! Once you spend more than five minutes with a toddler, you realize that they do not actually viscerally understand logical chains like "hey, if you toilet train your life will be immensely better and you will be able to go on sleepovers and fun things like that!" Babies require total control; toddlers require more control than a tweenager than a full adult, and Kohn seems to have only a grudging and implicit acceptance of this idea. Now, it's also the case that parents do have problems with how much control to relinquish as their kids get older, and how to control their kids in such a way that they kids actually do preserve as much autonomy (and, sometimes, the perception of autonomy) as possible, and that's a real issue and worth having a conversation about! And Kohn's points are obviously very relevant to this! but I feel like any explicit acknowledgment that hey, at different parts of their lives, different kids might need different amounts of control and different amounts of judgment would have gone a long way towards diffusing my annoyance at what I perceive as Kohn's apparent lack of actually spending time with anyone under the age of 15.
-Behavioralists: Wow, Kohn Does Not Like behavioralism. Because human beings must be more than the sum of their impulses and conditioning! That's it, that's his argument. Honestly I came out of this book thinking I should read more Skinner, he sounds like an interesting guy.
-Natural consequences: Kohn says that the parenting technique of "natural consequences" is just another way of saying "punishment." One of his examples is "A child who tips her chair back in class must stand up for the rest of the period." Okay, I agree, IDK whom he is talking to, but that sounds a bit... well, removed from the "natural" part of it. (The canonical example of "natural consequences" I know of is the one where, if a child does not dressed, they go to school in their PJs. There shouldn't be any parent-induced shame associated with this; but the kid is able to realize, hey, wait, okay, if I don't put on my clothes then... I don't have my clothes on!) Kohn then goes on to say,
Gosh, this in a nutshell is how I felt about this whole book: I agree with all these sentences taken individually! and yet when you put them together I'm like, this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth somehow? Like, part of living in this world is figuring out that actions DO INDEED have consequences, whether it be the physical consequences of gravity or consequences in relationships with other human beings, and part of raising a child to adulthood is showing them how that all works, and that doesn't seem to be part of Kohn's philosophy at all?? I kept thinking of this:
-On merit-based pay at work: Kohn is against this. Kohn says that one strategy is to pay everyone the same. So, there are a couple of problems with this. First, the people who are high contributors are going to feel undervalued and unappreciated. Their work IS worth something valued in money to the company, so I don't think at all that it's weird for the company to acknowlege that! Second, if you don't pay people enough they'll leave and go to another company that will pay them enough. It's true that, as Kohn cites, pay isn't the most important thing about work for a lot of people. But it's not nothing either! And at many places, including my own company, "being paid what you're worth" is a proxy for how they treat you in other ways, for what I think should be obvious reasons.
(This is not transferable to student-teacher or child-parent relations, because students' performance or children's tasks aren't really... worth a certain amount to the teacher or parents the way that work is worth to the company.)
I also don't see why this has to devolve into cutthroat competition, as Kohn claims it does. I assume Senior Engineer gets paid more than I do. He should! He is extremely productive AND in the last five years has launched a major successful business initiative, which I have no interest in doing. I don't resent him for getting paid more! If anything I would be more inclined to worry that he's not getting paid enough (I mean, I assume he is), I don't want him to jump ship!
I am also super amused (and annoyed) that Kohn deals with people saying, "If this is the case then why do you get paid for your lectures??" with, well, it's okay for HIM to get paid for lecturing and even negotiate for higher amounts because in his head he tries to decouple the money from how good a job he does! Basically, he's a special snowflake. Now, I don't disagree that it works better if people do decouple to a certain extent how much they get paid from the work itself; in fact, I think people at my workplace generally do that, which is how they maintain good motivation. It's the tight coupling of rewards and tasks, I agree, that is the problem. But I also think Kohn is not agitating to be paid the same as everyone else.
The other issue here is that in fact people do respond to extrinsic motivations, and if you take pay away, other extrinsic motivations will often rise to take their place, especially in a large-group setting (as opposed to a small-group or family setting) where there are lots of jobs that have to be done. I've been thinking about my church in relation to this recently. My church actually does not pay anyone anything! (Well, I think they do at the upper levels, but I'm concentrating on the lower levels that I know about.) And they get people to put inordinate amounts of time into their callings and do really good jobs at them! Part of what is going on here is a strong dependence on faith and a culture of hard work... but... there's also a lot (a LOT) of peer pressure and community status involved. The jobs that are the hardest and take the most time are generally also the highest-status jobs. There's a lot of time spent at church talking about how there's no such thing as a high-status calling, but... this is manifestly not the case in practice. (This is, I will admit, somewhat offset by people changing callings every several years, but even then you will get people who keep going "up" in the hierarchy.) As evidence, I submit how hard it is, as a general rule, to get people in my church to be a nursery leader (age 18 mnths-3 years) as opposed to Relief Society President (leader of the women's organization); even though the latter is way WAY more work than the former, it comes with a lot of status and the other doesn't. (People will still be nursery leader, because of the strong dependence on faith as well as the cultural imperative/peer pressure to say yes when called, but it's got a much higher rate of people outright saying no or flaking out or asking to be let out before their time is up.)
Is this the world that Kohn wants? Maybe. And, I mean, I'm still in that world, so it's clearly a world that appeals to me on many levels. But it's not a world that everyone wants, and which even most people in my church wouldn't want for their daily job. A lot of people would much rather have straightforward pay than have to navigate the silent trickiness of peer pressure and community status.
-On praise: okay, I have a LOT to say about praise because I had issues with this chapter. Kohn goes on about how praise is bad because it's just like any other reward and so is bad in the same kinds of ways, plus with an extra helping of manipulativeness/control and also judgment. More on the "judgment" bit later.
I think there's something to this, but it confused me for the longest time because I (and I think most people) conflate the word "praise" with several different types of activities. One is the kind that Kohn decries: praise as control. He doesn't like this (and rightly so, I think -- I'll have more to say on this in a bit) and says that people get dependent on it because they want more of it.
But there are other things I think of as praise. There's also "praise" as "appreciation." When I do e.g. music for church, it's always super nice when people come up to me afterwards and say, "Wow, that was great!" and even more when they say something like, "That touched my heart." I think of that as praise. But there's no judgment involved there, usually (with very few exceptions they're not qualified to judge and we both know that). It's sharing with me what their response was, and telling me that they appreciate me. And that is honestly encouraging! I want to do things because I know people appreciate it. And at the same time I don't think it's either a locus of control (except to the extent that all human relationships involve various push-pulls) or something I'm dependent on, and I'm gonna do my best regardless of whether anyone says something nice to me afterwards. (Sometimes no one does and that's fine!) This is the kind of praise that honestly I think should be encouraged and even taught (in my case, it's something I had to explicitly learn how to do by emulating what I saw other people doing).
And -- maybe a subset of that -- praise as "celebration" or "sharing." Like when I learned that my kid's classmate got a last-minute winning touchdown at his flag football game and I was like, "Oh wow! Hey, that's so awesome!!" I don't want anything from Classmate, I'm not trying to judge him, and he understands that. I'm sharing a moment that was exciting and meaningful to him, and am happy for him.
Note that these differing types of praise also mean that the "control" inherent in using praise, as well as the tight coupling of rewards and tasks -- which I argue is the problem here -- is looser for praise than it is for some other kinds of incentives, because while a child or other person may encounter some of the control/manipulative/tight-coupling types of praise, they are, in a reasonably healthy upbringing/life, also likely to encounter a good deal of the other sorts as well. I'll return to this in a bit; I think it's the tight coupling that is the problem.
(Tangentially, Kohn also dislikes the habit of "find something nice to say," which I don't get at all?? Like, a big part of the point of that is for the person who is giving the praise, because it's really really easy to focus on the parts that need improvements and not on the (sometimes many) parts that were good. But also I think it's totally fine to want one's negative feedback to be leavened by positive feedback??)
Okay, now let's talk about praise as judgment. Kohn thinks that one of the reasons praise (e.g., "Good job!") is bad because it's judgmental; you can see this because if an underling said "Good job!" to a superior, that superior would get annoyed because it was condescending. I... think there is more going on here. Saying "Good job!" is annoying in this case not because of the judgment part of it, but because the underling is assuming a mastery over the superior that they do not in fact hold. For example, if I had an underling who understood something technical much better than I did, and I had to brief that underling's work, and they then said "Good job!" to me, I'd feel good about that in a way I wouldn't feel good if I were briefing high-level material and the technical underling said "Good job," because I would be like, suck it, you don't know more than I do about the higher-level material! So this is a case where judgment is being applied, but the stickler here is not the judgment, it's whether the person has the right to make that judgment. (For another work example that decouples the praise part from the judgment part, I was recently in a meeting where I was doing an on-the-fly presentation on some technical material, and though it was mostly fine, I was struggling a bit with flow, and the other engineer asked me a leading question: "What does each row in that file represent?" Though it was admittedly helpful with the flow, I also found it super condescending, because there is something of a judgment involved in asking a leading question to which you already know the answer, and I know that file inside and out better than Other Engineer does :P But when I was a baby grad student my advisor did the same thing to me, ask me a leading question like that, and I was grateful and didn't find it condescending at all, okay, partially because advisor has a, um, more laid-back personality than Engineer, but also we both acknowledged his mastery over mine.)
I do see Kohn's point, though! Praise as granting or witholding approval (especially as a parental figure) is, yeah, bad. But it's because of the control locus, not directly because of the judgment -- though control is easier when there's a judgment component, so it's definitely highly correlated. In general I think he has the causality the wrong way. He says "Praise is bad because it is controlling"; I say, "Praise is bad when it is controlling." (Or, I concede, perceived to be controlling, which is why I don't disagree with a lot of his points for being more careful about how praise is delivered. Which I don't think makes a difference for some people, but might very much for others.)
Becoming dependent on external praise and validation: I don't think this is exactly the problem that Kohn does, although it's related to the problem that he sees. I don't think that, generally speaking, praising a child and providing them with external validation in and of itself will cause the child to become dependent on that praise and validation, although too much of anything is probably not great (and again, kids differ in how they react; I'm sure there's some kid who could become dependent on it even when done in the most innocuous of ways). (And of course the usual parenting caveats on "praise effort not results; praise things a kid does rather than things a kid is (smart, good, etc.)," etc. -- but the kinds of negative effects those are concerned with are a bit tangential to the negative effects Kohn is principally concerned with.)
Now, again, I do think that Kohn is correct that controlling a child through praise and validation -- witholding the praise and approval unless the kid is doing exactly the thing that the parent wants, and which almost never happens, so that it's effectively also used as a punishment -- can have potentially seriously bad effects. Again, I claim it's the control and the tight coupling that's the problem, not the fact of praise. If it's a "you only ever get praise or approval when you do this exact thing, and never otherwise," if it tightly couples the praise with a particular path/task/result, and especially when that's done by a parent, who has the most effect on the child's worldview, then... well, yeah. (The funny thing is, I recently found through a totally unrelated search an email of mine back from 2012 where I said that "being too aggressively tiger-mommed... I think can lead to doing things for external reward/praise rather than because one wants to do it and do it right, and [to having] one's self-respect bound up in one's intelligence." Note that I identified the root cause here as not the external rewards/praise, but rather the tiger-momming.) The one person I have known who was extremely dependent on external praise got almost no praise as a child; I believe strongly that it was the lack of praise (or, rather, the extreme control of the praise) that messed them up.
Anyway, I think that's really the message to get from this section, but I felt that he actually undercuts his own message by being sloppy about his definitions; I had to think about this for a week to decide how I felt about it and why I had so many problems with what he was saying while still agreeing with many of the underlying principles. Which... is sort of my problem with the entire book, come to think of it.
(*) It turns out that at least for E, being able to check things off on a checklist gives her the same sort of dopamine hit as a reward does. Would Kohn call that an extrinisic reward? I don't think he would, but then I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them."
It starts with Kohn's grand pronouncement that our society runs on the central idea Do this, get that, which is, he says firmly, not the way the world works a priori, it's a philosophy.
Me: But... that is actually the way the world does work? If you throw a ball straight up, it will come right back down and hit you on the head. You do a thing, there are consequences to the thing.
Kohn: Yeah, well, but if you were asking me I would say that's perfectly all right if you want to reduce humans to physics, but humans are obviously MUCH MORE COOL than that because we have, like, consciousness and free will and stuff.
Me: I'm... not even going to get into that with you. But even putting that aside... physics is still a thing? And also there are consequences to human interactions too --
Kohn: I'm talking about rewards EXTRINISIC to the task it rewards, like gold stars and money bribes to get A's, not INTRINSIC motivations.
Me: Okay, but you never actually said that in the first couple of chapters, I just had to infer that from the specific sorts of rewards you decry and how you talk about how great intrinsic motivation is. Also some of the things you class under intrinsic motivations actually seem to be natural consequences, but you seem to have this thing against this straw man that you call natural consequences --
Kohn: But you got my point, right? (*)
Me: FINE.
So... yeah... I agree that extrinsic rewards are not great as a motivator and can backfire! And that intrinisic motivations and natural consequences (more about this in a bit) are way better in general! And I agree totally that the fact that often one has to keep the extrinisic rewards going is an indicator that it's not something that works so well in general. And that often it just devolves into rules lawyering about "well, did THAT count as doing the task and can I get the reward?" Yes, I've been there, done that. So yes, I agree that he makes a very good case that forcing a tight coupling between extrinisic rewards and tasks, especially with the express purpose of controlling the kid, is not great.
That being said, there were many, many things that annoyed me NO END about this book.
-The thing that probably annoyed me the most is how the white male privilege here just basically oozes off the page: every several pages or so Kohn would say to me without saying to me that he has never been, say, a stay-at-home parent raising small children. For example, he reluctantly admits that it's probably not incredibly terrible to use rewards for toilet training, except insomuch as it reinforces the philosophy of "do this, get that." Which is good, because before I read that, toilet training was the counterexample I kept coming up with of "...but it actually works in this case and doesn't have any sort of bad long-term effects," but also I knew what he was going to say about it, which was that we should consider that instead of using rewards, perhaps it's the parent's problem for expecting the kid to toilet train before they're intrinsically motivated to. Which tells me HE HAS NEVER BEEN A STAY AT HOME PARENT PRIMARILY RESPONSIBLE FOR TOILET TRAINING. Seriously, though -- one of my strong use cases for extrinsic rewards(/punishments) is the case where the person involved will eventually be motivated intrinsically but needs a bit of extrinisic help to get over that initial hump -- which he doesn't seem to think is ever the case. Everyone I know who has more than one kid used extrinisic rewards at least once to toilet train, and no one I know still used them after the kid figured out that hey, not making a mess everywhere and not having to wear diapers is its own reward. (Also, it is the case that Kohn is all about how he's not going to deal with 'classical conditioning' -- that's the Pavlovian response whereby you hope to pair an artificial stimulus with a response -- but rather is concerned with 'operant conditioning' -- which is the "do this, get that" response he objects to -- and at least some of toilet training rewards is classical rather than operant, where you hand the kid a toy or candy as soon as they pee or poop. We are also currently trying to do classical conditioning with E. with a small reward (chocolate chip) when she uses her anger management techniques, at the suggestion of her fantastic therapist/coach (who, yes, is familiar with Kohn).)
But also toddlers are not mini adults! Once you spend more than five minutes with a toddler, you realize that they do not actually viscerally understand logical chains like "hey, if you toilet train your life will be immensely better and you will be able to go on sleepovers and fun things like that!" Babies require total control; toddlers require more control than a tweenager than a full adult, and Kohn seems to have only a grudging and implicit acceptance of this idea. Now, it's also the case that parents do have problems with how much control to relinquish as their kids get older, and how to control their kids in such a way that they kids actually do preserve as much autonomy (and, sometimes, the perception of autonomy) as possible, and that's a real issue and worth having a conversation about! And Kohn's points are obviously very relevant to this! but I feel like any explicit acknowledgment that hey, at different parts of their lives, different kids might need different amounts of control and different amounts of judgment would have gone a long way towards diffusing my annoyance at what I perceive as Kohn's apparent lack of actually spending time with anyone under the age of 15.
-Behavioralists: Wow, Kohn Does Not Like behavioralism. Because human beings must be more than the sum of their impulses and conditioning! That's it, that's his argument. Honestly I came out of this book thinking I should read more Skinner, he sounds like an interesting guy.
-Natural consequences: Kohn says that the parenting technique of "natural consequences" is just another way of saying "punishment." One of his examples is "A child who tips her chair back in class must stand up for the rest of the period." Okay, I agree, IDK whom he is talking to, but that sounds a bit... well, removed from the "natural" part of it. (The canonical example of "natural consequences" I know of is the one where, if a child does not dressed, they go to school in their PJs. There shouldn't be any parent-induced shame associated with this; but the kid is able to realize, hey, wait, okay, if I don't put on my clothes then... I don't have my clothes on!) Kohn then goes on to say,
If a child tips her chair back too far, she will fall over. That is a "natural consequence" -- and the fact that it qualifies for that label offers no argument for letting it happen; caring adults go out of their way to prevent many such consequences from occurring. If, by contrast, a child who tips her chair back is forced to stand up for the rest of the period, that is a punishment.
Gosh, this in a nutshell is how I felt about this whole book: I agree with all these sentences taken individually! and yet when you put them together I'm like, this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth somehow? Like, part of living in this world is figuring out that actions DO INDEED have consequences, whether it be the physical consequences of gravity or consequences in relationships with other human beings, and part of raising a child to adulthood is showing them how that all works, and that doesn't seem to be part of Kohn's philosophy at all?? I kept thinking of this:
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.(Bujold, of course.)
-On merit-based pay at work: Kohn is against this. Kohn says that one strategy is to pay everyone the same. So, there are a couple of problems with this. First, the people who are high contributors are going to feel undervalued and unappreciated. Their work IS worth something valued in money to the company, so I don't think at all that it's weird for the company to acknowlege that! Second, if you don't pay people enough they'll leave and go to another company that will pay them enough. It's true that, as Kohn cites, pay isn't the most important thing about work for a lot of people. But it's not nothing either! And at many places, including my own company, "being paid what you're worth" is a proxy for how they treat you in other ways, for what I think should be obvious reasons.
(This is not transferable to student-teacher or child-parent relations, because students' performance or children's tasks aren't really... worth a certain amount to the teacher or parents the way that work is worth to the company.)
I also don't see why this has to devolve into cutthroat competition, as Kohn claims it does. I assume Senior Engineer gets paid more than I do. He should! He is extremely productive AND in the last five years has launched a major successful business initiative, which I have no interest in doing. I don't resent him for getting paid more! If anything I would be more inclined to worry that he's not getting paid enough (I mean, I assume he is), I don't want him to jump ship!
I am also super amused (and annoyed) that Kohn deals with people saying, "If this is the case then why do you get paid for your lectures??" with, well, it's okay for HIM to get paid for lecturing and even negotiate for higher amounts because in his head he tries to decouple the money from how good a job he does! Basically, he's a special snowflake. Now, I don't disagree that it works better if people do decouple to a certain extent how much they get paid from the work itself; in fact, I think people at my workplace generally do that, which is how they maintain good motivation. It's the tight coupling of rewards and tasks, I agree, that is the problem. But I also think Kohn is not agitating to be paid the same as everyone else.
The other issue here is that in fact people do respond to extrinsic motivations, and if you take pay away, other extrinsic motivations will often rise to take their place, especially in a large-group setting (as opposed to a small-group or family setting) where there are lots of jobs that have to be done. I've been thinking about my church in relation to this recently. My church actually does not pay anyone anything! (Well, I think they do at the upper levels, but I'm concentrating on the lower levels that I know about.) And they get people to put inordinate amounts of time into their callings and do really good jobs at them! Part of what is going on here is a strong dependence on faith and a culture of hard work... but... there's also a lot (a LOT) of peer pressure and community status involved. The jobs that are the hardest and take the most time are generally also the highest-status jobs. There's a lot of time spent at church talking about how there's no such thing as a high-status calling, but... this is manifestly not the case in practice. (This is, I will admit, somewhat offset by people changing callings every several years, but even then you will get people who keep going "up" in the hierarchy.) As evidence, I submit how hard it is, as a general rule, to get people in my church to be a nursery leader (age 18 mnths-3 years) as opposed to Relief Society President (leader of the women's organization); even though the latter is way WAY more work than the former, it comes with a lot of status and the other doesn't. (People will still be nursery leader, because of the strong dependence on faith as well as the cultural imperative/peer pressure to say yes when called, but it's got a much higher rate of people outright saying no or flaking out or asking to be let out before their time is up.)
Is this the world that Kohn wants? Maybe. And, I mean, I'm still in that world, so it's clearly a world that appeals to me on many levels. But it's not a world that everyone wants, and which even most people in my church wouldn't want for their daily job. A lot of people would much rather have straightforward pay than have to navigate the silent trickiness of peer pressure and community status.
-On praise: okay, I have a LOT to say about praise because I had issues with this chapter. Kohn goes on about how praise is bad because it's just like any other reward and so is bad in the same kinds of ways, plus with an extra helping of manipulativeness/control and also judgment. More on the "judgment" bit later.
I think there's something to this, but it confused me for the longest time because I (and I think most people) conflate the word "praise" with several different types of activities. One is the kind that Kohn decries: praise as control. He doesn't like this (and rightly so, I think -- I'll have more to say on this in a bit) and says that people get dependent on it because they want more of it.
But there are other things I think of as praise. There's also "praise" as "appreciation." When I do e.g. music for church, it's always super nice when people come up to me afterwards and say, "Wow, that was great!" and even more when they say something like, "That touched my heart." I think of that as praise. But there's no judgment involved there, usually (with very few exceptions they're not qualified to judge and we both know that). It's sharing with me what their response was, and telling me that they appreciate me. And that is honestly encouraging! I want to do things because I know people appreciate it. And at the same time I don't think it's either a locus of control (except to the extent that all human relationships involve various push-pulls) or something I'm dependent on, and I'm gonna do my best regardless of whether anyone says something nice to me afterwards. (Sometimes no one does and that's fine!) This is the kind of praise that honestly I think should be encouraged and even taught (in my case, it's something I had to explicitly learn how to do by emulating what I saw other people doing).
And -- maybe a subset of that -- praise as "celebration" or "sharing." Like when I learned that my kid's classmate got a last-minute winning touchdown at his flag football game and I was like, "Oh wow! Hey, that's so awesome!!" I don't want anything from Classmate, I'm not trying to judge him, and he understands that. I'm sharing a moment that was exciting and meaningful to him, and am happy for him.
Note that these differing types of praise also mean that the "control" inherent in using praise, as well as the tight coupling of rewards and tasks -- which I argue is the problem here -- is looser for praise than it is for some other kinds of incentives, because while a child or other person may encounter some of the control/manipulative/tight-coupling types of praise, they are, in a reasonably healthy upbringing/life, also likely to encounter a good deal of the other sorts as well. I'll return to this in a bit; I think it's the tight coupling that is the problem.
(Tangentially, Kohn also dislikes the habit of "find something nice to say," which I don't get at all?? Like, a big part of the point of that is for the person who is giving the praise, because it's really really easy to focus on the parts that need improvements and not on the (sometimes many) parts that were good. But also I think it's totally fine to want one's negative feedback to be leavened by positive feedback??)
Okay, now let's talk about praise as judgment. Kohn thinks that one of the reasons praise (e.g., "Good job!") is bad because it's judgmental; you can see this because if an underling said "Good job!" to a superior, that superior would get annoyed because it was condescending. I... think there is more going on here. Saying "Good job!" is annoying in this case not because of the judgment part of it, but because the underling is assuming a mastery over the superior that they do not in fact hold. For example, if I had an underling who understood something technical much better than I did, and I had to brief that underling's work, and they then said "Good job!" to me, I'd feel good about that in a way I wouldn't feel good if I were briefing high-level material and the technical underling said "Good job," because I would be like, suck it, you don't know more than I do about the higher-level material! So this is a case where judgment is being applied, but the stickler here is not the judgment, it's whether the person has the right to make that judgment. (For another work example that decouples the praise part from the judgment part, I was recently in a meeting where I was doing an on-the-fly presentation on some technical material, and though it was mostly fine, I was struggling a bit with flow, and the other engineer asked me a leading question: "What does each row in that file represent?" Though it was admittedly helpful with the flow, I also found it super condescending, because there is something of a judgment involved in asking a leading question to which you already know the answer, and I know that file inside and out better than Other Engineer does :P But when I was a baby grad student my advisor did the same thing to me, ask me a leading question like that, and I was grateful and didn't find it condescending at all, okay, partially because advisor has a, um, more laid-back personality than Engineer, but also we both acknowledged his mastery over mine.)
I do see Kohn's point, though! Praise as granting or witholding approval (especially as a parental figure) is, yeah, bad. But it's because of the control locus, not directly because of the judgment -- though control is easier when there's a judgment component, so it's definitely highly correlated. In general I think he has the causality the wrong way. He says "Praise is bad because it is controlling"; I say, "Praise is bad when it is controlling." (Or, I concede, perceived to be controlling, which is why I don't disagree with a lot of his points for being more careful about how praise is delivered. Which I don't think makes a difference for some people, but might very much for others.)
Becoming dependent on external praise and validation: I don't think this is exactly the problem that Kohn does, although it's related to the problem that he sees. I don't think that, generally speaking, praising a child and providing them with external validation in and of itself will cause the child to become dependent on that praise and validation, although too much of anything is probably not great (and again, kids differ in how they react; I'm sure there's some kid who could become dependent on it even when done in the most innocuous of ways). (And of course the usual parenting caveats on "praise effort not results; praise things a kid does rather than things a kid is (smart, good, etc.)," etc. -- but the kinds of negative effects those are concerned with are a bit tangential to the negative effects Kohn is principally concerned with.)
Now, again, I do think that Kohn is correct that controlling a child through praise and validation -- witholding the praise and approval unless the kid is doing exactly the thing that the parent wants, and which almost never happens, so that it's effectively also used as a punishment -- can have potentially seriously bad effects. Again, I claim it's the control and the tight coupling that's the problem, not the fact of praise. If it's a "you only ever get praise or approval when you do this exact thing, and never otherwise," if it tightly couples the praise with a particular path/task/result, and especially when that's done by a parent, who has the most effect on the child's worldview, then... well, yeah. (The funny thing is, I recently found through a totally unrelated search an email of mine back from 2012 where I said that "being too aggressively tiger-mommed... I think can lead to doing things for external reward/praise rather than because one wants to do it and do it right, and [to having] one's self-respect bound up in one's intelligence." Note that I identified the root cause here as not the external rewards/praise, but rather the tiger-momming.) The one person I have known who was extremely dependent on external praise got almost no praise as a child; I believe strongly that it was the lack of praise (or, rather, the extreme control of the praise) that messed them up.
Anyway, I think that's really the message to get from this section, but I felt that he actually undercuts his own message by being sloppy about his definitions; I had to think about this for a week to decide how I felt about it and why I had so many problems with what he was saying while still agreeing with many of the underlying principles. Which... is sort of my problem with the entire book, come to think of it.
(*) It turns out that at least for E, being able to check things off on a checklist gives her the same sort of dopamine hit as a reward does. Would Kohn call that an extrinisic reward? I don't think he would, but then I don't really know what his definition is, except "extrinsic rewards are what they're called when I don't like them."
