[stevekemp]

We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing.

We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.

The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.

(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)

[ZeroGravitas]

I don't think you can parent without some level of bribing but note that research has been done suggesting that extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation.

One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end.

https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...

[light_hue_1]

Sadly, the link you provided shows how much nonsense there is in this space. They provide two sources of "evidence". Both of them are total junk.

For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.”

That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children.

The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do.

Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.

[ZeroGravitas]

That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but:

The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.

It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it.

> Kohn (1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight, stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ- uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together, these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence).

> A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace. In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2

> And, without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that: There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic motivation.

> Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance- contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain, Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.

[light_hue_1]

> that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.

To be clear, originally you said "extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation". "Incentives can hurt" is a totally different statement; but I assume you still mean the original.

A short digression. As a scientist I think we should teach critical reading skills when it comes to science. This study has a bunch of things going against it:

1. It is published in an economics venue. This means the reviewers were economists, not psychologists. They had no clue about rewards, children, etc. They are experts in evaluating the model, not in what you want to know about, which is the part about humans.

2. You are relying on something in the paper that isn't the key contribution. You're relying on a short survey in the intro. No reviewer carefully read this and proposed updates. And even if they did, they were not the deciding factor in acceptance. Even if the intro was one-sided and mostly junk, if the model was amazing, the paper would be published. Papers are not evaluated based on their intros.

3. The paper is almost 25 years old, surveying material that is more than 25 years old. Science changes. A lot. The conclusions here could be totally different from the conclusions in a paper today because we have so much more evidence, higher quality studies, and better conceptual frameworks.

4. The authors have a particular goal: they want to show that there's a conflict between internal and external goals. This taints everything. They don't want to present an even-handed review, they literally want to make their case to a reader. I'm not saying this in some "conspiracy" sense. When I write a paper I want to argue my view, and put my view's worldview at the center, because I want to win people over.

All of this means that you should not be reading this paper in this way. It's the wrong paper, from the wrong time, with the wrong thesis, and you're looking in the wrong section.

We can do better!

Here is a review from 2020. https://msofc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2020-Intrinsic-...

Let's compare with the points above.

1. It is published in Contemporary Educational Psychology. You can bet the reviewers here know the material, know the latest studies on child learning, etc.

2. The key contribution of the paper is a survey. This is what they are being evaluated for. You missed a paper? Nope, your survey is bad we don't accept you. You didn't fairly represent what that paper said, we don't accept you. etc. The paper is being evaluated by what you are looking for.

3. The survey is fairly current, 4-5 years is ok. You would expect a survey every that many years, or at least once per decade or so.

4. The authors might have biases, but not in this paper. This paper's goal is to present the state of the art. And reviewers aren't looking at the paper based on how well did their argue their point, they're looking at it based on how well they represented the state of the art.

All of this means that this paper should be read to find what you want to know. It's the right kind of paper, from the right time, with the idea of looking at the field and answering these kinds of questions, and we're looking in the main body of the paper.

Now, let's turn to the paper itself.

What it says is that extrinsic motivation is no longer seen as so alien from intrinsic motivation. That in the past 20 years there's a new framework that talks about internalizing extrinsic motivation.

https://al-kindipublisher.com/index.php/jeltal/article/downl...

The story is the same if you look at the paper above on language learning. The two types of motivation are not seen as opposites anymore.

You can keep reading by looking for "survey intrinsic extrinsic motivation teaching" and you'll find many more post 2020 papers. They all say the same thing. The field has changed. The two aren't opposites. Both are useful.

[ZeroGravitas]

Both your papers seem to support my position, that extrinsic motivation can be harmful.

The summary on Wikipedia suggests that there was some arguments about whether this effect was real or not but the consensus is currently that it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory#Deb...

> Through the debate, consensus seems to have emerged that crowding out reliably occurs if the following conditions are met:[33][dubious – discuss]

> * Rewards are offered in the context of pre-existing intrinsic motivation (e.g. in a pro-social setting or for interesting tasks).[34]

> * Rewards are known in advance and expected.[35]

> * Rewards are tangible.[36]