Quotes About Behavior

Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.

Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person's longer-term motivation to continue the project.

Only 1 percent of our respondents said that they never engage in such behavior—and fewer than 17 percent do it rarely. Meanwhile, about 43 percent report doing it frequently or all the time. In all, a whopping 82 percent say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth.[17]

There's no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash—and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free.

Of course, other animals also respond to rewards and punishments, but only humans have proved able to channel this drive to develop everything from contract law to convenience stores.)

Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose—and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.

Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice," they write, "whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.

Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you'll get that—had the negative effect. Why? "If-then" rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.

are we wired to be passive and inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged?

Economists studied what people did, rather than what we said, because we did what was best for us.

Sawyer Effect: A weird behavioral alchemy inspired by the scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom and friends whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. This effect has two aspects. The negative: Rewards can turn play into work. The positive: Focusing on mastery can turn work into play.

The good news is that vigilance breaks can loosen the trough's grip on our behavior. As the doctors at the University of Michigan demonstrate, inserting regular mandatory vigilance breaks into tasks helps us regain the focus needed to proceed with challenging work that must be done in the afternoon.

Intrinsic motivation is of great importance for all economic activities. It is inconceivable that people are motivated solely or even mainly by external incentives.

Regret is a retrospective emotion. It springs into being when we look backward. But we can also use it prospectively and proactively—to gaze into the future, predict what we will regret, and then reorient our behavior based on our forecast.

I'm convinced that Type I is the natural state—the default setting—for most human beings. By contrast, Type X behavior is something people learn through their experiences

Even "sophisticated economic agents acting in real and highly incentivized settings are influenced by diurnal rhythms in the performance of their professional duties.

Deci found that those oriented toward control and extrinsic rewards showed greater public self-consciousness, acted more defensively, and were more likely to exhibit the Type A behavior pattern.5

Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation BY EDWARD L. DECI WITH RICHARD FLASTE

CARROTS AND STICKS: The Seven Deadly Flaws 1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation. 2. They can diminish performance. 3. They can crush creativity. 4. They can crowd out good behavior. 5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior. 6. They can become addictive. 7. They can foster short-term thinking.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes BY ALFIE KOHN

the 1980s, as they progressed in their work, Deci and Ryan moved away from categorizing behavior as either extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated to categorizing it as either controlled or autonomous.

When we behave poorly, or compromise our belief in our own goodness, regret can build and then persist.

Alfie Kohn, whose prescient 1993 book, Punished by Rewards

Motivation 2.0 is similar. At its heart are two elegant and simple ideas: Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.