The Good Player Award

Hi friend,

In 1973, two children at a Stanford nursery school were given the same certificate for drawing. Gold seal, red ribbon, a blank space for the name.

Weeks later, one of them had nearly stopped drawing. The other was drawing as much as he ever had.

The difference between them had been decided before either child picked up a pen, and it had nothing to do with the certificate.

The experiment was run by Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett, and the first thing they did was the part that makes the study worth your attention.

They did not recruit children at random. They watched a nursery classroom through a one-way mirror and identified the ones who already loved to draw. Coloured markers were put out during free play, and the researchers noted which children went for them without being asked, without being watched, without anything on offer.

Fifty-one children were chosen precisely because drawing was already its own reason.

Then those children were split into three groups.

The first group was shown the certificate in advance. Would you like to win one of these by drawing some pictures? They said yes, they drew, they received it.

The second group was given no warning at all. They drew as they always had, and afterward, out of nowhere, the same certificate arrived.

The third group drew, and nothing happened.

A week or two later, the markers were put back out during free play, with no awards, no researchers making offers, no reason to do anything. The team watched through the mirror again and counted.

The children who had been promised the certificate spent roughly half as much free time drawing as the children who had been promised nothing.

The children who received the same certificate as a surprise showed no decline whatsoever.

Hold those two results next to each other, because everything is in the gap between them. The reward was identical. The gold seal, the ribbon, the name. What differed was whether the child had known about it beforehand, which is to say whether the drawing had been done in order to get it.

The certificate did not damage anything. The arrangement did.

The explanation the researchers reached for is called self-perception theory, and it is stranger than it first sounds.

The idea, from Daryl Bem, is that you do not have privileged access to your own motives. You work them out roughly the way anyone else would, by observing your own behaviour and the circumstances around it, and drawing the obvious conclusion.

So a child draws, and there is a certificate on the table, and the child concludes what any reasonable observer would conclude. I am doing this for the certificate.

That inference does not evaporate when the certificate is gone. It stays, and it has quietly overwritten the original account, which was that he drew because he liked drawing. The reward did not sit alongside the interest. It replaced the explanation for it, and then it left, and it took the explanation with it.

I want to be exact about what this research does and does not establish, because it gets flattened into something dumb almost everywhere it appears.

Rewards kill motivation is not the finding. The finding is narrower and far more useful.

In 1999, Deci, Koestner and Ryan reviewed 128 experiments and found the pattern held under specific conditions. Tangible rewards, expected in advance, given simply for doing the thing, reliably reduced free-choice motivation afterward. Verbal rewards generally increased it. Unexpected rewards, as those nursery children demonstrated, did nothing at all.

The magnitude and the reach of the effect have been argued over for fifty years and the argument is not finished. What has held up is the structure, and the structure is this: the damage comes from the contract, not the money.

Which is worth sitting with if you are in the business of turning what you like into what pays you.

Almost everyone reading this is doing some version of that, or planning to. The advice is everywhere and it is not wrong. Build the audience around what you genuinely care about. Monetise the thing you would do anyway.

But notice what that advice never mentions. The moment the thing you would do anyway becomes the thing you do in order to, you have run the Lepper condition on yourself. You have introduced the expected reward to the activity that was already its own reason. And the mind performs the same inference that the four-year-old performed, because it is the same mind, and the conclusion arrives in exactly the same reasonable-sounding form.

You have felt it, probably, without having a name for it. The hobby that stopped being restful once it had a revenue figure attached. The writing that got harder after people started paying attention. The training that was fine until you began tracking it. Nothing went wrong, and nothing got worse, and yet the pull that used to be automatic now needs manufacturing.

The oldest version of this warning is roughly two thousand years old, and it comes from the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna tells Arjuna that a man has a right to his actions but never to their fruits.

That has been read for centuries as a lesson about detachment and spiritual discipline. There is a more practical reading available now, which is that it is a description of how motivation actually survives.

The fruit is not the danger. Arjuna is not told to refuse the outcome. He is told not to let the outcome become the reason, because the moment it does, the action is no longer his. It belongs to whatever is paying for it, and it will end when the payment does.

The children in that nursery school did not stop enjoying drawing. Nobody took the markers away and nobody told them to stop.

They simply lost the reason, and never noticed it going.

What did you used to do for no reason at all, and when did you last do it?

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill