Summary of Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The core of pop behaviorism is Do this and you’ll get that. The wisdom of this technique is rarely questioned. We take for granted that this is the logical way to raise children, teach students, and manage employees.
#2 Rewards are used long before a theory was developed to explain and systematize their practice. They were used by Frederick W. Taylor to encourage maximum efficiency in production at a factory, and by the first public school in New York City to manage the behavior of schoolchildren.
#3 Skinner believed that everything we do can be explained by the principle of reinforcement. He believed that organisms are just repertoires of behaviors that can be fully explained by outside forces. He said that there is no self as we usually use the term.
#4 The book gives the impression that someone else is telling the story, someone who doesn’t care much about him. It is not a big stretch to reduce creativity to a series of novel behaviors selected by the environment, and morality to whether society deems an action appropriate or inappropriate.

Sujets

• Behaviorism

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669365051
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The core of pop behaviorism is Do this and you’ll get that. The wisdom of this technique is rarely questioned. We take for granted that this is the logical way to raise children, teach students, and manage employees.

#2

Rewards are used long before a theory was developed to explain and systematize their practice. They were used by Frederick W. Taylor to encourage maximum efficiency in production at a factory, and by the first public school in New York City to manage the behavior of schoolchildren.

#3

Skinner believed that everything we do can be explained by the principle of reinforcement. He believed that organisms are just repertoires of behaviors that can be fully explained by outside forces. He said that there is no self as we usually use the term.

#4

The book gives the impression that someone else is telling the story, someone who doesn’t care much about him. It is not a big stretch to reduce creativity to a series of novel behaviors selected by the environment, and morality to whether society deems an action appropriate or inappropriate.

#5

Skinner believed that he had chosen to visit my class, and that all of us choose our actions. But he believed that we are nothing other than what we do. We are simply the products of our actions.

#6

Behaviorism, the belief that only measurable behavior is real, is just one example of how America has a tendency to favor action over thought. We are a nation that prefers acting to thinking, and practice to theory.

#7

Behaviorism, while it may have trimmed off the rough edges of Skinnerian psychology, is still fundamentally consistent with what I have been describing, at least with respect to the issues that matter most.

#8

American education is saturated with behaviorism, and it is difficult to exaggerate the extent of this doctrine's popularity. Regardless of political persuasion or social class, people are immersed in this doctrine.

#9

We use the same theory of motivation to get children to behave: we offer them extra time in front of the television or a special dessert or money when they comply with our requests.

#10

The pervasiveness of pop behaviorism can be seen in the praise that is given to children and adults, which is often indiscriminate and unconditional. It is used for all sorts of objectives, from improving learning to changing people's attitudes or behavior.

#11

The use of rewards has become so natural and inevitable that to question why we are doing something seems perplexing and even a little unsettling. The use of rewards is a fundamental part of American pragmatism, and it is compatible with our pragmatism to believe that good conduct will be rewarded and evil acts punished.

#12

What we believe in other contexts, from religion to economics, may help us accept behaviorism’s premises. But what we see and do is also critical. What we see from our earliest days is the use of the carrot-and-stick model of motivation, and it is easy to swallow such theories whole and pass along the practices to our own children.

#13

While rewards do work in the sense that they can get people to do what you want, they are also incredibly easy to use. They are so easy to use that they are often used as a substitute for management.

#14

The use of rewards is a tempting way to get people to do what we want. It is the approach we know best, because it is how we were raised and managed. But aside from some troubling questions about the theory of behaviorism, what reason do we have for disavowing this strategy.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The same distinction can be made with respect to a discussion about pop behaviorism. Separate from the question of whether rewards do what we want them to do is the question of whether there is something fitting or troubling about their use.

#2

The belief that rewards should be distributed fairly, even if it takes until the next lifetime to do so, is one component of what is sometimes referred to as the just world view. Many people believe that things eventually work out the way they should, and that bad things should be inflicted on undeserving people.

#3

The idea of personal responsibility has been transformed in our culture into a terror of permissiveness that extends beyond child-rearing to a general fear of social laxity. We see this in outraged reactions to prisons that are judged too comfortable, or even to organizations that compensate employees on any basis other than achievement.

#4

The most important thing to know about how people will choose to distribute resources is what kind of relationship exists among those involved. The equity principle is more likely to be chosen by strangers, while other factors such as cultural background and individual personality determine which principle is used.

#5

When individuals insist that it is right to reward people for what they do, it sometimes turns out that their real concern is with the results they fear would follow the abolition of rewards.

#6

The theory behind Do this and you’ll get that is that we learn and behave in order to obtain rewards. But this is not an accurate assumption, and it is demeaning as well. It implies that we are only human because we have feelings and thoughts, and that we are not truly animals.

#7

The passive-organism view of humans as passive beings whose behavior must be elicited by external motivation is outdated. We are beings who possess natural curiosity about ourselves and our environment, who search for and overcome challenges, who try to master skills and attain competence, and who seek to reach new levels of complexity in what we learn and do.

#8

The use of rewards is typically used to induce or pressure people to do things they would not freely do. The real choice for us is not between rewards and punishments, but between either version of behavioral manipulation and an approach that does not rely on control.

#9

Rewards are simply a more blatant form of control than bribes are. They are used to manipulate people, and they always reflect the control of the rewarder rather than the rewarder’s own control.