Rewards Discourage Risk-Taking

Definition

When people are working for a reward, their goal shifts from doing the task well to obtaining the payoff, and they do exactly what's necessary to get it and no more. This narrows attention away from anything not directly relevant to the reward — including exploration, hunches, and peripheral details that later prove useful — and pushes people toward the easiest available version of the task, since an easier task means a faster payoff. One researcher's summary, quoted by Kohn: rewards are "the enemies of exploration."

In the Book

Kohn cites an "incidental learning" experiment: subjects memorizing words on colored index cards for a promised prize later recall the colors far worse than unrewarded subjects, because their attention narrowed to only what the reward required. He uses Teresa Amabile's image of a rat in a maze running the well-worn path to the cheese rather than testing a possibly-faster new route, and Barry Schwartz's experiments trying to condition pigeons — and then people — to produce novel response sequences: reinforcement, he found, is inherently biased toward repeating what worked before, because the aim of the activity becomes producing another reinforcer, not discovering a new principle. Kohn also reports at least ten studies finding that preschoolers, students, and adults given a choice of task difficulty pick easier tasks when working for a reward, and pick even easier ones as the reward gets bigger — illustrated by a free-pizza-for-reading-books program that predictably steers children toward short, simple books rather than better reading.

Why It Matters

This explains a pattern visible anywhere output is measured and rewarded: quotas produce minimum-viable compliance, not exploration past the target. It's a mechanism, not just an observation — narrowed attention plus preference for predictable, low-risk paths — so it applies wherever a reward structure is layered onto work that actually depends on creativity, discovery, or trying the untested route: R&D, research funding, sales incentives, standardized testing.