Rewards Ignore Reasons

Definition

The appeal of reward-and-punishment strategies is how little they demand of the person using them: you don't have to ask why the behavior is happening, only apply enough bribe or threat to override it. Kohn calls this "why ask why?" — behavioral interventions treat people as no more than what they visibly do, so changing the visible action counts as solving the problem, even when the cause that produced it is left completely in place.

In the Book

Kohn works through a mother's question about her three-year-old who keeps wandering out of bed. A "Behaviorist A" threatens to cancel television; a "Behaviorist B" promises a teddy bear for three good nights. Both skip the actual question — is she being put to bed too early, craving time with her parents, still keyed up from the day, scared of monsters — each of which implies a different response. He extends the pattern to a student who is chronically late or checked out in class, which may signal struggling with the material rather than defiance, and to poor teenagers offered extra welfare payments for school attendance, or threatened with cuts to their family's benefits — a policy Kohn cites as ignoring the structural causes of dropping out (poverty, curriculum irrelevance) in favor of manipulating attendance numbers directly. In each case the reward or punishment may move the metric temporarily, but because it never engages the reason the behavior existed, the underlying problem resurfaces or the gain evaporates once the incentive is removed.

Why It Matters

This is a general test for any intervention, not just reward systems: does it change what's measured while leaving the cause of the measurement untouched? It reframes "the metric moved" as insufficient evidence of a fix, and gives a concrete diagnostic — before applying an incentive or penalty, can you state the reason the current behavior is happening, and does your intervention address that reason or just override its symptom?