Our basic strategy for bringing up children, teaching learners, and managing employees can be summed up in six words: Do this, and you’ll get that. We dangle goodies (from chocolate bars to product sales commissions) in front of people just as that we train the dog.

Unfortunately, attempts to control people with incentives ultimately fail as well as do lasting damage. Drawing from hundreds of research, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work if they are enticed with cash, marks, about Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Compliment, and Various other Bribes or various other rewards. Also, they tend to weary in whatever they have been manipulated with benefits to do.

Over time, this groundbreaking reserve has persuaded countless parents, teachers, and managers that rewards and punishments are actually two sides from the same coin, and it’s a coin that doesn’t buy very much. Kohn clarifies what this means to utilize people instead of doing things to them-at house, at college, and at the job. Seasoned with humor-and containing new research and stories within an Afterword written for the book’s modified edition-Punished by Benefits presents a disagreement unsettling to listen to but impossible to dismiss.