The Power of Incentives: Inside the Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior

• Rewarding the behavior immediately may take time away from the behavior’s continuation.
• It’s cheaper not to reward every instance of a desired behavior.
• By making the rewards unpredictable, you trigger excitement and thus get an increase in response without increasing the amount of reinforcement.
• Since the person is already adapted to not always being rewarded, they take longer to stopping the behavior when reinforcement is removed.

Scheduling the rewards on intermittent reinforcement can be used on various schedules, each with its own degree of effectiveness and situations to which it can be appropriately applied. Some of the schedules are:

• Fixed-ratio: used to reward based on the amount of work done.
• Variable-ratio: are unpredictable as the amount of work done between rewards varies. This normally produces more work than any other schedule. (Varying the intervals between rewards also makes it unpredictable, but that often makes people feel unappreciated.)
• Fixed-interval: rewards people for the time spent on a specific task. Response rates on this schedule are low as effort is not rewarded.

• It’s behavior suppressing powers usually disappears when the threat of punishment is removed.
• It often triggers a fight-or-flight response and renders us aggressive if escape is not an option.
• It inhibits the ability to learn new and better responses, often leading to responses such as escape, aggression, and learned helplessness
• Punishment also fails to show subjects what they must do and instead focuses on what not to do.
• It is often applied unequally as we are ruled by bias in our assessment of who deserves to be punished.

• Stopping rewards to an undesirable behavior while rewarding desirable behaviors.
• Positively reinforcing a less preferred activity with a more preferred activities.
• Giving a prompt, a stimulus that encourages the desired behavior. Then reinforcing any approximation to the target response; that’s called shaping.