Punished By Rewards

Criticizes the system of motivating through reward, offering arguments for motivating people by working with them instead of doing things to them.

The author of Punished by Rewards and The School Our Children Deserve builds on his parenting theories of working with children rather than trying to control them, argues against practices that teach children that they must earn a parent's approval, and presents techniques that promote desired child qualities through unconditional support. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Reward and Punishment in Human Learning: Elements of a Behavior Theory provides a different approach to the study of reward and punishment, emphasizing what is learned when a response is rewarded and how does this differ from what is learned when a response is punished. This book discusses the distortions in impressions of success, accuracy in recall of reward and punishment, and determinants of outcome-recall. The role of open-task attitudes in motor learning, effects of isolated punishments, and structural isolation in the closed-task situation are also elaborated. This publication is intended for psychologists, but is also helpful to teachers, executives, prison officials, psychotherapists, and parents.

Argues that competition is inherently destructive and that competitive behavior is culturally induced, counter-productive, and causes anxiety, selfishness, self-doubt, and poor communication.

The Rewards of Punishment describes a new social theory of norms to provide a compelling explanation why people punish. Identifying mechanisms that link interdependence with norm enforcement, it reveals how social relationships lead individuals to enforce norms, even when doing so makes little sense. This groundbreaking book tells the whole story, from ideas, to experiments, to real-world applications. In addition to addressing longstanding theoretical puzzles—such as why harmful behavior is not always punished, why individuals enforce norms in ways that actually hurt the group, why people enforce norms that benefit others rather than themselves, why groups punish behavior that has only trivial effects, and why atypical behaviors are sometimes punished and sometimes not—it explores the implications of the theory for substantive issues, including norms regulating sex, crime, and international human rights.

In this 10th anniversary edition of an ASCD best seller, author Alfie Kohn reflects on his innovative ideas about replacing traditional discipline programs, in which things are done to students to control how they act, with a collaborative approach, in which we work with students to create caring communities. Features a new afterword by the author.

Parenting and education expert Alfie Kohn tackles the misconception that overparenting and overindulgence has produced a modern generation of entitled children incapable of making their way in the world.

In How and Why People Change Dr. Ian M. Evans revisits many of the fundamental principles of behavior change in order to deconstruct what it is we try to achieve in psychological therapies. All of the conditions that impact people when seeking therapy are brought together in one cohesive framework: assumptions of learning, motivation, approach and avoidance, barriers to change, personality dynamics, and the way that individual behavioral repertoires are inter-related.