Wenwen's mother said that in order to keep her children practicing the piano, she has developed a reward policy, and children can get five yuan for every day they insist. This trick was quite effective at first, and the text cooperated well, but it lasted less than a month and the text did not do it. She first said that the reward given by her mother was too small, and then she said that practicing the piano was too tiring and uninteresting, and no matter what the adults said, it would not work.
I believe that many parents have had a similar experience: in order to improve their children's performance, use monetary or material rewards. Sometimes it can have a certain effect, but it does not last too long, and it can even be counterproductive. This situation can be explained by the "Desi effect" in psychology.
The Desi effect originated from a well-known psychological experiment. In the experiment, psychologist Desi randomly selected some students to solve some interesting intellectual puzzles alone.
The experiment is divided into three stages: the first stage, all the participants have no reward; In the second stage, all the students in the experimental group will receive a dollar as a reward for each difficult problem, and the control group students will not have any rewards; In the third stage, the researchers told all the participants to do whatever they wanted, which was a free time arrangement.
They found that the control group (no reward group) was willing to spend more free time solving problems than the group that received the reward. This result indicates that the students in the reward group were quickly interested in solving the problems, while the students in the control group were interested in solving the problems for a long time.
The researchers concluded that when an individual engages in a pleasant activity, external rewards reduce his interest in the activity, which is the "Desi effect."
Similar to this effect, there is an interesting story: an old man who lives alone likes to be quiet, but there are always a few children who run outside the door where he lives to play. The old man was noisy and advised the children to play in another place, but the children did not listen to the old man at all, and played more and more vigorously.
Later, the old man thought of a way, he smiled and walked to the children and said, "Thank you for coming here to play, your arrival makes me feel very happy, and in order to show my gratitude, I reward you each with 25 cents." I hope you will come over every day in the future, and I will reward you every time. The children happily accepted the old man's reward.
The next day, the children came again, and the old man came over again and said, "Thank you for coming, but I don't have enough money, I can only give you 15 cents each." The children, though not very happy, accepted it.
On the third day, the old man made up a reason that he could only give the children 5 cents each. The children stopped drying and never came to play outside the old man's house again.
The old man's approach is very clever, he transferred the children's interest in play to the reward, when the reward is reduced, the children's interest in playing will be reduced.
The Desi effect reveals several truths:
Inappropriate rewards can cause individuals to change their motivation to do things.
Taking painting as an example, the child suddenly found that painting was very interesting one day, so he drew it with great interest, and he wanted to draw a few strokes when he had nothing to do, which was very interesting. In order to keep the child drawing, the adult proposes to reward the child, telling the child that he can get ten yuan for each painting he draws. The child was very happy to hear it, and did as the adult said, so that the child's interest in drawing was transferred to money.
But this often does not last long, according to the marginal diminishing effect, the child feels happy when he gets ten dollars for the first time, and as the number of times increases, ten dollars will become less and less attractive to him. In the end, he would feel that ten dollars was not enough for him to paint a painting. Once the reward is revoked, the child will also feel deprived.
The same is true for other things, so parents must be cautious about using material rewards when teaching their children. Don't use material rewards too often, especially if the child himself is interested in doing something, so as not to cause a shift in motivation.
You can try using spiritual rewards to give specific, sincere compliments to your child's good performance, which may motivate your child more than material rewards.