The Power of Incentives: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior

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Learning environments that forgive failure matter because punishment interferes with learning better responses.
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Xerox’s superior new machine sold poorly because sales commissions favored the inferior machine.
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Federal Express improved package handling by paying night-shift workers per shift instead of per hour.
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During extinction, unwanted behavior can intensify or change tactics to recover reinforcement before the behavior declines.
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The conventional 9-to-5 wage system rewards time, even though fixed-interval schedules discourage effort beyond the minimum.
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Perverse incentive systems can drive increasingly foolish or harmful behavior. Incentives exert powerful control over human cognition and behavior.
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Continuous rewards teach behavior. Intermittent rewards maintain already learned behavior more efficiently.
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Sales and gambling use variable-ratio schedules. The number of responses required for reward keeps changing.
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Fail to reward a newly learned behavior immediately and the learner may decide the behavior was wrong.
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The Premack principle uses access to a preferred activity as the reward for completing a less preferred activity.
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Prompting and shaping build behavior iteratively: provide cues, reinforce approximations, and narrow the criterion until the target behavior is achieved.
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A cricket match ticket can powerfully motivate someone in a cricket-oriented country while meaning little to most Americans.
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Ratio schedules depend on the number of responses. Interval schedules depend on elapsed time.
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A Skinner box let researchers control conditions and study how reinforcers shaped conditioned behavior in animals.

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