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…instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.

…rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work.

If-then rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy… that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivational bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment.

People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.

Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But ‘if-then’ motivators are terrible for challenges…

…rewards narrow people’s focus and blinker the wide view that might allow them to see new uses for old objects.

For complex or conceptual tasks, offering a reward can blinker the wide-ranging thinking necessary to come up with an innovative solution.

The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.

When the reward is the activity itself – deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best – there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road.

…cash rewards and shiny trophies can provide a delicious jolt of pleasure at first, but the feeling soon dissipates – and to keep it alive, the recipient requires ever larger and more frequent doses.