Life & Me

One of the biggest dilemma for people in authority is to choose between sticks (punishment) and carrots (rewards) for the subordinate. Should a boss punish their employees for bad performance to warn them or to give them encouragement as motivation? Should a parent be stern and strict or lenient and forgiving?

It’s hard to choose between the two because examples of success for both cases are everywhere. Ask every boss and parent and surely they’d have their own philosophy of managment/parenting. But our brains are notorious for making conclusion on small samples and stick to them for the rest of our life. If eating orange has coincidentally cured our headache once, we’d incline to do the same when we have headache the next time. If praising your child has resulted them doing less well in exam the next time, you’d bring out the sticks in no time. No conclusion can yet be made.

What about the difference between the West and the East. In common perception, carrots are more popular in the West and sticks more popular in the east. Well, Asian will point to Proverb and declare “spare the rod and spoil your child!” while an American will flip to Colossians “Father, do not aggravate your children, or they will become discouraged.”

So what about research? It has actually shown out of large sample, people tend to respond better to carrot, over a LONG period of time. Why is LONG important, because of noise. What is noise? In signals processing, it’s anything that confuses the user. Imagine driving on a bumpy road on a hill heading up, there are a lot of places where you’d feel a sudden jerk down on a surge up. To make conclusion about the gradient of the hill based on this would be not-so-smart. Our brain and eyes naturally filter out this noises and conclude that, overall, we’re heading up.

In statistics, it’s called “regression to the mean”. It means over a long period of time, our performance will swing but will average out to a mean/our real performance. Imagine a sprinter who has just ran the race of his life. You as a coach, should you give the stick or carrot? Our natural inclination, out of delight, might be to praise. How would he run the next time? Because he has ran THE race of his life, just by statistics, he’d run slower, to his average performance. To be sure, he might improve over a period of time. The danger is, you as a coach make the conclusion that you should never offer carrots to your sprinters, because it makes their performance worse.

The same for parenting, if your child has performed particularly bad in an exam, carrots or sticks? As Asian parents, most probably sticks, isn’t it? Following the same argument, because he has performed PARTICULARLY bad, he’d tend to perform better next time. He might performed worse in the long term. But because you made the conclusion that sticks work based on that one sample, you continue scolding and whacking your child.

But is there a best way, like a fusion of both? It’s actually the job of the social psychologist to find out. Recently they performed a smart experiment in a factory in China. One group was offered a monetary reward (MONEY!) if they achieved a quota (a carrot). Another group was given the reward, but was told that if they don’t achieve the same quota, they will lose the reward (still a carrot, but dressed as a stick). In the end, the second group performed better.

Lesson? Due to ownership complex, a carrot dressed as stick might work much better. It has the best of both world – the encouragement of a carrot and the fear of a stick. An example in parenting, you want to encourage your children to work hard in studies. So you promised them a trip to Disneyland. They might be motivated. If the experiments were right, it’s better to tell them about the Disneyland trip you want to give them, but if they do badly in exam, you’d cancel the trip. I have no idea about the long term effect on the children’s mind, but they’d work harder.

Lesson 2? All social psychologist are cunning, be careful of them. =D