Reward and Punishment

Alfred Adler’s critique of praise-and-punishment pedagogy, as relayed in The Courage To Be Disliked. Adler is “very critical of education by reward and punishment” because it produces “mistaken lifestyles” — people who think “If no one is going to praise me, I won’t take appropriate action” and “If no one is going to punish me, I’ll engage in inappropriate actions too.” The illustration in the book is the person who picks up litter already wanting to be praised for it, and who turns indignant or quits when no praise comes. The desire for recognition that this conditioning breeds is, for Adler, the danger to avoid.

In the wiki’s reading of the book, this connects to two adjacent ideas. First, internalization over external reward — glossed as “learning to be righteous in the dark,” doing the right thing without an audience (the same impulse as putting away your shopping cart). Second, the “separation of tasks”: when reward sits at the base of a relationship, a transactional feeling wells up — “I gave this much, so you should give me that much back” — which Adler says we must not seek or be tied to. The cure is to act for the intrinsic “feeling of contribution,” which the book’s closing thesis names as the real source of Happiness.

Context: Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was an Austrian psychotherapist and founder of individual psychology; his skepticism of reward/punishment as motivational tools anticipates later research (e.g. Deci & Ryan) on how extrinsic incentives can crowd out intrinsic motivation.

Where this appears

• The Courage To Be Disliked — Alfred Adler’s critique of praise/punishment pedagogy; glossed in the book’s synthesis as “righteous in the dark” and tied to the separation-of-tasks discipline