roystgnr comments on Quotes Repository - Less Wrong

1 Post author: Dorikka 10 February 2015 04:36AM

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Comment author: roystgnr 11 February 2015 10:40:27PM 3 points [-]

The tersest phrasing I've seen was "You get more of what you reward, less of what you punish". Google finds a 1990 book calling it an "old adage" so I've no idea what the source is.

From what I've read there is one important exception, though: if you apply an extrinsic reward or punishment to a behavior, people can see this as a replacement for rather than a supplement to whatever intrinsic rewards or punishments they had previously associated with that behavior, and this can actually reduce the desired behavior.