The magic markers came first, before anyone mentioned a prize. For the first hour of class on three days in a row, teachers at the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford campus set out felt-tip pens and fine white drawing paper on a six-sided table. Behind a one-way mirror, two observers with event recorders logged every child who sat down or picked up a marker. The match between their records was close to perfect.
Children who drew for more than four minutes became candidates for the experiment. They were matched in threes by how much they had drawn and split at random.
Within two weeks, an experimenter invited each child to the “surprise room.” For one group, he took out a card: a Good Player Award, with a big gold star, a red ribbon and space for a name. “Would you like to win one of these Good Player Awards?” They said yes, “typically with considerable enthusiasm.” A second group was simply asked whether they would like to draw some pictures. A third group drew too, and never heard of awards at all.
Each child drew for about six minutes with an assistant who didn’t know, for most of that time, which group the child was in. Then the assistant thanked them. For both award groups, the assistant wrote the child’s name on a Good Player Award “with a flourish” and showed off an Honor Roll board where it would hang. For the second group, this was the first they had heard of it.
One to two weeks after that, the markers went back on the classroom table. Three classes lost a session, for reasons that, the paper notes, ranged “from the unanticipated arrival of a goat in the classroom to equipment failure.” The final count covered 51 children.
The observers still didn’t know which child had been in which group. Children who had drawn in order to win the award spent 8.59% of their free time with the markers. Children who never heard of an award spent 16.73%. Children who got the award as a surprise spent 18.09%. Only the first group had dropped significantly from where it started.
A difference showed up earlier, too. In the surprise room, all three groups drew about the same number of pictures. But judges who didn’t know the conditions rated the pictures from the expected-award group lower, 2.18 on a five-point scale against 2.85 and 2.69 for the other two.
The authors were careful about how far this went. Nothing in their data, they wrote, suggests that working for a reward “will always, or even usually,” reduce interest. They had picked an attractive activity and children who already liked it.
Both award groups had the same star, the same ribbon and the same place on the board. The children who had been told about it first were the ones who now sat down with the markers less often.