Reddit mentions of Punished by Rewards

Second this. It's an absolutely brilliant, thought provoking book.

It grabbed me when I first read it more than 15 years ago with its very first paragraph (in which he was talking about the prevailing Skinnerian idea of punishments and rewards working to shape behavior over time) and never let go. The beginning read:

>"There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear its hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea; it has us."

That opening gambit is so powerful. I think it can be applied to many other areas of life beyond the psychology of competition too.

Interested readers can buy it on Amazon for as little as one penny.