The reinforcement effects of contingent self-reward

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the reinforcing effects of contingent self-reward with college students on an intellectual, though boring task. Forty-five male and female college students were instructed to work on a pile of simple addition problems for as long as they wished. Subjects in the self-reward condition presented themselves with sections of a television film contingent upon a fixed-ratio schedule that they had selected from three alternatives. An experimenter-rewarded group, yoked to the self-reward subjects in terms of the schedule upon which they were reinforced, received the movie sections automatically. A control group received rest-periods instead of sections of the film. The results supported the hypothesis that contingent self-reward can have reinforcing effects. The self-reward group completed significantly more problems than the control group; however, there were no significant differences in number of problems completed between the self-reward and the experimenter-rewarded groups. Two other measures, rate of performance and increase in rate of performance over time, reflected no significant reinforcement effects for the two rewarded groups over the control group. Individual differences in the rate of performance and the relative stability of these measures are believed to account for the lack of effects. A model analyzing self-reinforcement into two separate behavioral sequences and a discussion of the applications and generalizability of the results were presented.