Episode Transcript
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0:15
Pushkin. I
0:18
want you to think back to your school days for a second.
0:21
What was the worst grade you ever got? How
0:24
did it make you feel? And
0:27
now think about the best grade. How
0:30
is that grades?
0:33
Even decades after graduation, we
0:35
can still remember what those marks felt
0:37
like. And it makes sense
0:39
that grades affect us so deeply because
0:42
they're important. I mean, they're
0:44
kind of synonymous with education, aren't
0:47
they. Well, it turns
0:50
out not really. In
0:52
fact, grades are a relatively new
0:54
invention. For almost seven
0:56
centuries, schools got by without
0:58
them. As a professor myself,
1:01
I find that incomprehensible. I
1:03
mean, generation after generation
1:05
of scholars completed their studies without
1:08
anything akin to a grade point average. How
1:10
could my predecessors tell students apart?
1:13
How did they sort pupils who worked really, really
1:15
hard from those who just phoned it in?
1:18
Back in seventeen eighty five, all
1:20
that changed, so
1:22
we had the stuff that Karen found for us
1:24
today. I recently went on a pilgrimage
1:27
to a special spot at Yale where I teach, the
1:29
Binnick Library, in order to see an
1:31
important document, one that's kept
1:33
alongside a copy of the Declaration of
1:35
Independence and one of the oldest
1:37
pieces of literature in the world. I wash
1:40
my hands, but I can just open it. It's like not
1:42
going to break it. I was able to hold the
1:44
Diary of Ezra Styles, seventh
1:47
President of Yale University. So
1:49
cool. So the important
1:52
part is right here. On April
1:54
fifth, seventeen eighty five, he
1:56
recorded the details of an exam he'd conducted
1:59
that spring Tuesday with fifty eight
2:01
of his students. My colleague Mike
2:03
Morand pointed me to a short but revolutionary
2:06
footnote twenty opt to me second
2:10
Optimy twelve
2:12
inferiories Bonnie ten
2:16
and the unlikely event that you're someone who doesn't speak
2:18
Latin, let me translate for you. Styles
2:21
was splitting his students up into four different
2:24
grades from Optimy best
2:26
to pajoras worse. With
2:28
this tiny footnote, just a few lines.
2:31
It's argued that Styles invented
2:33
the four point o grading system we still
2:35
use today. I mean, this is amazing. It's
2:37
like a single line, his handwritten
2:39
text and the biggest thing in education
2:42
that shaped our history. It's right there in my
2:44
hand. I got to hold the first
2:47
ever grades. Nowadays,
2:51
we don't just have GPAs, we have
2:53
SATs and gres in advanced
2:55
placement tests and everything in between.
2:58
It's estimated that the average American
3:00
child takes more than one hundred standardized
3:03
tests. But we don't just grade
3:05
in education. We think ratings
3:07
are a good incentive for all our behavior years,
3:09
and that means we're constantly being evaluated,
3:12
from the number of stars and our uber driver rating,
3:15
to our positivity percentages on eBay
3:17
to a performance review on the job. We
3:19
seem to love being measured, and
3:22
when we get good grades, it feels great.
3:24
All those a pluses, the gold stars,
3:27
those little smartphone vibrations when we hit
3:29
our goal. They encourage us to become
3:31
better, more virtuous people. Or
3:34
do they are chasing? These incentives
3:36
really as good for our happiness as we think.
3:46
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be
3:48
happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
3:51
if our minds are lying to us, leading
3:53
us away from what will really make us happy.
3:56
The good news is that understanding the science
3:58
of the mind can point us all back in the right
4:00
direction. You're listening to the
4:03
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
4:10
The first time I eboxed it, I felt kind
4:13
of like a dweeb. This is Emma Lord,
4:15
she writes for Bustle dot com. Back
4:17
in twenty fourteen, she broke her foot.
4:20
I couldn't run for a little while while I was
4:22
waiting for a fracture to heal. And that's kind of
4:24
how the whole thing started was
4:26
I was pretty much told not to run for like six weeks,
4:29
and to me, that kind of seemed like a nightmare.
4:31
Emma was worried she wouldn't be able to stay in shape
4:33
while she was injured, so her mom bought her
4:35
a new step tracking device, a Fitbit, hoping
4:38
it would make her feel better and keep moving while
4:40
she healed. But I, you know, the first
4:42
day I used it, it did that thing
4:44
where it buzzed when I got to ten thousand steps,
4:46
and I was like, ooh, like this is such a
4:48
nice feeling. I just
4:51
got instant validation from it, and then
4:53
I was just kind of hooked. Emma quickly
4:55
experienced what science shows happens when
4:58
we start grading our performance with incentives
5:00
like a fitbit buzz we humans
5:02
are like little lab rats when it comes to external
5:05
rewards. Those buzzes and good
5:07
grades and gold stars work really
5:09
well. They change our behavior quickly,
5:12
but often more quickly than we expect.
5:14
I guess after that first day, the
5:17
baseline goal was to always hit the ten
5:19
thousand steps, and then you know, it started
5:21
getting to the threshold where you're like, oh, if I
5:23
can do ten thousand, I could do fifteen. And
5:26
that was when Emma started seeing the problem.
5:29
External rewards like the buzz of a fitbit
5:31
are so powerful that they often
5:33
work a little too well. I
5:35
think the first moment
5:38
I felt myself
5:40
becoming a little bit addicted to it was and I
5:42
realized I was suddenly getting on the metro
5:44
two hours before work just so I could
5:46
get in the ten thousand steps before work,
5:49
because I just wanted that validation, like really
5:52
early in the day. So it was going to be like off my conscience,
5:54
which is like such a weird thing to think about, because
5:56
like nobody was gonna the police weren't going to come
5:59
for me if I didn't hit ten thousand steps
6:01
that day. But I just felt better after
6:03
it had buzzed. The scary thing
6:05
was at the fitbit wasn't just affecting Emma's
6:07
happiness. It also started affecting
6:10
Emma's relationships. When I got
6:12
a new job once and there was a fitbit
6:15
like leaderboard to see who had the best
6:17
steps, and some guy in the office had
6:19
like thirty thousand, and I went out that weekend
6:21
and crushed it. And I came
6:23
in the next day and I was like, I got thirty five
6:25
thousand, and like nobody was pleased with me, and
6:27
I was like, not the way to make friends.
6:31
The level of competition emma experience with
6:33
her fitbit was reminiscent of another
6:35
time in her life when she felt super competitive
6:38
back in school. I came from one of the
6:40
most competitive school districts in the country, so
6:42
it was like one of those things where everybody was like the hungry
6:45
he was in there. So I definitely do
6:47
think that this is related to that in
6:49
some ways. I definitely was
6:52
one of those kids who was very, very manic about
6:54
my grades. In twenty fifteen,
6:56
Emma shared her experiences in an article
6:58
on Bustle entitled nineteen very
7:01
real emotional struggles of having a Fitbit
7:03
or does your Fitbit have you? I
7:06
thought it would be relatable to other people
7:08
who are kind of going through the motions
7:10
on that too, and weirdly I got more response from
7:12
that article than maybe anything I've
7:15
written on this entire site, because
7:17
you know, it is such a relatable kind of
7:19
mania, especially because
7:21
you know, I think people are so confused about
7:23
where that compulsion is coming from that
7:26
it's almost a relief to be like, oh,
7:28
I'm not the only crazy one. But
7:30
despite her own experiences with fitbit
7:33
and the response to her piece years
7:35
later, Emma's still tracking.
7:37
You know, even after the foot injury
7:39
healed. I found myself still
7:42
counting, even when I was running, and that
7:44
was like something I'd never really felt the need to count
7:46
before, just to have that number
7:48
there and to like know exactly how many steps I
7:50
had in a day. I mean, it's been four years
7:52
and I'm still doing it. Emma's
7:57
experience shows that seemingly innocuous
7:59
benchmarks can quickly change our behavior
8:01
for the worse. But they're more insidious
8:04
than we realize. Every
8:06
external reward has the power to turn
8:08
love into hate and virtue into
8:11
vice. They can even
8:13
relentlessly play on our most primal
8:15
fears. The
8:19
happiness lab will be right back. Where
8:30
do you stand on Obamacare? It's one
8:32
of the most bitterly divisive issues in US
8:34
politics today. I bet you have
8:36
a pretty strong opinion about it. So what do
8:38
you think it would take to shift that opinion
8:41
significantly? Would you believe
8:43
me if I said I could manipulate your view
8:45
with some arbitrary incentive, like
8:48
giving you a fake grade. Let
8:50
me explain. Back in nineteen sixty
8:53
one, Robert Bostrom and his colleagues surveyed
8:55
more than two hundred students on a couple
8:57
hot button issues. They asked
8:59
whether America should legalize gambling and
9:02
if the nation should adopt socialized medicine.
9:04
A few weeks later, all the participants
9:07
were assigned to write essays about these issues.
9:09
But, and this is crucial, they were
9:11
asked to defend the very view they
9:13
had staunchly opposed. People who viewed
9:15
gambling as an evil had to write in support
9:18
of casino owners. Those who saw
9:20
socialized medicine as creeping communism
9:22
were told to act as its cheerleaders. The
9:25
scientists collected the essays, but didn't
9:28
even bother reading them. Bosterm
9:30
and colleagues knew that the simple act of writing
9:32
about the opposite view was likely to
9:34
soften everyone's opinions, changing their
9:36
minds slightly. But what effect would smacking
9:38
an arbitrary grade on those essays have? The
9:41
next day, the researchers handed them back
9:44
randomly, giving a third of them an A,
9:46
a third of them a D, and a third
9:48
no grade at all. After seeing
9:50
their marks, students took the original
9:52
survey again. So what happened.
9:55
Students who got no grade or a bad
9:57
grade A D changed their minds
9:59
a bit, But something much more incredible
10:01
happened to the group that got inn A. Remember,
10:04
the grades were given totally randomly. The
10:07
A graded essays weren't better or more thoroughly
10:09
researched than the others. Nevertheless,
10:12
students who got that fake A shifted
10:14
their views more significantly than those
10:16
who got a bad grade. The simple
10:18
act of getting that A cause students
10:20
to change their core beliefs, isn't
10:23
that chilling views we hold? Deer
10:25
can be swayed by the simple act of evaluation,
10:28
even if that evaluation is totally
10:31
bogus. Let's
10:33
play a little game. It's called Unscrambled
10:35
the Letters. I'm going to give you a series of letters,
10:38
and you need to turn them into an English word.
10:40
Here's an easy one, just three letters,
10:43
ready, k O
10:46
A. Time's
10:48
up? Did you get it? The answer
10:51
is oak. Here's
10:54
a harder one, five letters, ready
10:57
c L P A
11:00
E, Time's
11:03
up the answer place.
11:07
And now an even harder one. It's
11:09
got nine letters ready O
11:12
n V O t
11:15
U I l E.
11:19
Time's up the answer evolution.
11:23
Think about how much you enjoyed playing this game. Unless
11:26
you're a huge puzzle fiend, the last one
11:28
with nine letters might have been a bit taxing. The
11:31
first one with three letters probably wasn't
11:33
that great either. It was a little too easy
11:35
to be fun. I bet the one in the
11:38
middle was just right. When
11:40
playing a game like this, we prefer puzzles
11:42
that are hard but doable. Those
11:44
are the ones we tend to enjoy the most. The
11:47
same holds for little kids. Back
11:49
in the seventies, child psychologists Susan
11:51
Harder tested sixth graders on Anna
11:53
Gramps just like this. She
11:55
gave them super easy ones with just three letters,
11:58
and ones with six letters that were pretty tough
12:00
for children their age. What did she find?
12:03
Overall, the kids were happiest when
12:05
pushing the boundaries of their abilities. They
12:08
even smiled almost twice as much
12:10
when doing the harder puzzles. But
12:13
what happens when you throw grades into the mix
12:16
To test that Harder told a different group of
12:18
sixth graders that the puzzles were part of a
12:20
school exercise and that they would be graded
12:23
on their performance. The result,
12:26
it's actually heartbreaking. Here's
12:28
how Harder described it. Children
12:30
working for grades chose significantly
12:32
easier anagrams to perform. Not
12:35
only did subjects respond below their
12:37
optimal level, but they manifested
12:39
less pleasure and verbalized more
12:41
anxiety.
12:44
When working for grades. The kids did
12:47
worse, felt worse, and aimed
12:49
lower. Grades can take experiences
12:51
that our minds normally find really enjoyable
12:54
and turn them into a source of dread. My
12:57
earliest memory of this was actually
12:59
when I was in seventh grade. This is Tracy
13:01
George. She spent her whole career advising
13:04
students suffering from severe academic
13:06
stress. She's seen firsthand
13:08
how grad can become a dangerous obsession,
13:11
how they robbed students of joy and even
13:13
worse. I was going to a private
13:15
middle school outside of Cleveland, Ohio, where I'm
13:17
from, and one day
13:20
a girl I know was crying at her locker.
13:22
Right It was in the middle of class. She kind of snuck out.
13:24
I'd left to go to the bathroom and she was there alone
13:27
crying, and I asked her what was going on, and
13:30
she said she had gotten her first to be and
13:32
she was so worried she would not be able to get into the school
13:35
she wanted to go to, and she had already picked
13:37
whatever IVY league she wanted to go to at that time,
13:39
at eleven or twelve. And
13:41
it was really hard to see that that she
13:44
was so distraught and so worried about
13:46
and really terrified. I mean she was crying and
13:48
almost like shaking about what this
13:50
would mean for her future. And it was the first
13:52
time I realized I really wanted to help people
13:55
and students, growing adults learn
13:57
what is important to them today. Tracy
14:00
is the founding director of the Good Life Center at Yale
14:02
University. Tracy and I teamed
14:04
up to develop this new resource on campus
14:06
in order to improve student well being. Note
14:09
the irony here. The very college
14:11
where GPAs were invented now employs
14:14
Tracy as well as a host of other staff
14:16
members to deal with the fallout of
14:18
that two hundred year old system At
14:20
Yale. There's a long, long wait list to see
14:22
a mental health counselor here, and that's
14:25
really one of the purposes of the Good Life Centers to create
14:27
a space for this overflow of
14:29
where does students go when they need to learn how to
14:31
manage this daily fear or the daily
14:34
stress, the daily anxiety. And this
14:36
isn't just an Ivy League problem or a
14:38
Yale problem. This is the thing that colleges are seeing
14:40
nationwide right right, absolutely, this
14:42
is an American thing. This is our country
14:45
and how we are approaching education, and
14:47
it's really detrimental and is breaking students
14:50
down. It's one thing to feel a little
14:52
stressed about getting your first b or
14:54
to get a bit neurotic about missing your fitbit
14:56
buzz, but that's not what we're talking
14:58
about. College mental health centers
15:00
aren't just dealing with a few obsessive, stressed
15:03
out students. We are facing a real
15:05
epidemic. In a national
15:07
survey, more than four percent of college
15:09
students reported they're too depressed
15:12
to function. More than half of current
15:14
students say they feel hopeless a
15:16
lot of the time, more than sixty percent
15:18
said they experienced overwhelming anxiety,
15:21
and more than one in ten say they've seriously
15:24
considered suicide in the last year.
15:27
And these are not numbers that we should be seeing in
15:29
this young population. This is when their brains are continuing
15:31
to form, They're starting to figure out who they are,
15:33
what they want to do in the world. This isn't just
15:35
a surface level amount
15:38
of stress or worry. It's really this fear
15:40
based reaction, just like
15:42
I had experienced in seventh grade, This fear
15:45
about what it will mean for your future really
15:47
far down the line. What's most
15:49
disturbing about all this fear and stress isn't
15:52
how it's making students feel. It's
15:54
affecting students physical health,
15:56
the basic way their bodies function.
15:59
And so this constant, low level
16:01
stress has a trickle down effect of physical
16:04
effects like our higher
16:06
blood pressure, higher heart rate, quicker
16:09
breathing, which is the activation
16:11
of our sympathetic nervous system that
16:13
was designed to help us fight off an
16:15
animal or flight run away from an animal
16:18
in a very direct way with our evolution,
16:20
like a tiger is attacking us basics right right,
16:22
there is a tiger in the bush, and we need to respond.
16:25
So our muscles tense as if we're actually getting
16:27
ready to hit something or runaway. Our heart rate
16:29
goes up, our blood pressure goes up in order
16:31
to get the blood to our muscles to activate
16:34
those muscles, and a lot of functions
16:36
decrease that we don't need for immediate
16:38
survival, like we don't need digestion, we don't
16:40
need reproduction, we don't need a lot of major systems
16:43
to survive in the moment. And there's a
16:45
ton of research that shows regular fight
16:47
or flight response causes chronic stress in the body
16:49
and has a trickle down effect of health impacts.
16:52
The problem is we see this system activated,
16:55
and students see these little lines and tigers
16:57
and bears behind every bush in their
17:00
daily modern lives. So it's not
17:02
a line, a tiger, or a bear, it's
17:04
an exam or a transcript or
17:06
an application that's actually causing the same
17:08
reaction. So when you talk to students
17:10
and you ask about their stress responses, especially
17:13
chronic stress responses, they often talk about
17:15
headaches, muscle tension, digestive
17:18
issues, even reproductive or
17:20
sexual issues, and they don't
17:22
realize until they're getting this process,
17:24
this biological process explaining that it's actually
17:26
chronic stress causing this trickle down
17:28
effect of physical issues.
17:31
It's really problematic, especially because
17:34
I see the most that students are wrapping up their
17:36
sense of value and purpose as a human
17:38
in their grades. They're not just being
17:40
graded in their classrooms. They're being graded
17:42
with everything you know, from their Instagram
17:45
likes to their what their fitbit is telling
17:47
them. Absolutely, I've heard some students
17:49
just in the hallways going like, why didn't this picture
17:51
get enough likes? Or why did this like I stopped
17:54
getting likes after so many days
17:56
or whatever. You know, any app
17:58
that is designed to support us in a certain
18:01
activity, like a running app, and
18:03
even meditation apps, right, so even that's
18:05
become even meditation apps
18:08
are competitive now. Yeah, it's totally crazy.
18:10
Actually haven't opened a meditation app in a while because
18:12
of this. I mean, even students who come
18:14
back to my class, the mindfulness
18:16
class that I teach here at Yale, are talking
18:18
about themselves as being quote unquote bad
18:20
meditators. Tracy and I have had
18:23
lots of conversations about what we can
18:25
do to fix things, but we both
18:27
worry it's going to take more than a wellness
18:29
center. It's going to take major structural
18:32
changes to how we and our institutions
18:34
think about external rewards. The
18:37
culture the system has to change as well,
18:39
especially for the school that invented
18:41
this four point grading scale. We invented this process.
18:44
We are in a great position to try to untangle that a
18:46
little bit and to give a new generation
18:49
of students of fighting chance at being
18:51
functional and happy and successful. But
18:54
that kind of change is really hard. We
18:57
might even need to abandon the ways we've educated
18:59
students since the time of Ezra
19:01
Styles. All right, let's get
19:03
started. Welcome
19:05
everybody to Psychology
19:07
and the Good Life today. What we're going
19:10
to go through is just a quick introduction
19:12
to the course. If you've been listening
19:14
to the Happiness Lab for a while, you know I
19:16
teach a class at Yale called Psychology and the Good
19:18
Life, an entire class devoted
19:21
to teaching students how to be happier. Over
19:23
a thousand students enrolled the first time
19:25
I taught it. This gets back to the reason why
19:28
I want to teach this class, which is that I
19:30
actually want to help you. I also
19:32
want you to find ways to overcome the stress, because
19:34
it's not healthy. But even
19:36
an Ivy League class devoted to making students
19:39
happier had to include the
19:41
one thing that I knew would make my students
19:43
the most miserable. These are the things,
19:45
by the way, that you are graded on. If we're going to talk about
19:47
our grades are stupid and you shouldn't worry about
19:49
them, but I have to give you one because y'all, college
19:52
you one let me teach this scourse if I didn't, and I wish I
19:54
didn't have to grade you, but I do. That's
19:56
right. Despite everything I just told
19:58
you, I still had to grade my students,
20:01
and while showing them the research that
20:03
grades don't work the way we think, but I
20:06
still tried to give them a way out. Like ya, college
20:08
one let me teaches clad. It was like, what are they greeted
20:10
on? Like methic because they don't get any grades like and
20:12
they're like, no, you haven't. They get on something. But you
20:14
have a mechanism to thwart this because
20:17
you can't say, aha, provisitudos has to de gree
20:19
me on something. I'm going to take the class Credit
20:21
D. Credit D is the Yale version
20:23
of pass fail. You get a grade, but
20:25
there are no A minuses and B plus,
20:27
just credit or no credit. But
20:30
I still couldn't force students to give up their grades.
20:33
They had to elect to take my class Credit
20:35
D of their own accord. I
20:37
did a lot to try to convince them, why
20:40
do I care? Because everything we're going to learn
20:42
the course suggests that grades are really dune. You
20:44
learn less, you're more anxious, and you're
20:46
less happy because everything this course is supposed
20:48
to play against what I have to provide you a degree.
20:51
So just in the class credit D.
20:53
Like, seriously, I know how many
20:55
students actually took the class credit D. I
20:58
don't know because professors
21:00
at Yale aren't allowed to know. It's
21:02
still considered a stigma for a student
21:04
to choose to take a class without a letter grade,
21:07
so they get to keep it a secret. Two
21:11
hundred years after Yale, President Ezra
21:14
Styles created grades. This is
21:16
how deep his beliefs go. They're so
21:18
entrenched, they're like a religion. I
21:20
was starting to lose faith in this system. But
21:23
to find a path forward, I had
21:25
to talk to one of the few true heretics
21:27
who are willing to raise their voices and
21:30
fight. But if you're asking, should
21:32
we just get rid of grades? Yes,
21:35
I mean grades poison everything they touch.
21:38
The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Writer
21:48
Alfi Khan has been America's fiercest
21:50
critic of our grading obsession for decades.
21:52
This could be revolutionary. You have to
21:55
change the way you think about parenting because
21:57
how many of you out there have offered bribes
21:59
to get your kids to stop crying.
22:02
His stark warnings about the dangers of external
22:04
rewards got him invited on Oprah twice
22:07
in one year back in the nineties. You
22:09
think kids are being punished by the
22:11
rewards in the long run, right,
22:14
But in the short run it works.
22:16
Alvie's classic book, Punished by Rewards
22:19
was just reprinted to markets twenty
22:21
fifth anniversary, twenty
22:23
five years longer than my college
22:25
students have been alive. Alfie's
22:27
been railing against the creed of ezra styles
22:30
for more than a quarter of a century. Grades
22:32
are problematic because of a larger
22:35
phenomenon of using extrinsic
22:37
inducements doggy biscuits,
22:39
carrots and sticks. Choose your
22:41
metaphor to try to make
22:44
students perform, rather
22:46
than authentically engaging
22:49
students in dealing
22:52
with questions, problems, and projects
22:54
that they find interesting and
22:56
worth their curiosity. And the
22:59
three effects of graves overall are
23:01
one. They undermine student's
23:03
interest in learning. To the
23:06
best of my knowledge, every study
23:08
that has ever paired students with
23:10
and without grades in terms of their
23:12
excitement about the learning has
23:15
found a negative effect from grades. The
23:17
second effect is that grades lead
23:20
students to try to avoid
23:22
challenging tasks. If they
23:24
have an opportunity to
23:27
do that, they will then pick the
23:29
shortest book or the most familiar
23:31
topic for their project. That's not
23:33
because they're lazy, it's not
23:36
because they're snow flakes. It's
23:38
because this system has led
23:40
them to respond rationally to an irrational
23:43
demand. I mean, if the
23:45
point is to get an A, of course, you're
23:47
more likely to do that if you're doing something easier.
23:50
And then we turn around and blame the students for
23:52
not being motivated or when the
23:55
grading system has elicited
23:57
a very predictable response. And
23:59
the third effect of grades is
24:01
that it leads students to think in a shallower
24:03
or more superficial way. They're
24:06
less likely to really press to
24:08
say, how do we know that's true? Or isn't
24:11
that contradictory to what we did
24:13
last week? They're more likely to say, do
24:15
we have to know this? Is this going to be on the
24:17
test? And again, the problem is not with the
24:19
students, it's with the fact of giving
24:21
grades. Research finds
24:24
that when you get rid of things like grades and
24:26
indeed all rewards, kids
24:29
spontaneously pick harder
24:32
things to do. So you
24:34
can't improve the system by
24:36
merely tweaking the way grades are
24:39
done. You've got to get rid of it,
24:41
which a number of schools have done, including
24:43
some colleges and high schools, and even
24:45
more middle schools and elementary schools. When
24:48
I first met Alfie at his home in Massachusetts,
24:50
I took him at present a photocopy
24:53
of the Ezra style's diary entry I saw
24:55
back at Yale, the first grades ever. I
24:58
thought he might get a kick out of seeing it. I didn't
25:00
realize how strong his reaction would be. This
25:02
is like showing me the first paddle that was used
25:05
to hurt a kid. This
25:07
is something I look at frowning. This is
25:09
not something I treat as a as
25:11
a cherished relic. As
25:13
an educator. That's a tough thing to hear. Alphia
25:16
is placing the grades I give my students on a
25:19
spectrum that includes the horrifying practice
25:21
of corporal punishment beating
25:24
my students. That's one thing I've
25:26
learned from studying this topic for thirty years
25:28
is that rewards, like punishments, are
25:31
ultimately about power. If
25:34
I threaten you with a
25:36
punishment, you do this or I'm going to make you
25:38
suffer. It's obvious I'm trying to control
25:40
you. But if I say, if you jump
25:43
through these hoops, here's the goodie
25:45
I'll give you, it should
25:47
be obvious. But it isn't always
25:49
that that's just as much about control
25:52
because it's treatily, you know,
25:54
because it's dipped in sugar syrup.
25:57
We often don't realize this is just
25:59
as much about doing two
26:02
rather than working with Alphie
26:05
argues that we tend to see motivation as a single
26:07
entity, when in reality, there are
26:09
two distinct forces which drive us, one
26:12
intrinsic, the other extrinsic. The
26:15
first is a hero, but the second
26:17
is somewhat of a villain. Intrinsic
26:19
motivation in general just means you get a
26:21
kick out of whatever is you're doing. It
26:23
means you enjoy doing something for its
26:25
own sake, and that can be reading
26:28
a book, solving a problem,
26:31
writing code, painting a picture,
26:33
helping someone who needs to help anything.
26:36
Extrinsic motivation means
26:39
you do something that's for something
26:41
extrinsic to or outside of the task itself,
26:44
such as getting a reward, and that reward
26:46
could be money, a grade, a
26:49
certificate. It could be praise,
26:51
good job that's just a verbal
26:53
doggy biscuit, or fear
26:56
of punishment, which is another kind of extrinsic
26:58
motivation. So the question I mean because you could
27:00
see someone who really wanted to motivate
27:03
kids thinking, well, if they are already interested
27:05
in learning, why don't I add an additional
27:07
reward on top of that. You know, like two
27:09
rewards should be better than one, right, right.
27:12
The problem is that, first
27:14
of all, you can't motivate someone
27:16
other than yourself, and the
27:19
more you try, the more you paradoxically
27:21
undermine the very thing you're trying to promote.
27:24
So, for example, about a half
27:26
dozen studies have found that children
27:29
who are rewarded or praised
27:32
are less generous than their peers.
27:34
When you say, good job,
27:36
I really like how you shared your
27:39
brownie with Diane. You're so generous.
27:41
Good for you. That kid just became
27:43
a little more selfish because you
27:46
taught her that Diane's feelings are irrelevant.
27:49
What matters is what you'll
27:51
get from helping, in this case,
27:53
a patronizing pat on the head. If
27:56
you wanted to destroy a child's interest
27:58
in reading, you should give the kid a prize.
28:00
For reading a book A that's
28:03
manipulative, and people don't like to be manipulated.
28:06
B It intrinsically
28:09
devalues the thing for which you got the
28:11
reward. Now the kid figures while
28:13
reading must suck. If it's something they have to
28:15
bribe me to do, you have reframed
28:18
it in the person's head. That's why
28:20
it's so remarkable to watch little
28:23
kids who have not yet
28:25
been graded and
28:27
rated and ranked and so on, following
28:30
their interests. You're looking at intrinsic
28:33
motivation in its undiluted
28:36
form, where little kids can't
28:38
wait to figure out how to make sense
28:41
of those squiggles on the restaurant menu.
28:44
They want to know, as my daughter asked, are
28:46
their bones in my tummy? They
28:48
keep asking us until we
28:50
give them doggy biscuits for successful
28:53
answering the question, and then they start
28:56
asking a different question, which is do
28:58
we have to know this? And we're continuing
29:00
to treat our children, our students, our
29:03
employees, and sometimes even ourselves
29:05
in effect like lab animals. It's
29:07
not just dehumanieing. The research
29:10
shows it's counterproductive, not
29:13
merely ineffective. The students
29:15
I teach at Yale are far removed from the innocent
29:17
children. Alfie describes, after
29:19
years of a's and b's, they have internalized
29:22
the pursuit of grades as the prime motivation
29:24
for paying attention in class. I
29:26
worry the idea that they should learn because it brings
29:29
them pleasure and stimulation is long
29:31
forgotten. They are way down a path
29:33
leading them away from their own happiness.
29:36
The question is not how much achievement
29:39
do they have under their belts,
29:42
what's happened to their souls? It's
29:44
what's happened to the desire to figure
29:46
stuff out that all human beings start
29:49
with. Many of them are joyless.
29:51
So we're in this situation
29:54
where most educational systems are using
29:56
grades. What's the solution. If you're an
29:58
individual teacher, you do what you can in
30:00
the long run by organizing and
30:02
mobilizing your peers to change
30:04
the structure, rather than treating
30:07
grades as a fact of nature, like the
30:09
weather that's just always going to be with
30:11
us and we have to cope with it.
30:14
Is not it's a political decision. And there are
30:16
plenty of pilot projects and schools showing
30:18
that you not only can do without grades,
30:21
but that students do much better without
30:23
them. As I talked to Alphie. More
30:25
and more, I started to believe it
30:27
is possible to go back to a world without grades,
30:30
to what education was like before Ezra
30:32
Style started this new creed. Alphie
30:35
understands that it's a long road ahead, but
30:37
he believes the revolution is worth it. He
30:40
even thinks are fundamental values goals
30:42
like equality and intrinsic worth depend
30:44
on it. I think your primary goal should be
30:47
to help everyone to succeed. If
30:49
you had to use grades, then you would want
30:51
everyone to get aids. The idea
30:53
that there is a little normal distribution.
30:56
A bell curve sits in the
30:58
head of a lot of instructors, even when they're not
31:00
creating on a curve. Greating on a curve
31:02
is immoral. There's no other word
31:04
for it. To say that, no matter how well
31:06
everyone does, some of you
31:09
cannot get the best grade. Suggest
31:12
that it's a war of all against all.
31:14
The more we tend to see life in
31:17
adversarial terms, where I can
31:19
succeed only if you fail,
31:22
the more all of us are dragged down
31:24
to failure. Even the winners ultimately
31:26
lose. So
31:32
what should you take away from this episode? First,
31:35
the external rewards aren't all They're
31:37
cracked up to be Adding in a grade
31:39
or a fitbit buzz might change your performance
31:42
in the short term, but it'll cost you dearly.
31:46
Pursuing success on those terms
31:48
can rob you of the joy you may experience in your
31:50
studies, hobbies, or even career,
31:53
and that means we need to find ways to return
31:55
to our internal rewards. Run
31:57
because you enjoy the sensation, not
31:59
to beat some arbitrary number on an app, take
32:02
a class to satisfy your intellectual curiosity,
32:05
not to get on the honor roll and
32:08
make a podcast us for the fun of it, not
32:10
to tap the charts. As
32:13
people and as a society, we need
32:15
to find ways to reduce these systems
32:17
of external rewards that we've surrounded ourselves
32:19
with. It's the only way to return
32:21
to our childlike joy of learning just
32:24
for learning sake, just because it's fun,
32:26
just because we dig it. And
32:29
if you want a completely grade free way to learn
32:31
about the other lives of your mind, then
32:33
I really hope you'll come back for the next season
32:35
of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor
32:38
Laurie Santos. The
33:01
Happiness Lab is co written and produced by
33:03
Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered
33:05
by Evan Viola and edited by Julia
33:08
Barton, checking by Joseph
33:10
Friedman, and our original music
33:12
was composed by Zachary Silver. Special
33:15
thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly mcgliori,
33:18
Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya
33:21
Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. The
33:24
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
33:27
and me Doctor Laurie Sanders
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