Well it might produce an overjustification effect whereby giving
someone an incentive to do something that they may do by intrinsic
motivation alone. As a result of the extrinsic incentive, the person
views his or her actions as externally motivated rather than
intrinsically appealing. Lacking adequate external justification for
refraining from the action they probably will succeede in convincing
themselves that they did not perform the action because they didn't
really like it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-justification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
Picture the scene: You are the parent of a 5-year-old boy who enjoys
beating up his 3-year-old sister. You've tried to reason with him, but
to no avail. So, to protect the welfare of your daughter and to make a
nicer person out of your son, you begin to punish him for his
aggressiveness. As a parent, you have at your disposal a number of
punishments that range from extremely mild (a stern look) to extremely
severe (a hard spanking, forcing the child to stand in the corner for
2 hours, and depriving him of television privileges for a month). The
more severe the threat, the greater the likelihood that the youngster
will mend his ways while you are watching him. But he may very well
hit his sister again as soon as you turn your back.
Suppose instead you threaten him with a very mild punishment. In
either case (under the threat of severe or mild punishment), the child
experiences dissonance.
http://tinyurl.com/6ses6 He is aware that he
is not beating up his little sister and he is also aware that he would
very much like to beat her up. When he has the urge to hit his sister
and doesn't, he asks himself, in effect, "How come I'm not beating up
my little sister?" Under a severe threat, he has a ready-made answer
in the form of sufficient external justification: "I'm not beating her
up because, if I do, that giant over there (my father) is going to
spank me, stand me in the corner, and keep me from watching TV for a
month." The severe threat has provided the child ample external
justification for not hitting his sister while he's being watched.
The child in the mild-threat situation experiences dissonance, too.
But when he asks himself, "How come I'm not beating up my little
sister?" he doesn't have a good answer because the threat is so mild
that it does not provide abundant justification. The child is not
doing something he wants to do—and while he does have some
justification for not doing it, he lacks complete justification. In
this situation, he continues to experience dissonance. He is unable to
reduce the dissonance by simply blaming his inaction on a severe
threat. The child must find a way to justify the fact that he is not
aggressing against his little sister. The best way is to try to
convince himself that he really doesn't like to beat his sister up,
that he didn't want to do it in the first place, and that beating up
little kids is not fun. The less severe the threat, the less external
justification; the less external justification, the greater the need
for internal justification. Allowing people the opportunity to
construct their own internal justification can be a large step toward
helping them develop a permanent set of values.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
...a classic study by Leon Festinger and J. Merrill Carlsmith. These
investigators asked college students to perform a very boring and
repetitive series of tasks—packing spools in a tray, dumping them out,
and then refilling the tray over and over, or turning rows and rows of
screws a quarter turn and then going back and turning them another
quarter turn. The students engaged in these activities for a full
hour. The experimenter then induced them to lie about the task;
specifically, he employed them to tell a young woman (who was waiting
to participate in the experiment) that the task she would be
performing was interesting and enjoyable. Some of the students were
offered $20 for telling the lie; others were offered only $1 for
telling the lie. After the experiment was over, an interviewer asked
the liars how much they enjoyed the tasks they had performed earlier
in the experiment. The results were clear-cut: Those students who had
been paid $20 for lying — that is, for saying the spool packing and
screw turning had been enjoyable — rated the activity as dull. This is
not surprising — it was dull. But what about the students who had been
paid only $1 for lying? They rated the task as enjoyable. In other
words, people who received abundant external justification for lying
told the lie but didn't believe it, whereas those who told the lie in
the absence of a great deal of external justification moved in the
direction of believing that what they said was true.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
But simply getting one to do the opposite without due consideration of
these kinds of factors could lead to dangerous consequences for child
or adult.
