Skinner-Box

Preface: We are in a society of loyal Skinnerians, unable to think our way out of the box.

No wonder there had never been a book written for a general audience that showed how rewards undermine our efforts to teach students or manage workers or raise children — much less a broader critique that looked at all three arenas.

Of this book’s twelve chapters, the first six lay out the central argument. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the behaviorist tradition, the prevalence of pop behaviorism in our society, and some reasons for its widespread acceptance. Chapter 2 weighs arguments about the intrinsic desirability of rewarding people, first challenging the claim that doing so is morally or logically required, and then proposing that there is actually something objectionable about the practice.

Chapter 3 moves from philosophical arguments to practical consequences, summarizing the research evidence showing that rewards simply do not work to promote lasting behavior change or to enhance performance; in fact, they often make things worse. Then, in chapters 4 and 5, I explain why this is true, offering five key reasons for the failure of rewards, all of which amount to serious criticisms of the practice apart from their effects on performance. Chapter 6 examines one particular reward that few of us would ever think to criticize: praise.

The second half of the book examines the effect of rewards, and alternatives to them, with respect to the three issues I’ve mentioned: employees’ performance, students’ learning, and children’s behavior. This part of the book is arranged so that readers primarily interested in only one of these topics won’t have to wade through discussions of the other two. Workplace issues are discussed in chapters 7 and 10, educational issues in chapters 8 and 11, and the question of children’s behavior and values (which is relevant to teachers as well as parents) in chapters 9 and 12. Serious readers will find that the endnotes provide not only citations for the studies and quotations but additional thoughts, qualifications, and discussion of the issues raised in the text.

Chapter 1 Skinner Boxed: The Legacy of Behaviorism

It is not true that “best way to get something done is to provide a reward to people when they act the way they want them to”. Rare inspection on “Do this and you’ll get that”.

Nothing wrong with the rewards themselves. That concerns the author is the practice of using these things as rewards. Trouble - To take what people want or need and offer it on a contingent basis in order to control how they act.

Classical conditioning - When trained in classical conditioning, dog react to bell when there is no steak.

Operant conditioning - Skinner, “Reinforcement“. Action is controlled by stimulus that comes after it rather than before it.

This book is more about Operant conditioning. Not only interested in figuring out how rewards work; they are apt to argue that virtually everything we do — indeed, who we are — can be explained in terms of the principle of reinforcement. Man are treated as different animal from other animals only in the types of behavior he displays.

Essence of behaviorism: it proceeds from a boundless faith in science—and specifically, a narrowly defined version of science that never caught up with modern physics—to tell us everything we need to know. Human beings are to be analyzed in precisely the same way as we would analyze “a chemical compound or the way a plant grows,” Anything that is not observable, testable, and quantifiable either is not worth our time or does not really exist.

The consequence of patterning psychology after the natural sciences is predictable: psychology’s subject matter (us) is reduced to the status of the subject matter of physics and chemistry (things). When we try to explain things, we appeal to causes. When most of us try to account for human behavior, though, we talk about reasons; a conscious decision, rather than an automatic response to some outside force, usually plays a role. But for Skinner, our actions, too, can be completely described in terms of causes. Freedom is just an illusion. Remember, there is no “self” to be free: what we are is nothing other than what we do. This is the belief that gives behaviorism its name.

It is important to understand that practice does rest on theory, whether or not that theory has been explicitly identified.

practices that rest on those premises.

Is it unfair to indict all of behaviorism on the basis of what Watson and Skinner had to say? Yes and no. It is true that they were more extreme than subsequent researchers and therapists on certain issues, such as the status of an inner life. Feelings, attitudes, and intentions were suspect to them—useless for explaining anything people do, completely determined by external factors, largely irrelevant to their version of psychology. In many intellectual movements, the pioneers are unreconstructed and immoderate; it is left to the next generation to temper and qualify and blend in what is useful from other theories. To some extent, behaviorism did move on while Skinner stood still. Long before his death, he was spinning in his house from what was being offered under the name of behavior therapy. (In his last paper, completed the night before he died, Skinner reiterated that “there is no place in a scientific analysis of behavior for a mind or self.”)15)

But if more restrained and less quotable behaviorists have trimmed off the rough edges of Skinnerian psychology, they are carrying on a tradition that is fundamentally consistent with what I have been describing, at least with respect to the issues that matter most. They may have fastened on the finding that we also learn from watching other people receive rewards, or that attitudes as well as behaviors can be reinforced, but these are not decisive departures from Skinner with regard to what concerns us here.

More important, we can depart from Skinner at this point and begin to address ourselves to contemporary pay-for-performance plans in the workplace or the technique of pasting a gold star on a chart each time a child complies with her parents’ demands. To repeat, this book is intended as a critique of these sorts of practices, of pop behaviorism rather than of Skinner, so whether the vision of a seamlessly controlled Utopia like Walden Two chills you is beside the point. There is reason enough to be concerned once we reflect seriously on the implications of “Do this and you’ll get that.”

Bring In the Reinforcements

Any time we wish to encourage or discourage certain behaviors—getting people to lose weight or quit smoking, for instance—the method of choice is behavioral manipulation.

“Why shouldn’t we pay teenagers not to have babies?”

One article, entitled “If Employees Perform, Then Reward ‘Em,” declares flatly, “The more money you offer someone, the harder he or she will work.”[24]

praise

Behind the Appeal of Behaviorism (many examples)

Intuitive people agree this idea. ethical conduct will be rewarded and evil acts punished.

Ironically, rewards and punishments not only lie at the core of faith but are central to our idea of rationality as well.

If you are a parent who has found that your children promptly make their beds when you promise them ice cream cones for doing so, you may conclude that rewards are effective. You may even decide that it is unrealistic to expect children to do such things if you don’t use them.

Typically, it is assumed that rewards will increase children’s interest in an academic assignment or their commitment to altruistic behavior. Even when presented with data indicating that the reverse is true, 125 college students in one experiment continued to insist that rewards are effective.(As we shall see, some research psychologists who champion behaviorism are just as likely to wave away data that contradict what they are sure is true.)

e.g. 1- In the middle of a lecture on behaviorism a few years ago in Idaho, one teacher in the audience blurted out, “But stickers are so easy!” This is absolutely true. If she finds herself irritated that children in her class are talking, it takes courage and thought to consider whether it is really reasonable to expect them to sit quietly for so long—or to ask herself whether the problem might be her own discomfort with noise.30 It takes effort and patience to explain respectfully to six-year-olds the reason for her request. It takes talent and time to help them develop the skill of self-control and the commitment to behave responsibly. But it takes no courage, no thought, no effort, no patience, no talent, and no time to announce, “Keep quiet and here’s what you’ll get….”

e.g. 2 - Good management, like good teaching, is a matter of solving problems and helping people do their best. In many workplaces, incentive plans are used as a substitute for management: pay is made contingent on performance and everything else is left to take care of itself.

They can do good teaching and management through good preparation, thoughts, patience, courage etc. However they using the brute force reward method. Doing this, unilaterally dispense reward, they did not respect the motivation, they are in lack of control of the motivation

Conclusions & Answers: The negative effects appear over a longer period of time, and by then their connection to the reward may not be at all obvious. The result is that rewards keep getting used.

Chapter 2: Is it Right To Reward

Saving Room for Just Deserts

It seems to follow, then, that people who do not succeed can be held responsible for their failure. Failure, after all, is prima facie evidence of not having tried hard enough. This doctrine has special appeal for those who are doing well, first because it allows them to think their blessings are deserved, and second because it spares them from having to feel too guilty about (or take any responsibility for) those who have much less.

The belief that rewards will be distributed fairly, even if it takes until the next lifetime to settle accounts, is one component of what is sometimes referred to as the “just world” view. It does not take much imagination to see where this sort of thinking can lead: one group of children, after watching a film about the Nazis, were reported to have said, “But the Jews must have been guilty or they wouldn’t have been punish

Fear of Child-rearing to Social Laxity pay is not conditioned on performance we are sometimes said to be rewarding incompetence (or laziness) and giving some people a free lunch—a prospect that sends shudders through executive dining rooms.

The basic idea that people should get what they deserve, which social scientists refer to as the equity principle

In short, the equity model, as social psychologist Melvin Lerner put it, “applies to only a limited range of the social encounters that are affected by the desire for justice.“3) Specifically, it is the favored mode of “impersonal, economic relations.”

A teacher frame learning as something one does in exchange for a prize rather than as something intrinsically valuable ? -> the decision to give any reward reflects a theory of learning more than a theory of justice.

Treating People Like Pets

pop behaviorism is by its very nature dehumanizing. But I do not mean by that word merely that we are treated or understood as being on a par with other species; this is just a symptom. In the case of Skinnerian theory, the human self has been yanked up by its roots and the person reduced to a repertoire of behaviors. It is hard to imagine what could be more dehumanizing than the removal of what defines us as human.

In fact, even to suggest that we learn or work only in order to obtain rewards—an assumption held by behaviorists less extreme than Skinner—is not only inaccurate but demeaning as well.

The underlying theory of human nature, however, is not the only reason that handing out rewards (or, for that matter, punishments) is dehumanizing. That description also seems to apply because the practice is, at its core, neither more nor less than a way of trying to control people. Now there are circumstances, especially where children are involved, in which it is difficult to imagine eliminating all vestiges of control. (I will say more about this later.) But anyone who is troubled by a model of human relationship founded principally on the idea of one person controlling another must ponder whether rewards are as innocuous as they are sometimes made out to be.

rewards simply “control through seduction rather than force. In the final analysis, they are not one bit less controlling since, like punishments, they are “typically used to induce or pressure people to do things they would not freely do“ or rather, things that the controller believes they would not freely do.

This is why one of the most important (and unsettling) things we can recognize is that the real choice for us is not between rewards and punishments but between either version of behavioral manipulation, on the one hand, and an approach that does not rely on control, on the other.

We recognize the status difference between the rewarder and rewardee, meanwhile the use of reward benefit the more powerful party - rewarder

One example: Imagine that you have given your next-door neighbor a ride downtown, or some help moving a piece of furniture, and that he then offers you five dollars for your trouble.

Another example: a magazine editor who, after disagreements with others on the staff, was given to handing out bottles of wine or gift certificates

Three Objections offers remarks concerning control

  • The first is the relatively modest point that it may be misleading to speak of rewards as inherently controlling, since some rewards are more controlling than others.

  • Control is an unavoidable feature of human relationships; all that actually varies is the subtlety of the system of reinforcement — more so, perhaps, since social rewards may have a more enduring effect than tangible rewards. Just because we cannot readily identify the operative operant doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

    • The introduction to a book entitled Man Controlled pretty well captures this perspective. Those who raise concerns about what the title suggests, we are told, simply have a “fear of new knowledge” that has been cultivated by “alarmists.” Realists recognize that “the technology of behavior control is not good or bad, but neutral”—therefore “not even an issue”—for the simple reason that there is no freedom (in fact, this word appears only within quotation marks) to be lost. Whether we like it or not, “all behavior is controlled…. The world is, in a sense, one large ‘Skinner box.’”
    • in fact, I argued earlier that rewards are just as controlling as punishments, and delicate rewards as controlling as heavy-handed ones.

  • Even if it is possible to avoid controlling other people, control is sometimes an appropriate, even desirable, mode of interaction, whether we use rewards or some other technique. It could even be argued that parents who fail to control their children are not living up to their responsibilities.

Chapter 3: Is it effective to reward?

I will try to show in this chapter and the two that follow, they also change the way we do it. They offer one particular reason for doing it, sometimes displacing other possible motivations. And they change the attitude we take toward the activity. In each case, by any reasonable measure, the change is for the worse.

Skinnerian has written, the trouble “may be not that it doesn’t work but that it works only too well.”1) I think exactly the same thing can be said of rewards: we pay a substantial price for their success.

Do Rewards Change Behavior?

  1. For whom are rewards effective?

    For what? When we look at the probability that rewards will change human behavior, a pattern begins to emerge, as two management specialists have noticed:

    • Many of the early (and highly successful) applications of the principles of behavior modification have involved animals (such as pigeons), children, or institutionalized adults such as prisoners or mental patients. Individuals in each of these groups are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.
    • Laboratory animals are typically underfed to ensure their responsiveness to the food used as a reinforcer. Likewise, “in order to make people behave in a particular way … they must be … needy enough so that rewards reinforce the desired behavior.” People who have some degree of independence, will also respond to rewards on occasion, but it is more difficult to make this happen in a predictable, systematic way.

  2. For how long are rewards effective?

    The short answer is that they work best in the short term.

    • What if he becomes satiated

    • what if his demands to be paid off escalate (in frequency if not in quantity) beyond your desire or ability

      when the goodies stop, people go right back to acting the way they did before the program began. In fact, not only does the behavior fail "to generalize to conditions in which [reinforcements] are not in effect"

Platinum medal in Play Station

Losing weight, Quitting smoking, Using seat belts

  1. At what, exactly, are rewards effective?

    What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless.

Do Rewards Improve Performance?

No, the contrary is true in many experiments.

Rewards usually improve performance only at extremely simple—indeed, mindless—tasks, and even then they improve only quantitative performance.

Problems: Too generalized to put on all circumstances: Reward people and they’ll do a better job—and applied it in our workplaces and schools.

A mid-1970s research on reward:

Kenneth McGraw: Incentives will have(Most likely) a detrimental effect on performance when two conditions are met:

  1. when the task is interesting enough for subjects that the offer of incentives is a superfluous source of motivation;
  2. when the solution to the task is open-ended enough that the steps leading to a solution are not immediately obvious.

Further, Skinnerian approach is particularly unlikely to prove useful for creativity work.

We cannot casually assume it makes sense to reach for the reinforcements for everything that doesn’t demand creativity.

As one psychologist read the available research, people who are offered rewards tend to

  • choose easier tasks, are less efficient in using the information available to solve novel problems, and tend to be answer oriented and more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of a lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problems.

Chapter 4: THE TROUBLE WITH CARROTS: Four Reasons Rewards Fail

Rewards Punish

“attempt to change someone’s behavior by forcing him or her to undergo something unpleasant”

Reward and Punishment are similar.

  • Both are used to force a bahavior
  • Long-term use of either will raise the stakes and more threats and more sactions to get people continue working

Two features are more critial facts:

  • Punishment and reward proceed from basiclly same psychological model: “one that conceives of motivation as nothing more than the manipulation of behavior.”

When the promised rewards are taken away, people become demortalized.

Rewards Rupture Relationships

Rewards disrupt relationship ina a very particular ways that are demonstrably linked to learning, productivity and the development of responsibility.

In team cooperation, participants exchange skills, knowledge, resources. Each participant is encouraged and helped to do the best.

Reward is in the on contrary, based on the faulty assumption “that the organization’s effectivess is the simple additive combination of individuals’ separate performaces”, in the words of organizational psychologiest Jone L. Pearce. E.g. In a team, it becomes that a teacher expect “I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do.” People tends to perform better than perform in individual.

Rewards Ignore Reasons

A child is not behaving the way we want; a student is not motivated to learn; workers aren’t doing good work—this is when we bring in the reinforcements. *rewards do not require any attention to the reasons that the trouble developed in the first place. *

Rewards Discourage Risk-taking

Rewards can sometimes increase the probability that we will act the way someone wants us to act. But they do something else at the same time that many of us fail to recognize: they change the way we engage in a given behavior. Chances are you will not do nearly as well on this task as someone who was given the identical instructions but wasn’t promised a prize.

Conclude:

“Do this and you’ll get that” makes people focus on the “that,” not the “this.”

Chapter 5: Cutting The Interest rate: The Fifth Reason Rewards Fail

Who would have thought that play could be turned into work by rewarding people for doing what they like to do? —Rosemane Anderson et al., 1976

Intrinsic motivation remains a powerful predictor of how good a job someone will do in the workplace or how successfully he or she will learn in school. Intrinsically motivated people function in performance settings in much the same way as those high in achievement motivation do: They pursue optimal challenges, display greater innovativeness, and tend to perform better under challenging conditions.

The Old Man’s Plan

Example 1: Edward Deci, performed the first of what turned out to be a series of experiments with college students. The basic design was ingeniously simple and, as tends to be the case in social psychology, a little deceptive. Each subject was asked to work on an interesting spatial-relations puzzle. Half were promised money; the other half weren’t. Then the experimenter announced that it would be a few minutes before the next phase of the study got started. The subject was left alone in a room to wait, where he or she could continue playing with the puzzle, read a magazine, or daydream.

Actually, this was the next phase of the study; the subjects were secretly watched to see how long they worked on the puzzle when they had a choice. Those who had been paid, it turned out, now spent less time on it than those who hadn’t been paid. It appeared that working for a reward made people less interested in the task. Or, as Deci put it, “money may work to ‘buy off’ one’s intrinsic motivation for an activity.”

Example 2: Many teachers there used rewards to induce children to play with learning games, which they dutifully did. But when the rewards were no longer available, Lepper noticed that the kids wanted nothing to do with these activities anymore—whereas in classrooms that left it up to the children to decide what to play with, lots of them eagerly played with the very same games.

Despite the differences in design, the two experiments converged on a single conclusion: extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic motivation.

OLD MAN Joke

An old joke captures this phenomenon as well as any study could. It is the story of an elderly man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds each day as they passed his house on their way home from school. One afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how stupid and ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan. He met the children on his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments about him would receive a dollar. Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man ambled out and paid everyone. “Do the same tomorrow,” he told them, “and you’ll get twenty-five cents for your trouble.” The kids thought that was still pretty good and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers. “From now on,” he announced, “I can give you only a penny for doing this.” The kids looked at each other in disbelief. “A penny?” they repeated scornfully. “Forget it!” And they never came back again.

Most Memorable Studies: One of the most memorable studies to confirm this effect was conducted by a researcher whose specialty is the investigation not of rewards but of food preferences. Leann Lipps Birch and her colleagues at the University of Illinois took a group of children and got them to drink kefir, a fruit-flavored yogurt beverage they had never tasted before. The children were divided into three groups: some were just handed a full glass, some were praised (“That’s very good, you drank it all the way down”), and some were given a free movie ticket for drinking it.

Who drank more? Skinner, of course, would predict higher levels of consumption by those who received either verbal or tangible reinforcement. Was he right? Whenever I put this question to a group of people who have just listened to an account of how rewards are bad news, most of them now assume that everything Skinner says must be wrong—or at least that I wouldn’t bring up the study unless it refuted his prediction. In fact, though, his prediction is absolutely correct. If a reward is attractive enough, people will do almost anything to get it. A few extra gulps of liquid yogurt are surely worth a movie ticket.

But Birch was not interested in who would drink more kefir at the time the rewards were offered. What she wanted to know was how the incentives would affect the children’s long-term preferences. What she found was that those who got nothing for drinking it liked the beverage just as much, if not more, a week later. But those who had received tickets—or, to her surprise, praise—now found the stuff much less appealing

The problem is not just that the effects of rewards don’t last—although, as we saw in chapter 3, that is true in one sense: long-term change of the kind we want is not effected by manipulating people’s behavior with incentives. The more significant problem is precisely that the effects of rewards do last, but these effects are the opposite of what we were hoping to produce. What rewards do, and what they do with devastating effectiveness, is smother people’s enthusiasm for activities they might otherwise enjoy.

The Scope of the Effect

There is no significant difference among Age, Race, Social Class, Sex

Further scientific examinations of how rewards affect intrinsic motivation have turned up additional evidence of the extent of their destructive power. A single, one-time reward for doing something you used to enjoy can kill your interest in it for weeks.13 It can have that effect on a long-term basis, in fact, even if it didn’t seem to be controlling your behavior at the time you received it.14 The reward may also spill over to spoil your attitude about brand-new activities,15 in effect making you more dependent on extrinsic incentives generally. And just as you don’t have to be the one smoking a cigarette in order to be harmed by it, merely watching someone else get a reward for engaging in some activity can have at least a temporary motivation-killing effect.

The Reason for the Effect

  • Threatened
  • Watched
  • Expecting to be evaluated
  • Forced to work under deadline
  • Ordered around
  • Competing against other people

“But If We Just”

In some situations, we may be inclined to explain the consequences of using rewards by noting that whatever has to be done to get them is seen as just a prerequisite;

in other situations, we may notice that people lose interest by virtue of feeling controlled.

Some Discussion about following statements.

  • “Two kinds of motivation are better than one.“ it’s not so easy to combine intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to make them more motivated. Finding a task interesting, which is both critical to excellence and highly desirable in itself, is usually eroded by the addition of a reward.

  • “As long as you don’t use rewards permanently, there’s no problem.“ Switching the baits are appealing but …

Richard deCharms realized that the truth is quite different: giving someone an extrinsic reason for behaving in a certain way “changes the whole event; it does not just add a reward.” The Gestalt has been shifted; the perception of the task and of one’s motives may no longer be what they were.

  • “Rewarding people is not only inevitable but apparently desirable since people want the goodies we give them.“

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with offering a child acceptance and reassurance, but there is something very wrong with turning these into rewards that are provided only when the child acts in a certain way. In fact, the more you want what has been dangled in front of you, the more you may come to dislike whatever you have to do to get it.

Deci and Lepper, with the kefir study and the logic of the old man’s plan, it becomes clearer how this vicious circle works. When we are repeatedly offered extrinsic motivators, we come to find the task or behavior for which we are rewarded less appealing in itself than we did before (or than other people do). Thereafter, our intrinsic motivation having shrunk, we are less likely to engage in the activity unless offered an inducement for doing so. After a while, we appear to be responsive to—indeed, to require—rewards. But it is the prior use of rewards that made us that way!

As rewards continue to co-opt intrinsic motivation and preclude intrinsic satisfaction, the extrinsic needs … become stronger in themselves. Thus, people develop stronger extrinsic needs as substitutes for more basic, unsatisfied needs…. They end up behaving as if they were addicted to extrinsic rewards.

  • “Let people reward themselves.“

  • “The only problem is that we are offering incentives for the wrong behaviors. If we made rewards contingent on people’s doing exactly what needs to be done, the problem would disappear.“

  • “If we’re worried about reducing intrinsic motivation, then what’s the problem with giving people rewards for doing things they don’t find interesting?”
  • “Some people are more extrinsically oriented than others. Why not give rewards to those who seem to want or need them?“

Minimizing the Damage

  • Get rewards out of people’s faces.
  • Offer rewards after the fact, as a surprise.
  • Never turn the quest for rewards into a contest.
  • Make rewards as similar as possible to the task.
  • Give people as much choice as possible about how rewards are used.
  • Try to immunize individuals against the motivation-killing effects of rewards.

Chapter 6: The Praise Problem

Children have an intrinsic desire to learn. Praise and manipulation can only serve to stifle that natural motivation and replace it with blind conformity, a mechanical work style, or open defiance toward authority. —Randy Hitz and Amy Driscoll, 1988

“Good Work!” vs. Good Work

Hooked on Praise

Encouraging Words

The Fear of Spoiling

Rewards in Parcatice

Chapter 7: PAY FOR PERFORMANCE: Why Behaviorism Doesn’t Work in the Workplace

Actually, when I read the book, I was motivated that I might be able to find a way to produce intrinsic motivation, this must be very funny

BTW, Working towards deadline and a grade is one reason for such effect.

About our midterm? We read for the midterm?

Jail ?

Prisoners work to reduce the time they need to spend on jail.

  1. 对照组，给正面反馈和不给反馈，观察performance。Give a smile, praise, is same controlling like a dollar.
  2. Promise them rewards, finally they did not get it and become demoralized.
  3. 囚徒困境，多人闯关
  4. Then she brought 72 nine-year-old boys into her laboratory one at a time and challenged them to tell the two faces apart. Some of the boys were paid when they succeeded; others were simply told each time whether or not they were correct.
  5. “ooperation does not just make tasks more pleasant; in many cases, it is virtually a prerequisite for quality. More and more teachers and managers are coming to recognize that excellence is most likely to result from well-functioning teams in which resources are shared, skills and knowledge are exchanged, and each participant is encouraged and helped to do his or her best.”