Rewards resurface as creativity enhancers.

Psychologists take opposing views of how external rewards, from warm praise to cold cash, affect motivation and creativity Behaviorists, who study the relation between actions and their consequences, argue that rewards can boost performance at work and school. Cognitive researchers, who study various aspects of mental life, maintain that rewards often undermine creativity by fostering dependence on approval and gifts from others.

The latter view has gained many supporters, especially among educators. But the careful use of small monetary rewards sparks creativity in grade-school children, suggesting that properly presented inducements indeed aid inventiveness, according to a study in the June Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"If kids know they're working for a reward and can focus on a relatively challenging task, they show the most creativity," asserts Robert Eisenberger of the University of Delaware in Newark. "But it's easy to kill creativity by giving rewards for poor performance or creating too much anticipation for rewards."

A teacher who continually draws attention to rewards or who hands out high grades for mediocre achievement ends up with uninspired students, Eisenberger holds. As an example of the latter point, he notes growing efforts at major universities to tighten grading standards and reinstate failing grades.

In earlier grades, the use of so-called token economies, in which students tackle challenging problems and receive performance-based points toward valued rewards, shows promise in boosting effort and creativity the Delaware psychologist contends.

Eisenberger and Michael Selbst, a graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia, studied 504 fifth and sixth graders attending public schools in Wilmington, Del. The researchers looked at divergent thinking, a component of creativity that involves generating various answers to a problem that has many alternative solutions.

Children studied five target words, such as "instrument" and "refrigerator," one at a time. Some were asked to construct six new words from letters in each target word; others were asked to come up with one new word from each target word.

For each correct answer, youngsters in the two groups received the affirmation "That's correct" and in some cases either a penny or a dime. Money was placed in front of participants in some trials and hidden from view in others.

Children then completed a second task, in which they drew pictures using a set of circles printed on a sheet of paper. Two judges independently rated drawings for their originality. Renderings of happy faces, for instance, occurred far more often and were judged less original than drawings of eyeglasses or tires.

Compared to the verbal affirmation, visible penny rewards on the more challenging word task produced greater originality on picture drawing. The same payments on the less challenging word task reduced subsequent creativity Visible 10-cent rewards failed either to boost creativity following the challenging task or to decrease originality after the simpler task.

However, hidden dimes also upped creativity after the challenging task and deflated it following the simpler trials.

Kids tend to apply divergent thinking to new situations after getting nondistracting rewards, such as visible pennies or hidden dimes, whereas the same rewards foster mental laziness if used with simple tasks, Eisenberger concludes.

Behaviorists largely agree with this interpretation. "The cognitive position on reward is unfortunately oversold these days," contends Allen Neuringer of Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Moreover, people given rewards spend as much time working on experimental tasks and display the same motivation as those offered no rewards, asserts Judy Cameron of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Cameron's statistical analysis of nearly 100 such studies will appear in the Review of Educational Research.

Teresa M. Amabile, a cognitive psychologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., rejects these suggestions. Eisenberger and Selbst rewarded kids to produce a larger number of unusual responses on tasks that did not actually measure creativity, she argues.

Amabile and her coworkers find that creativity in artwork and written stories drops for children who receive or expect to receive prizes or other rewards.