Curt Flood. Through the 1960's, Curt Flood, center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, was arguably the best baseball player in America. He could hit with power and was a .300 career hitter, was an excellent baserunner, and was the best defensive outfielder in baseball. At the end of the 1969 season, he was summarily traded to Philadelphia, including a slight reduction in his $110,000 annual salary (one of the biggest in sport at the time). He was unhappy about being traded, and decided to not play baseball for what he considered to be an unacceptable amount of money given that he had no say in the trade. Curt Flood moved to Los Angeles and became an artist, essentially never playing baseball again.

I was in graduate school when this happened, and I remembered thinking that here was a guy who, at one time in his life, played baseball for the fun of it (intrinsic reinforcement). Then, he started getting paid for it (extrinsic reinforcement), and, when the extrinsic conditions were no longer to his satisfaction, he quit. It's important to keep in mind that $110,000 in 1969 would be close to $1M today. This seems to me to be a case of the extrinsic contingencies coming to predominate the behavior. Zillions of baseball wannabes, or even other major league ball players for that matter, would have been thrilled to make what he was offered, even if it meant living in Philadelphia (especially considering it would be St. Louis he was leaving). His prime reason for quitting was that he felt he wasn't being adequately (extrinsically) compensated. My guess is, if he had never been paid for playing ball, he would have continued enjoying playing ball well into later life. I'm guessing he never played in a game after he left organized ball.

You call this positive reinforcement? We tend to equate receiving appetitive stimuli for behavior as positive reinforcement, and that positive reinforcement is a good thing--it's what we work for. But is this arrangement always reinforcing? For example, consider a recent contest run by the Mars Candy Co. After you had eaten the M&Ms, you could open the package to find out if you had won. The little cartoon to the right is how the company let people know that they had not won. Is the statement from the M&M on the left reinforcing to the M&M on the right? Apparently not. As a sidenote, consider how ubiquitous the term postive reinforcement has become--it even shows up on M&M wrappers!

The link below will take you to a site that addresses this issue in a little more depth.

• Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation: when do rewards harm?

My question for you is, "How can we get out of the dilemma that positive reinforcement is not always viewed as good?" You might want to go way back to early in the semester and consider what really defines positive reinforcement.

Last modified November 14, 1998.