Stanford study reveals the subtle cost of rewarding children's natural creativity

A 1973 Stanford study uncovers how external rewards can diminish children’s intrinsic desire to create, highlighting the importance of fostering play without the pressure of approval for sustained creativity.

A child’s first drawings often begin as a kind of play, made for the pleasure of moving colour across paper. Yet that instinct can be quietly displaced when the response matters more than the making itself. The question then changes from curiosity to performance, and the child starts working for approval rather than for the activity. That shift, small as it looks, can shape how creativity develops.

A landmark 1973 study at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School captured that dynamic with unusual clarity. Psychologists Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett observed preschoolers who already enjoyed drawing, then divided them into groups: one was promised a “Good Player” award for drawing, another received the same award unexpectedly afterwards, and a third received no reward at all. When the children later had the chance to draw freely, the group that had been promised the prize showed less interest and produced weaker pictures than the other two groups, according to the original paper. Stanford Magazine has since cited the experiment as one of the nursery school’s classic findings.

The result helped popularise what psychologists later described as the overjustification effect: when an activity that already has its own appeal is tied too tightly to an external reward, the original interest can diminish. A 1999 meta-analysis by Edward Deci, Richard Koestner and Richard Ryan found the same broad pattern across a large body of experiments, especially where people expected a tangible reward for doing something they might otherwise have chosen freely. The broader lesson is narrower than the crude version often repeated in parenting debates: rewards are not inherently harmful, but they can crowd out intrinsic motivation when they are layered on top of something a child already wants to do.

That idea reaches well beyond the art table. Approval, in modern childhood, is often public, quantified and immediate: praise from adults, points in class, thumbs-up reactions, follower counts and group status all create the same basic bargain. Jennifer Crocker’s work on contingency in self-worth, widely discussed in psychological literature, suggests that when esteem depends heavily on other people’s approval, the costs can show up in mood, learning and relationships. The child learns to treat each piece of work as a test of whether they are acceptable, and the safest work usually becomes the least interesting.

What helps at home is not silence, but a different kind of attention. Commenting on effort, persistence or choice gives a child information about their own experience, rather than turning the finished piece into a verdict on their value. Many educators make a similar distinction between feedback that notices process and praise that crowns the product. It also helps to leave room for making that does not need an audience at all: drawings that are not displayed, constructions that are dismantled, songs that are never recorded. That private space is often where children protect the impulse to create for its own sake.

The Stanford study endures because it names something familiar rather than exotic: the point at which a child stops drawing because the paper is interesting and starts drawing because someone is watching. The first motive is fragile, but it is also the one most worth preserving. If adults want children to keep their sense of play, they have to be careful not to make every act of making into a search for applause.