Desmond Byrne

“Give most children crayons and paper and they’ll happily draw for the fun of it; the intrinsic reward of doing something creative keeps them happy and interested. But as soon as you pay children for their art, their drawings get sloppy and less detailed. They also don’t seem to enjoy the process of drawing anywhere near as much when they are offered a treat in return for each piece produced. In studies, children who know they will be rewarded for their drawings spend only about half as much time playing with crayons as those children who aren’t offered a reward.5 In fact, the exact same behavior had already been observed in the 1960s with chimpanzees in the wild. Desmond Morris, a man with “surrealist painter” and “children’s author” alongside “world-renowned zoologist” on his CV, observed that wild chimpanzees stopped drawing for its own sake as soon as they learned that drawings earned treats. Those drawings that they could be persuaded to produce were made with less time, care, and attention. “Any old scribble would do and then it would immediately hold out its hand for a reward. The careful attention the animal had paid previously to design, rhythm, balance and composition was gone and the worst kind of commercial art was born.””