Abstract
In the movie Mary Poppins, the children hear their magical governess sing that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” as she whisks about, using her powers to clean up the untidy nursery. The message of this song is that “in every job that must be done there is an element of fun” and all one has to do to enjoy work is find that element. There is a double meaning to this message. On the one hand, the spoonful of sugar provides the extra sweetness needed to transform an unpleasant task to “a piece of cake.” On the other hand, once that “element of fun” is discovered, the task activity itself becomes rewarding, and even as mundane an activity as cleaning up one’s room can become enjoyable. This principle of having an intrinsic motivation replace an extrinsic one is used extensively in behavior modification, particularly as applied with children. The goal is to have the learner become more motivated by the intrinsic features of the desired behavior (such as keeping “on task” in school) so that extrinsic rewards (tokens or candy) used initially to reinforce the desired behaviors can be phased out eventually.
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
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Whitbourne, S.K. (1986). A Spoonful of Sugar. In: The Me I Know. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8618-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8618-6_7
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-96261-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-8618-6
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