Effects of uninstructed verbal behavior on nonverbal responding: Contingency descriptions versus performance descriptions.

College students sat at a computer and pressed a button. A schedule paid them for fast presses.

Before each session the experimenter read one of two short rules. One rule said what the schedule did: “You get points when you press fast.” The other rule said how to do the task: “Press the button quickly to earn points.” The team watched which rule shaped the students’ pressing.

When the rule told students how to perform, every student matched the speed the rule described. Their pressing stayed steady across the whole session.

When the rule only described the contingency, results were messy. Some students followed the schedule, others did not. The schedule alone could not be trusted to guide behavior.

Dougherty et al. (1994) saw the same pattern with competition. Adults chose to compete even when the odds of winning were tiny, because social instructions over-ruled the math. Together these studies show that human choice follows the rule on the table, not the numbers in the machine.

Alba et al. (1972) found a similar split in a classroom. Reinforcing “pay attention” helped behavior but not math scores. Reinforcing accuracy helped scores but hurt behavior. Like the 1985 lab, the frame of the contingency decided what people actually did.

The 1985 paper sharpens the lesson: performance rules beat contingency rules in both adults and kids.

When you write task instructions, tell the client exactly what to do, not just what the payoff is. Say “Put each block in the blue box” instead of “You get tokens for correct sorting.” A clear performance rule locks the behavior in place and keeps the schedule from drifting it away.