The Wrong Way To Get People To Do The Right Thing By Kohn

The value of human kind is obliterated, and personal financial interest is serving as a replacement. As described in “The Wrong Way to Get People to Do the Right Thing”, people act on the basis of incentives and opportunity costs rather than their own intuition. The idea of acting based on kindness of heart and charity in todays society often seems to be very foreign. As a reader, Kohn persuaded me to believe that rewards make people less helpful. Through the use of situational irony, facts and statistics, and appealing to the readers sense of sorrow; Kohn persuaded me to believe that rewards destroy the purpose in which people act. Kohn draws attention to the use of situational irony in the idea of “doing the right thing”. While helping others is intended to be done out of goodness of heart, the opposite is often the reality. In Kohn’s article he declares, “Many religious traditions promise that those who act rightly will be rewarded with a pleasant afterlife or a

A world where “… wife-beating is disproved mostly because it leads to the excessive use of medical benefits”. A world where wife-beating should not stop because it is cruel, but because it simply “costs too much”. Kohn makes the reader feel deep agony for what peoples intentions are. By appealing to our emotions, he allows the reader to think for themselves that society needs to change. Kohn acknowledges that a child would even conclude that everyone acts for egoistical reasons despite what it might seem. He allows the reader to believe that no one is selfless, and people only act for the wrong reasons. In the last sentence of the article, strong diction of the words “invocations of self-interest” and “self-reproducing framework” are used to pursue melancholy in the reader about what society has become. Kohn conveys the challenges of offering rewards by leading the reader to feel that people only act based on what will