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Some experts have warned that bribing children to eat healthy foods can be counter-productive, undermining their intrinsic motivation and actually increasing disliking. Lucy Cookeand colleagues have found no evidence for this in their new large-scale investigation of the issue. They conclude that rewards could be an effective way for parents to improve their children's diet. '...rewarding children for tasting an initially disliked food produced sustained increases in acceptance, with no negative effects on liking,' they said.
Over four hundred four- to six-year-olds tasted six vegetables, rated them for taste and then ranked them in order of liking. Whichever was their fourth-ranked choice became their target vegetable. Twelve times over the next two weeks, most of these children were presented with a small sample of their target vegetable and encouraged to eat it. Some of them were encouraged with the reward of a sticker, others with the reward of verbal praise, while the remainder received no reward (a mere exposure condition). A minority of the children formed a control group and didn't go through an intervention of any kind.
After the two-week period, all the intervention children showed equal increases in their liking of their target vegetable compared with the control children. However, when given the chance to eat as much of it as they wanted (knowing there was no chance of reward), the kids who had previously earned stickers chose to eat more than the kids who'd just been repeatedly exposed to the vegetable without reward.
At one- and three-month follow-up, the intervention children's increased liking of their target vegetable was sustained regardless of the specific condition they'd been in. However, in terms of increased consumption (when given the opportunity to eat their target vegetable, knowing no reward would be forthcoming), only the sticker and verbal praise children showed sustained increases.
So, how come previous studies have claimed that bribery can undermine children's intrinsic motivation, actually leading to increases in disliking of foods? Cooke and her colleagues think this may be because past lab studies have often targeted foods that children already rather liked. Consistent with this explanation, it's notable that past community studies that reported the successful use of rewards targeted unpopular vegetables just as this study did.
An important detail of the current study is that verbal praise was almost as effective as tangible reward. 'Social reward might be particularly valuable in the home,' the researchers said, 'because it may help parents avoid being accused of unfairness in offering incentives to a fussy child but not to the child's siblings.'
参考译文：
有些专家说，用贿赂的方法诱使小孩吃素，不但没能让他们变得喜欢吃，反而降低了他们的内部动机，适得其反。但是Lucy Cooke和她的同事在一个新的有关该问题的大规模调查研究中，并没有发现支持这个说法的证据。他们的结论是，奖励能帮助父母使他们孩子的饮食得到改善。他们说，“用奖励使小孩吃原先不喜欢的食物，实际上能让他们慢慢喜欢上吃他们，而且并不会对它们的喜好产生负面影响。”
超过四百个四到六岁的小孩参与了研究。品尝六种蔬菜之后，要求他们评估其味道并按喜好程度排序，选取被他们排在第四位的那种蔬菜作为其“目标蔬菜”。接下来两周的十二次试验，大多数孩子面对少量 “目标蔬菜”并被鼓励食用之。一些孩子以贴纸或口头奖励作为食用“目标蔬菜”的奖赏，而剩下的则没有奖励（只是给他们暴露在这些蔬菜中）。另外少数没有接受任何干预的小孩组成对照组。
两周后，“对照组小孩”和所有那些“受干预小孩 ”同等表现出了对其“目标蔬菜”喜爱程度上的增加。然而，如果让他们按照自己意愿选择吃多少（在知道没有奖赏的情况下），则与那些没有奖赏只是重复性的暴露在其“目标蔬菜”中的孩子相比，那些早期试验中曾得到贴纸做奖赏的小孩吃了更多的“目标蔬菜”。
在之后一个月及三个月的跟进中，不管接受哪种条件干预的小孩，都持续保持着对其“目标蔬菜”增加的喜爱。但就食用量来说（在知道没有奖赏前提下选择食用），只有得到贴纸和口头奖励的小孩表现出持续增长。
为什么之前的研究，声称“贿赂”会破坏小孩的内部动机，反而使小孩更加不喜欢吃那些食物呢？Cooke和她的同事认为，可能是因为以前实验室研究所选用的目标食物，或许本来就是小孩自己所喜欢的。值得注意的是，以前的社区研究所报道过的“使用奖励方法让小孩吃原先不喜欢的蔬菜的成功应用”和本研究的结果是一致的。
本研究的一个重要细节是，口头奖励和有形奖励的效力是几乎相同的。“在家庭情景中，社会性奖励也许会更加有用，”研究人员说，“这也许是因为，仅奖励挑三拣四的小孩，会让其他小孩觉得不公平，而这也可以帮助父母们避免被指责。”
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