This experiment was designed to investigate the role of external influences in children's self-regulatory behavior under stringent-demand and lenient-demand conditions. The abilities of a stringent-demand condition (in the form of stringent instructional sets and criterion setting) and a lenient-demand condition (in which lenient instructions were provided) to maintain children's performance on an arithmetic task were examined. The performance of these two self-regulatory groups was compared with that of a control group, in which no prizes were administered. The subjects, who were randomly assigned to one of the experimental groups, were 33 boys and 29 girls from the third and fourth grades. Following five trials in which children self-administered prizes, all subjects in the stringent-demand group performed significantly better, during both the incentive and the extinction conditions, on all three dependent variables than did subjects in both the lenient-demand and control groups. Factors contributing to the differential performance of subjects under the lenient-demand and stringent-demand conditions are discussed in light of the self-reinforcement literature.Self-management strategies have recently received much research attention, and their success has been witnessed in several important areas, including both clinical and applied settings (Masters & Mokros, 1974;Meichenbaum, 1979;Thoresen & Mahoney, 1974). As a result, the possibility that selfcontrol procedures may provide a viable alternative to external control becomes apparent.Among procedures falling under the rubric of self-control, self-reinforcement has stimulated the vast majority of research attention. Its effectiveness in modifying a host of behaviors attests to its potential This project was supported entirely by a faculty research grant awarded to the first author.The authors would like to thank members of the Pittsburgh Public Schools and Lloyd Briscoe for their patience and cooperation throughout this project. Special thanks are also extended to Alan Bellack, Alan E. Kazdin, and Samuel M. Turner for their suggestion on an earlier version of this article. We would also like .to express our extreme gratitude to the following students for their role as experimenters in this project:
This investigation was designed to ascertain the effects of instructions, criterion setting, and the presence of tangible rewards on the selfreinforcement process. Fifty-two third-and fourth-grade subjects
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