BOOK REVIEW / PSYCHOLOGY : Money May Not Be the Great Motivator, After All : PUNISHED BY REWARDS: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes, <i> by Alfie Kohn</i> , Houghton Mifflin, $22.95, 384 pages

Unlike their mightier cousins, TV and radio, most nonfiction books published in America tend to be charmingly offbeat. A haven both for those wisely rejected by mainstream culture and those bravely ahead of their time, they have become our samizdat , as free-thinking as most public discourse in America is parochial.

“Punished by Rewards” is a particularly fine example of how good publishing’s bad timing can be. In an era of unprecedented agreement between Democrats and Republicans about the wisdom of championing free-market competition at home and abroad, along comes writer and lay psychologist Alfie Kohn, arguing that money and other rewards not only do not buy happiness, they can, if misapplied, kill people’s desire to do their best.

No doubt, thousands of disillusioned socialists on our college campuses share the same gripe. And Kohn’s basic longing--for some Utopia where people cooperate rather than compete--is probably something we’ve all felt.

But unlike some loose countercultural cannon, Kohn is able to back up his criticism of our motivational practices with solid, exhaustive evidence gathered at such leading capitalist think tanks as Harvard Business School.

Since World War II, Kohn explains, American “Behaviorists”--scientists who subscribe to B. F. Skinner’s belief that man can be handled by incentives--have been unable to explain a bizarre but consistent research finding: Dangling carrots in front of workers--whether they be the gold stars a teacher gives his students or the merit raises a company manager grants her employees--tends to decrease the quality of work, especially on creative tasks.

In the early 1960s, Louise Brightwell Miller at the University of Kentucky discovered that 9-year-old boys were less likely to solve a simple identification test when they were paid for right answers than when they worked for free.

Meanwhile, Mark Lepper at Stanford found that if you offer kids rewards to induce them to play with learning games, they will want nothing to do with these activities once the rewards are withdrawn. “ ‘Do this and you’ll get that,’ ” Kohn explains, “automatically devalues the ‘this.’ ”

Of course, this practice is easy for Kohn, in his Ivory Tower, to eschew. Teachers and managers manning the front lines of unruly classrooms and apathetic work forces, on the other hand, will wonder, “If I shouldn’t say, ‘Do this and you’ll get that,’ then what can I say instead?”

For teachers and parents of young children, Kohn has some good answers. He admits that control can be necessary: “A 3-year-old cannot be permitted to toddle out into the street at will.”

But he counsels that when we resort to control, “we should be absolutely certain that less intrusive, more respectful interventions cannot work. We should also think about how an act of control is exercised.” That is, do we justify it with a reasonable explanation: “Cars come by here very fast sometimes and I love you so much that I have to make sure you don’t get hurt”?

Unfortunately, Kohn is unable to offer strategies to help managers and teachers decondition older kids and adults raised to survive in a culture that is organized, as are all animal societies, on the basis of competition.

He can only lament that public education in America has become a disheartening maze wherein young children begin bright-eyed and “endlessly fascinated by the world,” but finish, after years of carrot-and-stick manipulation, “complaining about homework . . . (counting) the minutes until the end of the period, the days before the weekend, the weeks they must endure until the next vacation.”

Such Behaviorist mazes, Kohn believes, have left America with a population of halfhearted workers whose sentiments are unmistakable in such bumper stickers as “Thank God It’s Friday” and “I Owe I Owe--It’s Off to Work I Go.” “One could scarcely imagine,” Kohn writes, “more vivid signs of an economic system in crisis.”

Kohn quotes the legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, who has called the corporate system by which merit is appraised and rewarded “the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world.” It “nourishes short-term performance,” Deming writes, “annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and . . . leaves people bitter.”

Deming’s and Kohn’s vision of our competitive, reward-based culture is clearly too dark to be fully realistic. USA Today Publisher Al Neuharth, for instance, whose rallying cry has long been “Life is a game--play it to win,” is but one of many American leaders who have shown that sportsmanship, played both for symbolic and monetary goals, can indeed encourage creativity and excellence.

Still, Kohn’s warning about the dangers of undermining such higher motivational drives as curiosity and reason cannot be ignored. These dangers are perhaps best illustrated in a story about Saul Oliner in Kohn’s last book, “The Brighter Side of Human Nature.”

Oliner was a Holocaust survivor who mapped the motives, explanations and backgrounds of European Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. Contrary to his expectation, Oliner found that these altruists included both self-confident and insecure people, the deeply religious as well as atheists.

The one trait that these heroes shared, however, was an upbringing free from punishment and bribes. Invariably, Oliner found, their parents had motivated them through reason.