rich55@hound.UUCP (R.GORE) (12/27/85)
Behavioral science does not say that "punishment is bad"; nor does it say that reinforcing a behavior will always create a dependence between the behavior and a reward, although this can be done. Punishment (removing a positive stimulus, adding a negative stimulus) shapes behavior just as well as reinforcement (adding a positive stimulus, removing a negative one) when done CONSISTENTLY and following a SCHEDULE. Children who are punished learn to stop the punished behavior whenever they believed that the punisher could not be escaped. The drawback of punishment is that it will usually only shape behavior that the punisher is aware of, and also create escape behavior. So a result of consistently taking toys away from children when they fight will be that they will either stop fighting whenever you're around, or they will grab their toys and try to make a break for it. (Or they may even generalize the not-fighting behavior even when you're not around; that's what makes kids more interesting than rats.) But if you're only interested in stopping a behavior when you're around, punishment is certainly effective. Children who are rewarded for a "good" behavior every time they do it do tend to get hooked on the reward, and the behavior extinguishes when the reward is withdrawn (or soon thereafter). To maintain the behavior for long periods of time, you should gradually and randomly increase the number of times you fail to reward the good behavior. Slot machines approach this in their payoffs of lever-pulling behavior.