Abstract
Skepticism that normally focuses on pseudoscientific claims can also be directed at “established” principles of behavior. After discussing some ways in which empirically-derived principles can potentially mislead, as an illustrative example I describe some reasons to wonder whether our understanding of punishment is as established as sometimes assumed.
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Notes
Yale University commencement speech, June 11, 1962; retrieved from http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3370.
My comments also are selective in that I will steer clear of certain practical matters regarding punishment’s position in society. Examples include legal restrictions on clinical applications of punishment in many jurisdictions and the view of clinical punishment as unkind, abusive, or otherwise objectionable in many codes of clinical ethics. Lengthy treatises could be devoted to examining how punishment got to be so unpopular and how current legal and ethical stances square with the empirical evidence on punishment. In the latter case, interested readers may find that Cipani (2004) provides a good start.
A common corollary to the First Core Truth is that efforts to harness punishment for therapeutic purposes are destined to fail (e.g., Vargas 2009). This is a complex topic that deserves more attention than be provided here, but I will mention two relevant issues before moving on. First, many interventions seek to build new repertoires and, unlike positive reinforcement, punishment does not teach what to do. I agree that under most circumstances positive reinforcement is preferred for constructing new repertoires. Second, for a variety of reasons, it is often said that punishment interventions do not actually eliminate unwanted behavior. This claim runs counter to a number of published reports of effective applications of punishment, both alone and in combination with positive reinforcement procedures (e.g., Lindsheid, Iwata, Rickets, Williams, & Griffiths, 1990; see also Lerman and Vorndran 2002).
Some of my colleagues might discount this external evidence due to the fact that relevant studies were conducted using experimental methods in which they have limited faith. While part of skepticism does require considering the quality of empirical evidence, the wholesale dismissal of a literature rarely enhances a discipline’s credibility. I am reminded here of Hearst’s (1967) characterization of the typical basic behavior analyst as “a hard-nosed experimentalist who … attacks anything that sounds even mildly theoretical or physiological, ridicules anyone who has ever used statistics of the R.A. Fisher variety, and ignores the work of any psychologist who does not publish in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior” (unpaginated).
Cooperation can be increased by making it the most individually profitable strategy, but under such circumstances individual self-interest aligns with the common good and the task no longer parallels the social dilemmas that cooperation games were intended to model.
These results do not indicate whether the punishment game was preferred because penalties enforce cooperation, because it “feels good” to punish non-cooperation, or because of some combination of these factors. The noteworthy point, however, is that almost all players chose to place themselves in a game where they could be penalized. These findings have limited precedent in the behavior analysis literature. In a few cases, individuals have been shown to prefer contingencies involving aversive stimulation to contingencies involving only positive reinforcement (e.g., Hanley et al. 2005; Iwata and Bailey 1974). In these cases, however, the contingencies were strictly individual, and beneficial outcomes were measured at the individual level. The present focus is on preference for punishment-based social contingencies.
The “better outcomes” are defined socially; that is, “greatest common good” means maximizing collective, not individual, benefits. In both laboratory and clinic, behavior analysts usually seek to identify functional relations governing individual behavior. Thus, the available evidence on not just punishment, but most behavioral phenomena, comes from this level of analysis. One wonders what other behavioral phenomena, besides punishment, might look different to us if viewed through the lens of interactive social relations.
To those who find this conclusion about the potential social benefits of punishment unsettling, take heart: Research also indicates that when given the opportunity players in cooperation games will reward others’ cooperation, even when this costs them some of their own earnings. Such player-mediated rewards tend to increase the overall level of cooperation in the game (Balliet et al. 2011; Szolnoki and Perc 2010). As with the punishment contingencies I have described, however, these are “additional” contingencies, superimposed upon the primary contingencies embedded in the game, and thus do not change the general observation that cooperation is unreliable under typical payoff systems modeling social dilemmas. Additionally, cooperation is enhanced more by allowing players to penalize non-cooperation than by allowing them to reward cooperation (Baillet et al. 2011). Thus, my general point about the potential value of punishment appears to hold.
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Critchfield, T.S. Skeptic’s Corner: Punishment — Destructive Force or Valuable Social “Adhesive”?. Behav Analysis Practice 7, 36–44 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-014-0005-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-014-0005-4