Punishment

[andrewducker]

You cannot simply train cats with punishment. No matter what you do, they never learn not to climb on the kitchen counter. You can squirt them with water, knock them on the floor, administer light spankings and you will still not instill a belief that being on counters is a universal bad.

What you _will_ instill is the urge to avoid being caught on the kitchen counter. Congratulations, you have trained your cat to fear you.

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You cannot simply train people with punishment. No matter what you do, they never learn not to copy files. You can put up notices everywhere and sue 0.01% of them, but you will still not instill a belief that copying music is a universal bad.

What you _will_ instill is the urge to avoid being caught copying music. Congratulations - you have trained your customers to fear you.

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This is not to say that there aren't certain things you can't train a cat not to do - they are (usually) easily trainable to use a litter tray/outdoors, for instance. But this seems largely to be because cats naturally use an area for a toilet and the location of that area is fairly plastic. Training them not to do things that are natural for them to engage in doesn't work.

And the same goes for almost any trait in people - if someone is doing something, they're doing it because it's what they want to do. Punishing them for doing it won't lead to them not doing it - it'll just lead to them doing it when you aren't about, or doing it when they don't think they'll get caught.

Which isn't to say that people can't or don't change. But they have to want to change themselves, and they need positive reasons to do so - not just fear. Almost every study of the justice system has shown that punishment has almost no effect on re-offence rates, but education and job-skills have huge effects. Similarly, listen to rhetoric on both sides of any war - "We will keep killing them until they surrender." versus "Their attacks just make us mad - we will never surrender!".

Think about that next time you want to alter someone's behaviour - what actual effect will your behaviour have on them, and how woud you react in a similar situation. Punishment makes you feel good, but it doesn't actually do any good.

Comments

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I see your point, but I'm not really sure that cats and humans are quite so comparable. I just don't think most cats are *capable* of 'wanting to change themselves' - I once heard a description that animals are conscious of others, but not themselves, and to a large extent I agree with that - whereas humans are.

I'm probably nitpicking here instead of going with your main argument, huh. :)

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

From watching children, I don't think you can just lump all punishment together. For example, a young child will often throw tantrums. If the child is set outside on her own until she can control her moods again, it is a punishment (separation from the group), but you can clearly see that, over time, she learns to control her emotions before she gets to the tantrum stage.

You can also see the effect of a lack of punishment on children who are raised too permissively.

Where fear comes into play is when the punishment is out of proportion, or not understandable by the child. Punishment without clear communication as to what went wrong, why the punishment was necessary, and how to avoid the punishment in the future is pretty worthless.

Punishment as a deterrant is not adequately reflected in the rates of crime reoccurrance, either, because those people who commit a second crime are those who already decided that the act was worth the risk of punishment. The number of people who would commit crimes if there were no negative consequences cannot be measured.

You say that people mostly do what they want, but I do not believe that people have a complete, inherent moral system. I believe that very few of the things that we, as socialized individuals, consider "wrong" are ingrained. Therefore, I believe that a system of punishment and reward is the only way to imprint morality.

To use your same analogy, you cannot teach a cat not to jump on a counter by only rewarding him when he doesn't do it. You cannot reward a cat every moment he is not on a counter and have it be meaningful, and if you try to reward him when he jumps off the counter, he will only jump on and then off to get the treats.

In conclusion - if your cat likes to jump on your counters, you're screwed.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I think the difference between people and animals (perhaps not higher simians) is surely that we CAN be trained to do things that aren't natural to us (by whatever means) - not hit each other, table manners, putting the toilet seat down :-)

Or to put it another way we are sufficiently evolved that we can be motivated by reason not just instinct or reward.

On a good day.

(I agree BTW that reward as a training mechanism usually works far better than punishment).

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

If you could implant a cat with a chip so they got an electric shock every time they jumped on the counter, I believe they would lose the desire to do so in fairly short order.

Likewise people (not that I ever jump on the counter... I prefer a nice well-sprung mattress, myself).