The Use of Punishment to Change Behavior - Essay Example

Running Head: THE USE OF PUNISHMENT TO CHANGE BEHAVIOR Critically Assess the Behaviouristic View of the Use of Punishment to Change Behaviour [Writer's Name] [Name of Institution] Punishment One type of punishment has us ceasing or getting rid of something that usually would be a positive fortifier; the other type has us generating something that usually would be a negative fortifier. Fortifier- positive or negative - increase the future possibility of actions that they pursue. Punishment is different in a significant way from fortification. Punishment takes place when a loss of positive or a gain of negative fortifier follows an action. But the definition does not state that punishment lessen the future possibility of punished actions. What consequence does the punishment have Punishment, through the elimination of positive fortifiers, is well understood. Another abuse of positive fortification is deliberately to transform even positive fortification into an instrument of forcible compulsion. This is a practice that some institutional managers and members of the serving professions frequently use in prisons and caring institutions for the mentally unwell and persons with retarded conduct. Also, other persons in the control position, acclimatized to forcible compulsion, frequently can realize no other way. If they try positive fortification, their first whim is to take something away from their control - to return it back for good behaviour. This happened in some prison projects that claimed to be using positive fortification. They put prisoners in solitary detention, let them elsewhere for short period if the prisoners showed proper penitence; dispossessed them of food, handed them bit of food stuff if they acted submissively. Then, for any lapse, real or superficial, they reemployed the dispossession. Does Punishment Work Punishment is widespread in the world. Does it attain its purpose There is no simple "yes" or "no" answers for this question. What turn out to conduct that is punished Does murder by society really diminish murder by individuals Does confinement keep people from doing the same crimes after such people get out Financial punishments can eradicate tax eluders' profits. Do occasional confiscations keep them truthful, or stop tax elusion by others This is the point where behaviour analysis can contribute. (Bauman, 1996) Punishment's Side Effects Punishment has side effects. According to Sidman (1989) the changes that occur in people who are punished and, what is even more vital, the changes that occur in those who do the punishing, lead to the finale that punishment is a most injudicious, unwanted, and fundamentally destructive way of controlling conduct. A side effect is a term that often refers to inadvertent effects of drugs. It has become common for hazardous side effects to cause the recall of drugs brought into the marketplace without sufficient testing. Punishment and other varieties of forcible compulsion, like many drugs, have been brought into our culture without sufficient testing. The results of punishment have large behavioural importance than hoped for main effects. Test results are now accessible. Behaviour analysis provides a lucid, systematic account of the results of forcible compulsion. Lots of chastisement side effects have been studied in the laboratory, not as minor phenomena but as processes significant in their own right. Perhaps a more careful evaluation of compulsive practices will cause them, too, to be taken off the approved list. It is usually claimed that the intention of punishment to be the control of redundant behaviour. But other options to punishment are available. They are non-traditional, unknown even to many psychologists. What makes these options necessary is the enormous catalog of punishment's side effects that discard its benefits and are accountable for much that is wrong with our social systems. From Bad to Worse: How New Punishers Are Made Trained reinforcers manage much of what we carry out. Passionate appreciation reinforces a stage recital because it pointers encouraging reviews, personal approbation and future appointments. Minute signals that specify crucial enchantments reinforce sentimental advances. According to Gershoff (2002) by the equivalent procedure, neutral actions can become retaliators-- as a consequence of our understanding with them. These are called conditioned retaliators. Accumulating this third factor to the basic fortification or punishment eventuality permits us to discover how features of the environment get control over behaviour. The Significance of Conditioned Punishment Punishment's first side effect is to give any indication for punishment the proficiency to punish on its own. A component that leads to punishment becomes a punisher: Once a person has slapped a child, the mere prospect of our raised hand will suffice. Novel fortifiers and punishers are created this way -- by indicating other fortifiers or punishers. Why should this side upshot cause any anxiety The process is potentially volatile. Whenever anyone is punished, we come more and more under compulsive control; we rely more and more on counter compulsion to keep ourselves buoyant. Conditioned punishment is a noxious side effect of punishment. (Wenger, 1999) Environments where one is punished become punishing. People who exercise chastisement become conditioned punishers. All the side effects that stuns generate, we, too, will generate. Anyone who uses stun becomes a stun. Escape and Escape Routes Punishment and negative fortification, when caused by the same event, become linked in a nasty circle. A stun that we flee also punishes whatever we did just before the stun; it sets up the potential for negative fortification; it fortifies whatever we do to turn off the stun. Punishers - people, things, events, or places -- repress actions that generate them, and cause flee as a side effect. The punisher may not even be aware of the link between the reprimands and flee. (Cotton, 2000) Countless marriages break up because of compulsive manages by one or both spouses. The most direct means to study flee is to present negative fortifiers and, simultaneously, give the subject a flee route; stun a laboratory rat, but let the animal turn off the stun straight away by pressing a lever. Before long, the animal will learn to press the flea lever as soon as the stun comes on. This reveals that both constructive and unconstructive fortification can teach new behaviour. Now we get down to the core of the subject. What is competent teaching What does effectual control mean How can one tell whether someone's behaviour has been changed well In the negative fortification possibility, laboratory animal has been taught something: to be ever-attentive, to turn off stun by pressing the lever, to lead a "life of silence desperation" -- but nothing else, its sole condition of success being its usefulness in diminishing the amount of stun it gets. Positive fortification leaves us free to spoil our curiosity, to attempt new options, to expand prospects, to learn in momentous ways. (Mcdonald, 2001) If the goal is to produce a being that will do exactly what one desire, and nothing else, strong negative fortification is the way to go. Outside the laboratory, a vast variety of flea routines are performed. Levers are founded to switch off stuns. Tuning Out We tune out what displeases us. Unless bad news demands immediate action, we escape by becoming deaf or blind to it. We see and hear what we want to see and hear. We may save a relationship by ignoring small annoyances, but tuning out danger and danger signals is not adaptive. The danger does seem to go away. But can we survive by ignoring reality Do Nothing Flee from problem deciphering turns out to be more strengthening when a wrong judgment could create cataclysm. Nuclear armaments are becoming progressively more easily reached even to terrorists. Still, there is a propensity to made-up the upheaval cannot occur. Or the prospect is far-flung. Flee from veracity and liability carries on. The reprieve from having to make a prospectively terrifying decision is instantaneous. (Baum, 1994) It directs us more strappingly than the calamitous but long-delayed effect of making no apparent conclusion. The decision to do nothing put downs us free to track our daily interests and obsessions. The deep-seated problem is behavioural, and performance analysis depicts it. But it is not obvious that our class is compartmentally prepared to work out it. Can we probably lessen the control that precedent and present eventualities wield over our existing manners Can we, instead, put ourselves under the charge of a possibility that has not at all so far ensued Can we come what may make the endangered annihilation of the species a more influential decider of our demeanour Dropping Out We have loafers from education, from the family, from religious conviction, from private or the public accountability, from nationality, from the social order, from existence. The general element is pessimistic fortification. (Sidman, 1989) Learning through Avoidance Punishment chases the laboratory animal's proceedings until it discovers to bear down on its evasion lever --The issue learns to take the direct and constricted path. Pressing the evasion lever is not dangerous. Eventualities of escaping can modify people to become androids. People can find out by means of avoidance eventualities; what they learn, nevertheless, is to evade, and slight else. Terrorism In current years, fanatics have determined and are developing a new shape of compulsion. They mete out a single stun-- arbitrary killing. They try to compel the privileged of the world to force down an unusual evasion lever: Grant us what you have, or we will demolish all that an individual value. Because activists have diminutive to mislay and they often think they have much to increase in the henceforth-- they are keen to annihilate even themselves in the practice. Constructive fortification, used inefficiently, has helped promote intimidation. The fee of release-- whether cash, jailbird exchanges, hauling, weapons, or any other encouraging return -- has made certain that the taking and assassination of detainees will keep on. Paying money for the release of one cluster has warranted that others will afterward be taken. (Ciocchetti, 2004) As long as we give terrorists for what they execute, they will be content to continue willing us with more of the same. This is not an issue of personal view; it is the way constructive fortification exerts. Behaviour Management in Institutions Those who pre-tense dangers to themselves or to humanity in general we often commit to foundations. We give away these "humane" conveniences to members of the helping professions -- and sponge down our hands of the problems. Staff expediency and prisoner submissiveness replace instructive, curative, and correctional objectives. Cruelty becomes the means of selection for getting the prisoners to "perform". And so we get intimidation existing in the institutional running of the retarded, of the emotionally ailing, and of immoral of all kinds. Freedom from public responsibility turns many of these amenities into stockrooms for society's oddities. When public or official pressure for restructuring comes up, it is transitory; an examination hardly ever appraises the purpose of behaviour management procedures. Prisons as Learning Environments Solemn crimes subsist at all economic and communal stages. But homes and environs that undergo the cruellest societal and economic denial also produce the most visible forms of youthful illicitly. Young citizens in dejected areas grow up not capable to interpret, write, or compute numerically. Their objectives focus on the instantaneous resolution of coercive incidents compelled by the law and by the deficits that ineptitude fetches on. Their lives gyrate around reinforcers bounded to victuals, refuge, alcohol, sex, drugs -- and currency to acquire these. What they do learn is occasionally the only way unlock to them for attaining basic reinforcers: "Take them from somebody else." (Birch, 2000) When such teenagers fail to benefit from, they are thrown to reformatories. Before being enslaved, they obsessed limited adaptive expertise. Numerous reinforcers were beyond their contact and others were unidentified to them. After rationing their term, they generally return to their old region. If they have been "restructured" in any means, it has been by a honing of their skill to carry on from getting grabbed. Many do get seized. The risk of incarceration failed to stop their first anarchic acts, and concrete detention fails to put off their recurrence. These collapses are to be projected; coercive control presents no substitutes for the offender who lacks, collectively enviable kinds of skill. Detention centres and penitentiaries manage reinforcers to an extent not allowable on the outside. It is feasible to use positive fortification to teach prisoners more adequate forms of behaviour. An optimistic reinforcement agenda, organized before youths have become routine lawbreakers, costs less than to hold up the standard system of coercive power. (Baum, 1994) The project defined paths -- with fixed reinforcers -- obtainable to inmates. No one was obliged to take these lessons; no one was lock out; penalty did not pursue if any person favoured the standard prison practice. Inmates signed up in this project acknowledged credit checks as reinforcers for finishing learning responsibilities. They got possessions that otherwise would not have been accessible. Earned 'goodies' included private room, desks, seats, cabinets; lanterns items that made persistent study practicable, along with continued underpinning. They could keep and utilize the credits like wealth to shop at the project's store, supplied with objects made to order to their preferences. Classified ownership produced new supporters. Melody, television, equipment, and wall ornaments became items attraction working for -- and learning sustained. (Emmendorfer, 1999) As undergraduates studied new and extra compound behaviours, they were permitted formerly prohibited rights: visits in seclusion by associates and relations, managed trips outside the borders. Ultimately, they came to use their credits to pay coaching for classes that they demanded -- a necessity they would also have to convene outside. When these learners left, their world had lengthened. Many capitalized on new prospects that the non-disciplinary approach brought up to them. Smaller amount came back to detention centre. References Baum, W. (1994), Understanding Behaviourism-Science, Behaviour & Culture. New York Harper Collins. Bauman, Laurie J., (October 1996), Assessing The Causal Effect Of Childhood Corporal Punishment On Adult Violent Behaviour: Methodological Challenges,Pediatrics, Part 2 of 2, Vol. 98, Issue 4. Birch Christopher, (2000). Memory and Punishment, Criminal Justice Ethics, Vol. 19. Ciocchetti Christopher, (2004), Punishment, Reintegration and Atypical Victims, Criminal Justice Ethics, Vol. 23. Cotton Michele, (2000). Back with a Vengeance: The Resilience of Retribution as an Articulated Purpose of Criminal Punishment, American Criminal Law Review, Vol. 37. Emmendorfer L. Janet, Crosbie John, (1999). Effects of Punishment Proportion and Condition Sequence on Contrast and Induction with Humans, The Psychological Record, Vol. 49. Gershoff, E. T. (2002). Corporal Punishment By Parents And Associated Child Behaviours And Experiences: A Meta-Analytic And Theoretical Review. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 539-579. Mcdonald D. Michael, Silvia M. Mendes, (2001). Putting Severity of Punishment Back in the Deterrence Package, Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 29. Sidman Murray, (June 1989), Coercion and Its Fallout, Cambridge Centre for Behavioural, ISBN: 0962331112. Wenger, N.S., Korenman, S.G., Berk, R., Liu, H., (May 1999), Punishment For Unethical Behaviour In The Conduct Of Research,Journal of Chiropractic Technique, Vol. 11, Issue 2. Read More