Well… hrm. That might very well be true about toilet-training, as increased anxiety is one of the side-effects of positive punishment, and anxiety interacts exceptionally poorly with bladder control. So, I dunno.
But in general, I’m pretty sure what you’re saying isn’t quite right. If I want to extinguish, say, jumping on the couch, consistently punishing incidents of jumping on the couch will extinguish the behavior much faster than pretty much anything else I can do.
Please don’t misunderstand me; I absolutely don’t endorse this as a training technique. But the reason I reject it isn’t because it doesn’t extinguish the behavior quickly… it does. The reason I reject it is because it creates a host of related side-effects that make subsequent training much more difficult, not to mention make the subsequent relationship with the trainer (and often with everyone else) much more unpleasant for the trainee.
Punishment is a blunt axe, but it’s a powerful blunt axe.
I talked with my wife, the future BCBA, and it appears that my intellectual reach has exceeded my grasp. First, I seem to have confused positive reinforcement v. punishment and positive and negative instruction. It is the case that negative instruction (“Don’t throw your toy car”) is less effective than positive instruction (“We only throw balls”).
Second, there are some interventions, reinforcing and punishing, that could teach in one trial (consider heroin injections as reinforcement and flamethrowers as punishment). Edit: my wife says this point is about salience.
Third, best practices among behavior analysts are to use reinforcement prior to using punishment. My wife says that this is for ethical reasons—her reference book didn’t talk about the relative effectiveness of reinforcement and punishment.
Well… hrm. That might very well be true about toilet-training, as increased anxiety is one of the side-effects of positive punishment, and anxiety interacts exceptionally poorly with bladder control. So, I dunno.
But in general, I’m pretty sure what you’re saying isn’t quite right. If I want to extinguish, say, jumping on the couch, consistently punishing incidents of jumping on the couch will extinguish the behavior much faster than pretty much anything else I can do.
Please don’t misunderstand me; I absolutely don’t endorse this as a training technique. But the reason I reject it isn’t because it doesn’t extinguish the behavior quickly… it does. The reason I reject it is because it creates a host of related side-effects that make subsequent training much more difficult, not to mention make the subsequent relationship with the trainer (and often with everyone else) much more unpleasant for the trainee.
Punishment is a blunt axe, but it’s a powerful blunt axe.
I talked with my wife, the future BCBA, and it appears that my intellectual reach has exceeded my grasp. First, I seem to have confused positive reinforcement v. punishment and positive and negative instruction. It is the case that negative instruction (“Don’t throw your toy car”) is less effective than positive instruction (“We only throw balls”).
Second, there are some interventions, reinforcing and punishing, that could teach in one trial (consider heroin injections as reinforcement and flamethrowers as punishment). Edit: my wife says this point is about salience.
Third, best practices among behavior analysts are to use reinforcement prior to using punishment. My wife says that this is for ethical reasons—her reference book didn’t talk about the relative effectiveness of reinforcement and punishment.
Ah! Yes, that makes sense. Negative instruction doesn’t work very well, it’s true.
Mm… yeah, that’s a good point. I was eliding the distinction between salience and reward/punishment, and ought not have.