Incentives are not only about operant conditioning, and what matters is whether a given measure is successful in changing people’s behaviour, not whether it’s successful specifically by means of operant conditioning.
I don’t think “incentive” is a standard term in behaviourist psychology at all, but unless I’m very confused—which is always possible—operant conditioning absolutely does include responses to the presence or absence of unpleasant stimuli, and also to the absence of a pleasant one that would otherwise have been present. If you’re claiming that disincentives can’t be effective in changing behaviour, I think you need to provide some actual evidence for that.
I wasn’t attempting to put up an “academic fence”, I was responded to what seemed like your attempt at doing exactly that. I’ve no objection to the terms “incentive” and “disincentive”. Perhaps I misunderstood your intention.
Anyway, it seems to me that the claims you’re making have got weaker and weaker, to the point at which they don’t offer any real argument against (e.g.) taxes on things the government wants people to do less of.
You started off by claiming that doing this would be counterproductive because the government’s incentives would be wrong. “Anything you tax you have little incentive to decrease.”
I pointed out that that could be counterbalanced by the fact that taxing things give the people actually doing them an incentive to do them less. You then shifted to claiming that specifically for addictive drugs making one drug less available just makes people switch to another.
I pointed out that we aren’t talking only about addictive drugs, and questioned whether there’s good evidence that the substitution effect you describe is strong and consistent enough to justify the claim that there’s no point trying to dissuade people from taking a drug because they’ll necessarily switch to another that’s just as bad. You ignored my request for evidence, and switched to arguing that taxes give disincentives which are completely different from incentives.
I pointed out that disincentives are one variety of incentives. You then switched to saying that they’re completely different from the perspective of operant conditioning.
I pointed out that human motivation isn’t just operant conditioning and that operant conditioning works with disincentives as well as incentives. You switched to claiming that operant conditioning is “the gold standard”, whatever exactly that means, and that positive stimuli work better than negative stimuli in operant conditioning.
By this point, what you’re saying has very little to do with the original question. We shouldn’t tax lotus-like things … because operant conditioning is (in some unspecified and unevidenced sense) the best way to modify behaviour and it works better with positive than negative stimuli? That doesn’t seem very convincing.
Again, I’m not arguing that the government should (always, or often, or in any particular case, or ever) tax lotus-like things. Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe not. But I hope that whoever’s making that decision is going to base it on something other than what sort of stimuli are most effective for training pigeons.
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Incentives are not only about operant conditioning, and what matters is whether a given measure is successful in changing people’s behaviour, not whether it’s successful specifically by means of operant conditioning.
I don’t think “incentive” is a standard term in behaviourist psychology at all, but unless I’m very confused—which is always possible—operant conditioning absolutely does include responses to the presence or absence of unpleasant stimuli, and also to the absence of a pleasant one that would otherwise have been present. If you’re claiming that disincentives can’t be effective in changing behaviour, I think you need to provide some actual evidence for that.
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I wasn’t attempting to put up an “academic fence”, I was responded to what seemed like your attempt at doing exactly that. I’ve no objection to the terms “incentive” and “disincentive”. Perhaps I misunderstood your intention.
Anyway, it seems to me that the claims you’re making have got weaker and weaker, to the point at which they don’t offer any real argument against (e.g.) taxes on things the government wants people to do less of.
You started off by claiming that doing this would be counterproductive because the government’s incentives would be wrong. “Anything you tax you have little incentive to decrease.”
I pointed out that that could be counterbalanced by the fact that taxing things give the people actually doing them an incentive to do them less. You then shifted to claiming that specifically for addictive drugs making one drug less available just makes people switch to another.
I pointed out that we aren’t talking only about addictive drugs, and questioned whether there’s good evidence that the substitution effect you describe is strong and consistent enough to justify the claim that there’s no point trying to dissuade people from taking a drug because they’ll necessarily switch to another that’s just as bad. You ignored my request for evidence, and switched to arguing that taxes give disincentives which are completely different from incentives.
I pointed out that disincentives are one variety of incentives. You then switched to saying that they’re completely different from the perspective of operant conditioning.
I pointed out that human motivation isn’t just operant conditioning and that operant conditioning works with disincentives as well as incentives. You switched to claiming that operant conditioning is “the gold standard”, whatever exactly that means, and that positive stimuli work better than negative stimuli in operant conditioning.
By this point, what you’re saying has very little to do with the original question. We shouldn’t tax lotus-like things … because operant conditioning is (in some unspecified and unevidenced sense) the best way to modify behaviour and it works better with positive than negative stimuli? That doesn’t seem very convincing.
Again, I’m not arguing that the government should (always, or often, or in any particular case, or ever) tax lotus-like things. Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe not. But I hope that whoever’s making that decision is going to base it on something other than what sort of stimuli are most effective for training pigeons.