Could this have anything to do with our culture’s fascination with cunning, charming, arrogant characters without much of a moral compass? (Wait, is that actually culture-specific, or are tricksters typically sympathetic?)
Given the evidence for psychopaths’ dominant response styles and differing response thresholds, increasing the salience and consistency of punishments would be important elements in these interventions.
I would say the exact opposite! Drop the punishments since those don’t work well, and reward desired behaviors instead.
Holy moly, freaky theory: The old parenting style of punishing children when they misbehave and ignoring them the rest of the time produces obedient children in a population with low psychopathic traits, but children good at manipulating parents otherwise. When the population becomes more psychopathic (possibly due to this; in general I’d expect more social and reproductive success from good manipulators with little care for social norms, though impulsiveness may compensate), rewarding children for good behavior works better. Do we know where the parenting style shift came from?
How do you reward/reinforce desired behaviors in cases when the desired behavior is normal rather than exceptional? If I give my child a reward every time they’re not hitting their sibling, isn’t this isomorphic to taking away their expected reward every time they do hit their sibling (a punishment)? Worse, if I only started this “reward basic lack of misbehavior” scheme when I noticed that a child was prone to misbehavior, isn’t that just going to be perceived as “[I/my sibling] got a new nearly-continuous reward for misbehaving enough to trigger parental notice”?
Then, since it’s significantly harder to apply reinforcements than punishments to badly-behaved children, wouldn’t we expect to see a strong correlation between reinforcement and good results (or between punishment and bad results) regardless of how effective each was at changing behavior?
You don’t reward the omission of bad behavior, you reward good behavior. For example you reward your child every time they are good to a sibling. Sure, it is harder to look for good behaviors and to reward that instead of simply punishing the child when they do something bad but punishment doesn’t work well as mentioned earlier and for example often leads to situations where the child decreases the undesired behavior but only when it is being watched.
Also whenever you can you should choose intrinsic or ever extrinsic reinforcements.
Talk about building a system that can be gamed! My big dog does not steal my little dogs food except when he can. And in between they play together pretty amusingly. I don’t think I would gain anything by rewarding them playing together in terms of a lower rate at which the theft of food occurs. The problem being, my big dog (and probably my little dog) don’t think its “wrong” to steal food, they just don’t have that gene.
Given that the food is usually the positive reinforcement when you are conditioning animals and that is one of their goals for which they change their behavior it is indeed quite hard to reinforce them not to eat when presented with the option.
You could reward at random time intervals if the behavior persists during the interval (for persistent behaviors like not hitting), or after a random number of repetitions of the behavior (for discrete behaviors). I’m not actually sure why random reinforcement works better than systematic, but I expect the effect to apply here.
The problem of what to reward is harder, but maybe you could make a list of every absolute demand and stick to that? Parents always drop some of their nice-to-haves because otherwise the kid can’t do anything right so you’re better off letting them draw on the wallpaper if that means they’ll stop sticking forks into plugs. (Also the Chaos Legion demands that you ask “Is that actually bad?” when a kid does something unexpected but not so obviously bad you didn’t think of it.)
Wait, is that actually culture-specific, or are tricksters typically sympathetic?
I’m not sure “sympathetic” is the right word. I’m not an anthropologist, but the impression I get from reading trickster stories—whether we’re talking about Raven or Anansi or Reynard the Fox or Gregory House—is that the main appeal comes from watching the protagonist do things to annoying people or institutions that would get you fired or incarcerated or at least get your ass kicked, do them with style and without remorse, and get away with them at least for a time. It’s a schadenfreude thing, and it’s fun to watch even if the character is depicted as an unrepentant jerk—which most of them are.
It is indeed a standard finding of behaviorism and conditioning that punishment is significantly less effective than reinforcement when trying to produce change in the behavior of an animal or a person.
How much “obedience” do you think is optimum for the individual? Even for society? If sociopaths are over-represented in leadership positions, maybe this is a feature and not a bug: the last thing you want is a principled leader when the struggle is to the death against an equally matched opponent except the opponent is less principled.
A hypothesis that could be tested is that “healthy” obedience to social norms appears as a matter of degree, that too much of it is as restrictive to what roles the individual can play in society as is too little of it, and that a society with a mix of levels of “obedience” is more effective at competing against other societies with a less varied range of obedience, either all followers or all psychopaths.
That psychopathy behaves as much like a disease as does, say, homosexuality is telling us something. Perhaps that we have similar reasons for classifying either one as a disease. (And to recap, homosexuality used to be classed as a disease albeit with few or no successful treatments and few or no comorbidities, but is no longer classified as such.)
Obviously modern society needs to protect itself against psychopaths in many micro cases, this can be done most effectively when we have a better understanding of what psychopathy is and what it is not,.
Could this have anything to do with our culture’s fascination with cunning, charming, arrogant characters without much of a moral compass? (Wait, is that actually culture-specific, or are tricksters typically sympathetic?)
I would say the exact opposite! Drop the punishments since those don’t work well, and reward desired behaviors instead.
Holy moly, freaky theory: The old parenting style of punishing children when they misbehave and ignoring them the rest of the time produces obedient children in a population with low psychopathic traits, but children good at manipulating parents otherwise. When the population becomes more psychopathic (possibly due to this; in general I’d expect more social and reproductive success from good manipulators with little care for social norms, though impulsiveness may compensate), rewarding children for good behavior works better. Do we know where the parenting style shift came from?
Questions for both you and Tenoke:
How do you reward/reinforce desired behaviors in cases when the desired behavior is normal rather than exceptional? If I give my child a reward every time they’re not hitting their sibling, isn’t this isomorphic to taking away their expected reward every time they do hit their sibling (a punishment)? Worse, if I only started this “reward basic lack of misbehavior” scheme when I noticed that a child was prone to misbehavior, isn’t that just going to be perceived as “[I/my sibling] got a new nearly-continuous reward for misbehaving enough to trigger parental notice”?
Then, since it’s significantly harder to apply reinforcements than punishments to badly-behaved children, wouldn’t we expect to see a strong correlation between reinforcement and good results (or between punishment and bad results) regardless of how effective each was at changing behavior?
You don’t reward the omission of bad behavior, you reward good behavior. For example you reward your child every time they are good to a sibling. Sure, it is harder to look for good behaviors and to reward that instead of simply punishing the child when they do something bad but punishment doesn’t work well as mentioned earlier and for example often leads to situations where the child decreases the undesired behavior but only when it is being watched. Also whenever you can you should choose intrinsic or ever extrinsic reinforcements.
Talk about building a system that can be gamed! My big dog does not steal my little dogs food except when he can. And in between they play together pretty amusingly. I don’t think I would gain anything by rewarding them playing together in terms of a lower rate at which the theft of food occurs. The problem being, my big dog (and probably my little dog) don’t think its “wrong” to steal food, they just don’t have that gene.
Given that the food is usually the positive reinforcement when you are conditioning animals and that is one of their goals for which they change their behavior it is indeed quite hard to reinforce them not to eat when presented with the option.
You could reward at random time intervals if the behavior persists during the interval (for persistent behaviors like not hitting), or after a random number of repetitions of the behavior (for discrete behaviors). I’m not actually sure why random reinforcement works better than systematic, but I expect the effect to apply here.
The problem of what to reward is harder, but maybe you could make a list of every absolute demand and stick to that? Parents always drop some of their nice-to-haves because otherwise the kid can’t do anything right so you’re better off letting them draw on the wallpaper if that means they’ll stop sticking forks into plugs. (Also the Chaos Legion demands that you ask “Is that actually bad?” when a kid does something unexpected but not so obviously bad you didn’t think of it.)
I’m not sure “sympathetic” is the right word. I’m not an anthropologist, but the impression I get from reading trickster stories—whether we’re talking about Raven or Anansi or Reynard the Fox or Gregory House—is that the main appeal comes from watching the protagonist do things to annoying people or institutions that would get you fired or incarcerated or at least get your ass kicked, do them with style and without remorse, and get away with them at least for a time. It’s a schadenfreude thing, and it’s fun to watch even if the character is depicted as an unrepentant jerk—which most of them are.
It is indeed a standard finding of behaviorism and conditioning that punishment is significantly less effective than reinforcement when trying to produce change in the behavior of an animal or a person.
How much “obedience” do you think is optimum for the individual? Even for society? If sociopaths are over-represented in leadership positions, maybe this is a feature and not a bug: the last thing you want is a principled leader when the struggle is to the death against an equally matched opponent except the opponent is less principled.
A hypothesis that could be tested is that “healthy” obedience to social norms appears as a matter of degree, that too much of it is as restrictive to what roles the individual can play in society as is too little of it, and that a society with a mix of levels of “obedience” is more effective at competing against other societies with a less varied range of obedience, either all followers or all psychopaths.
That psychopathy behaves as much like a disease as does, say, homosexuality is telling us something. Perhaps that we have similar reasons for classifying either one as a disease. (And to recap, homosexuality used to be classed as a disease albeit with few or no successful treatments and few or no comorbidities, but is no longer classified as such.)
Obviously modern society needs to protect itself against psychopaths in many micro cases, this can be done most effectively when we have a better understanding of what psychopathy is and what it is not,.