The Punishment Myth

I recently read Psychology in Plain English by Dean Richards. One of the chapters, called The Punishment Myth, deals with the way we tend to approach punishment and how our approach is, for the most part, rather ineffectual. So in the interests of making the world a better place, I thought I should let you know how we can improve our use of punishment.

Punishment comes very naturally to us. If someone does something we don’t like, our automatic reaction is to want to punish them – by hitting them, by damaging something belonging to them, by taking away their privileges, by stopping speaking to them, or simply by giving them a dirty look.

The problem is that for the most part, punishment doesn’t actually work. Certainly, the concept  might have potential, but in many cases, we don’t simply use it effectively.

But before we go any further, what does “effectively” mean? What “effect” are we trying to achieve? By smacking the child who has just broken a glass or by glaring at the person talking loudly in a restaurant, are we:

(a) trying to provide a deterrent, by showing them “This is what happens if you do this action, so you’d better not do it again” or

(b) trying to even the scores?

And here’s the crux of the matter. Frequently, we might think that we’re providing a deterrent for future offences, but in reality, we’re actually just trying to even the score. We’re thinking backwards instead of forwards.

It makes a lot more sense, though, to take approach (a), using punishment as a deterrent. Then it will keep paying off in the future, rather than just attempting to balance out things that are already in the past.

Now that we’ve established that, we can look at how to use punishment effectively. In order for a punishment to be effective, it needs to fulfil the following criteria:

1)      It must be unavoidable

2)      It must be immediate

3)      It must be moderately severe

4)      It must be infrequent

5)      It must be logical

1)      IT MUST BE UNAVOIDABLE

A fundamental problem is that punishment doesn’t actually motivate you to avoid the punishable behaviour. It really doesn’t. Think about it. All it does is motivate you to avoid the punishment itself.

One way to avoid the punishment is to hide the action. If you are a teenager who smokes and you know that your parents will be angry if they find out, then you simply don’t smoke at home. You hide your cigarettes and you chew gum before you see your parents so they won’t smell the smoke on your breath.

Another way is to avoid the punisher. Suppose your father has found out that you smoke and is giving you dull lectures on the dangers of cigarettes. So you start avoiding your father. You leave the house early in the morning before he is up, you come home and go straight to your room, you avoid being in the same room with him. And you keep smoking.

In both cases, the punishment has been avoided, and it has had no effect.

2)      IT MUST BE IMMEDIATE

Look at that big fat juicy hamburger sitting in front of you. It’s glistening with oil and dripping with barbecue sauce and garnished with pickles, and the smell of the meat tickles your nostrils. It’s irresistible.

Unfortunately, your doctor has told you that your cholesterol level is sky high and you need to stop with the hamburgers. Hamburgers will send your cholesterol soaring and you will develop heart disease and die.

Yes, but look at the hamburger! It’s right there, begging to be eaten, and it will make you so happy! Yes, it’ll give you heart disease and kill you, but it won’t kill you today. It’ll kill you next year, or the year after, or in ten years’ time. But if you give in and eat it, then the pleasure will be now.

And “now” wins out every time.

But imagine that you knew that you would have a heart attack the minute you bit into the hamburger. Then you’d exercise some self-control. If the punishment is immediate, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more effective. It’s related to the point above, on unavoidability. For some reason, “delayed” appears to equate to “avoidable” in our minds.

3)      IT MUST BE MODERATELY SEVERE

As with so many things in life, you need to find a happy medium between too much and too little.

Imagine, for example, that you’re driving and jump a red light, forcing a car to slow down to avoid an accident. You know that you shouldn’t do it, and you feel a bit guilty, but you’re in a rush. 

The driver of the car that slowed down for you shoots you a dirty look. You shrug, drive on, and within a minute have forgotten the entire incident.

That driver’s dirty look was an insufficiently severe punishment. At the next intersection, you will jump another red light. Zero effect.

Now imagine that instead of just giving you a dirty look, the driver follows you, and the next time you stop at a red light, gets out, marches over to your car and bashes your windscreen in.

How do you feel? Are you full of remorse at having jumped the red light? Are you vowing never to break the rules of the road again? Of course you’re not. You’re too busy feeling furious with the guy smashing your windscreen. You’re just thinking how you’d like to bash his head in.

The driver’s reaction was overly severe punishment. The problem with this approach is that it completely distracts the receiver from the deed they have done to merit this treatment, and simply makes them angry at the punisher.

4)      IT MUST BE INFREQUENT

Punishment can't be used too frequently if it is to be effective, because if it is a regular occurrence, it “normalises” and just becomes part of the backdrop of your life.

Imagine you’re a child and your mother is always shouting at you. You soon learn not to take any notice. If your mother is cross, then it doesn’t merit particular attention, because she’s always cross.

But imagine if your mother is always gentle and smiling and indulgent. Then one day you do something and she stops smiling. She is cross. Your docile mother who is never cross! Something bad has clearly happened, and you want the bad thing to be put right and never to happen again, so that your mother can go back to being kind and smiling.

5)      IT MUST BE LOGICAL AND NATURAL

Now here’s the part we keep getting wrong. A logical and natural punishment is one which would be a normal result of the undesired behaviour.

The example Dean Richards gives in his book is of a child leaving his bicycle in the driveway, where the father nearly runs it over as he reverses the car out. So the father storms back into the house and confiscates the child’s X-box.

The problem with this is that losing access to the X-box is not a natural result of leaving a bicycle in the driveway. The two things are completely unrelated.

So what would be the natural result of leaving the bicycle there? Probably that it would be crushed by the reversing car, leaving the child without a bicycle.

Now, it would be counterproductive to actually run the bicycle over to teach the child a lesson, because the parent would be landed with the cost of repairing it (and possibly the car). But the effect of leaving the child without the bicycle can still be achieved, by locking it up. The father can calmly explain that he was worried that the bicycle would get damaged, so he has put it somewhere safe and will unlock it in a day or two.

Being deprived of your bicycle is a logical, natural consequence of leaving it lying in the driveway. Next time you’ll put it away.

Many parents might be tempted to use smacking as a catch-all punishment. The problem with this is that being smacked is not a logical or natural result of anything very much. Smacking, for the most part, is a rubbish punishment.

SO IF WE ARE NOT TO PUNISH, THEN WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

Obviously, we not only want people to stop behaving badly, we also want them to behave well. How do you make someone behave well?

1)      REWARD DESIRED BEHAVIOUR

But you already knew that. 

2)      MAKE SURE THE SUBJECT KNOWS WHAT THE DESIRED BEHAVIOUR IS

It’s no good telling someone not to do something if they don’t know what they should be doing instead.

This occurred to me the other day when I saw some children on a train chasing each other round and round a pole, giggling hysterically, making themselves dizzy and bumping into other people.

“Careful!” called their mother. “Gently, children! Hey! I said gently!”

“If I were a four-year-old child,” I thought, “would I know what my mother meant if she told me to be ‘careful’ and play ‘gently’? I would probably think, “But I am being careful, and I am playing gently!” If, however, she told me to ‘walk, not run’ or to ‘stay away from other people,’ or indeed to ‘sit down quietly,’ then I would understand exactly what she wanted of me.”

This is especially effective if by performing the desired behaviour prevents the subject from performing the undesired behaviour, as illustrated in Amy Sutherland’s very amusing and enlightening article “How I trained my husband”. She describes a trainer of cranes who was annoyed with the cranes landing on his head and shoulders, so he trained them to land on mats instead. He didn’t punish the undesirable behaviour – he simply had the cranes replace it with something more desirable.

3)      EXPLAIN YOUR REASONING

You are much more likely to follow rules if you can see the sense in them. For example, if you are seven years old and your mother tells you to pick your toys up from the bedroom floor and put them in the cupboard, you will probably think she is just trying to sabotage your attempts to go out to play. However, if she tells you, “Put your toys in the cupboard so you know where to find them next time. Do you remember yesterday you couldn’t find your Spiderman? That’s because you didn’t put him away when you finished playing with him. And if you put your toys away now, that won’t happen again” then you are more likely to realise that the rule your mother is imposing is for your own good.

Furthermore, next time you play with your toys, you are more likely to put them away of your own accord, because you can see the sense in the rule.

So explaining your reasoning makes people more amenable to following rules and encourages them to police themselves when you are not around to enforce the rule. And if you can’t think of a good reason why you want a certain behaviour to be followed, then it’s worth asking yourself if it really does need to be followed.

4)      ALLOW THE SUBJECT TO HAVE SOME SAY IN THE RULES

You are more likely to follow a rule if you have imposed it on yourself. I have used this to great effect in the classroom. On the first day of a course, the first thing I get my students to do is to draw up their own “Code of Conduct”. They generally come up with the sorts of rules that I would have imposed myself (arrive on time, switch off phones, listen to the person who is speaking, etc.) but because they have come up with the ideas themselves, they feel more attachment to them. Then as soon as there is any disorder, a simple reading out of the Code of Conduct is generally enough to restore order.

      5)    MAKE IT EASY TO COMPLY WITH THE RULES

If you want your children to go sleep instead of staying up watching TV, then don’t put a TV in their bedroom. If you want them to eat healthily, then have healthy food in the house. If you want your elderly mother to use a mobile phone, then make sure she has a simple one that she understands how to use.

CONCLUSION

You’d think that after millions of years of living together, we would have developed ways to influence each other’s behaviour that actually work. And when the ideas above are pointed out to us, they all seem very obvious, but clearly, they’re not, otherwise everybody would behave according to them. So it’s just as well that someone like Dean Richards is there to point out our errors to us. Step by step, we will make the world a better place.