To understand the importance of punishment and reinforcement, we need to first understand that while our brain houses our personality, the parts pf us that make us US, it is also, fundamentally, a fibrous stick of butter. It follows the laws of physics, it responds to environmental cues, and it is broken into a bunch of tiny little parts that all do different things. Some of those parts can think rationally and some of them do not think at all, they only feel, sense, and understand in fragments. This is part of what makes us us, but it is also part of what makes your brain very mechanical in nature.
In a psychological context, we have STRICT definitions for things like punishment and reinforcement. In the context of psychology, punishment is anything that decreases a behavior. Anything, regardless of intention, regardless of the emotion, regardless of control and power, regardless of anything, ANYTHING that decreases behavior is a punishment. And inversely, anything that INCREASES a behavior is a reward.
The fine tune this idea further, we can talk about POSITIVE (+) and NEGATIVE (-) punishment and reinforcement. Positive and negative, in this context, do not refer to morality or pleasantness. They refer to math – addition or subtraction of something from an equation. If I am using negative reinforcement, I am not rewarding you with something bad, I am rewarding you with the removal of something unpleasant to you. Taking ibuprofen is negative reinforcement because it removes (or subtracts) a headache, granting you the reward of less pain. When you connect your seatbelt to stop your car from yelling at you, that’s negative reinforcement. The removal of the annoying ding increases the likelihood of buckling your seatbelt. That is negative (subtraction) reinforcement (increasing a behavior.) Simialrly, positive punishment can include things like spanking because it is adding something (pain) to decrease a behavior, so even though it is not good to use often it is considered “positive” because all we mean by “positive” in this context is addition.
Now that these terms are clearly defined, I would like to tell a story: My mom had a friend growing up whose father was a Bishop in the Mormon church. Mormons are VERY anti-swearing (I got called a motherfricker once for honking at someone when I was driving back to BYU) and kids often do not recognize swear words. So my mom’s friend, let’s call her MF, learned a bad word on the playground and said it at home. Her dad told her to not talk like that because those words make Jesus sad, THEN he made her wash her mouth out with white vinegar.
The trick to this was that my mom’s friend has a rare condition that makes vinegar taste sweet to her. Like candy. So her dad said “Sweetie, no, saying ‘damn’ makes Jesus cry, here, have some candy” and because she did not understand the concept of sin and DID understand the concept of candy, she started swearing more. MF learned more and more bad words, she used them more and more, always getting the sweet reward of vinegar after her parents told her to stop saying those words.
One day, her mom comes down the stairs in the middle of the night and sees MF drinking distilled white vinegar straight from the bottle and it all clicked. She LOVES vinegar. Every time she says a bad word, they gave her a treat. They had trained her to swear! Their own grumpiness at the situation was not a deterrent. She didn’t care if her dad was grumpy with her, she just wanted the candy. So her mom sneaks back upstairs, tells her dad, and the next time she swears they wash her mouth out with soap and she NEVER swore again.
Punishment, when used tactically, is not actually a bad thing. When I was a little kid I did not know that cars cannot see me. I did not know they were dangerous. So one day I was running towards the street because I thought I saw a quarter and my mom grabs me by the arm and pulls me back inside. She didn’t let me go back outside for an hour, not because she hated me and wanted me to be sad, not because she enjoyed the sound of me crying, not because she wasn’t interested in seeing if there was a quarter in the street, but because she needed me to know that going into the street unsupervised was dangerous.
The trick with punishment, however, is that it only tells you what NOT to do. It doesn’t instruct, it only deters. So then the next question comes: What do I do instead?
When my mom let me go back outside, she made me practice crossing the street *with her.* She made a little sing-songy mantra for us, which was “You have to hold hannies when you cross the street!” (Hannies was how I pronounced hands until I was like 8) and she got SO excited when I held her hand to cross the street AND THEN she gave me an otter pop when we went back inside, and I held hands while crossing the street until I was SO old omg. If you want someone to stop swearing, like MF, then you can use punishment to deter the behavior, but that still leaves a gap – what SHOULD MF say? If it’s left unaddressed then the gap is filled by fear – we know what happens when we say the wrong thing is gross, but if we say the right thing, nobody does anything, so we don’t know.
And from an observer perspective, why WOULD you do something when someone does something well? It’s what they were supposed to do, right? Kids don’t get treats for NOT swearing, they just get punished for swearing. But if you REALLY want your kid to not swear, then you also have to REINFORCE alternative words. If your kid says “Fuck this!” and you wash their mouth out with soap, then they know not to say “fuck,” but if you give them a pat on the back and a “I’m proud of you!” when they go “Oh fu-, wait, I mean Oh darn it,” that lets them know you LIKE the alternative word they used and they are in the clear to continue using it. Reinforcement isn’t just kinda important, then, to changing behavior, it is vital.
So now the obvious question is “OK, Lizard, you’ve clearly explained how to train kids like puppies, I’m now marginally better at manipulating people to my will, but who cares?” I would like to argue that YOU, yourself, ought to care, because YOU., yourself, have doubtless been punished for something before and not had reinforcement to replace the behaviors. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t get reinforcement. That means the reinforcement wasn’t positive, it was negative. When people are punished but not given reinforcement, it means that the reinforcer changes into a lack of punishment. That relief you get when your car stops yelling at you – yeah, you’ve felt that before haven’t you? Who else has yelled at you for doing the wrong thing but never praised you for doing the right one? Who else has grounded you for getting a ‘C’ on your math test but not congratulated you and gotten excited with/for you when you got an ‘A’ the next time? You learn that there is pain for failure but not joy for success. So YOU care about it because you’re tired – tired of feeling scared, of running, of hiding things and feeling the reward of relief at not getting caught or the release of letting your guard down, instead of the joy at living life. “But everyone is living life” yeah and everyone should be able to feel joy with it. To feel reward from their life. “But it’s the bare minimum” maybe to not get punished, but is it the bare minimum to live a joyful life?
I see this all the time as a therapist, and truthfully it is so sad regardless of whose perspective I see it from. “I want my husband to stop leaving his towels around on the floor so I yell at him when he doesn’t put them away, but when he does put them away I’m supposed to pat him on the back?” YES! And you were ALSO supposed to be patted on the back for doing things like that, and you never were, and now the only language you speak is “Stop it!” and “Do more or else!” and now you don’t know how to reward yourself or let yourself feel pride in your accomplishments.
It’s heart-breaking to see how punishment perpetuates punishment, the same way it’s heartbreaking to see reinforcement be ignored. “Yeah, I got a 3.7 GPA this semester, but I just have to do it all again next semester, what’s even the point?” Well for you the point is probably to avoid being chastised by the disappointed teacher/parent (either IRL or in your head, depending on phase of life), but in reality the point is to learn skills and information that give your life more meaning. It’s to learn how to do things that make your life easier, better, and more enjoyable. That’s the goddamn point. Life is to be enjoyed in the light of day, not in the dark secret loneliness of fear. When your beneficial, helpful, joyful, or exciting things are not reinforced, the reinforcement instead becomes the relief at having finished them without being punished. We reinforce ourselves because we have to, but without better guidance the reinforcement tends to be minimal and related to avoidance of punishment.
So what do you do now? Well, if you’re anything like me the next step is going to feel offputting, dirty, almost violating in a way. It’s gonna feel like you’re breaking a rule, like you’re being self-indulgent. The next step is to reinforce what matters to you.
This does not have to be huge. You don’t have to buy yourself a car anytime you get an ‘A’ on a final exam. You don’t have to buy yourself an ice cream cone every time you do the dishes or fold your laundry. But if you let yourself feel proud of having done the dishes, that is enough of a reward to start allowing the dishes to be something done out of self-care instead of something done out of punishment-aversion.
If you remind yourself at the end of the day that you didn’t just “sit around doing nothing,” but that you spent time resting and recuperating, and that you deserved to rest and recover, that counts as reinforcement. Not just for reinforcing rest, in this example, but for reinforcing that you can feel pride in being functional, even if it’s “just the bare minimum.” The bare minimum keeps you alive, warm, clothed, and fed, so it deserves to be reinforced. Playing a video game for an extra half-hour after work helps you calm down and re-center, so it deserves to be reinforced. That snack you had between breakfast and lunch gave you extra energy, nutrition, and joy, so you can stop punishing yourself for it and let that joy and nutrition be a reinforcer. That walk you went on to clear your head during an argument deserves to be reinforced because it’s helping you communicate more effectively.
If you’re reading this and can relate to frequently feeling scared, confused, and overwhelmed, but not often excited, pleased, or comfortable, you may want to start looking at what punishers and reinforcers are active in your life (or have been in your life beforehand.) If you’re finding yourself perpetually disappointed in yourself or loved ones, you may want to ask what reinforcement you can offer to make changing behavior easier, and ask yourself if you’ve been overly-reliant on punishment in the past.
Be kinder to others, be kinder to yourselves, read more Terry Pratchett, treat your brain like it’s 50% machine and 50% human, and remember – now more than ever before – that you need reinforcement more than punishment.
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