The Power of Reinforcement

3. CARROT-AND-STICK CONTROL, BRIBERY, AND VALUE

27 3 CARROT-AND-STICK CONTROL, BRIBERY, AND VALUE While ignorance about a general principle does not mean that principle does not exist, ignorance does lead to inaccurate criticisms. For example, establishing and increasing the rate of behavior with reinforcement has been criticized as a “carrot-and-stick” approach to behavior management and child care. Indeed, Alfie A. Kohn titled a chapter “The Trouble with Carrots,” in his book Pubished by Rewards and disparagingly refers to reinforcement as a carrot-and-stick approach no less than ten times. “The carrot-and-stick approach in general is unsuccessful” (Kohn, 1993, p. 201). Relating to the criticism that reinforcement is “rat psychology ,” under a section titled “Treating People like Pets,” Kohn remarks: “Before these words came to be used as generic representations of bribes and threats, what actually stood between the carrot and the stick was, of course, a jackass” (p. 24). The implication is that rewards (i.e., reinforcers) are bribes, and that purposefully using reinforcement with humans makes them something other than human (in Kohn’s example, jackasses). “The unconscious assumption behind the reward-punishment model is that one is dealing with jackasses, that people are jackasses to be manipulated and controlled.” The relationship is “inevitably one of condescending contempt whose most blatant mask is paternalism” (Levinson, 1973, pp. 10–11).This absurd polemic assumes that my parents, millions of other parents, and the hundreds of thousands of teachers who participate in Book It! (just to name a small subset of people) or other reinforcement programs, have “condescending contempt” for their children and all “assume” that their children are jackasses! The carrot-and-stick criticism generally reflects an ignorance of the reinforcement process and is a thinly disguised insult to professionals who use or advocate the use of reinforcement to ameliorate human problems. An image of a carrot-and-stick falsely implies that those who use reinforcement in a programmatic purposeful fashion are simple and largely ignorant of more sophisticated and more effective methods to enrich children . Yet, the editorial boards of journals that focus on the practical application of reinforcement such as the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and Behavior Modification, are filled with professionals from many of the world’s top research and academic institutions such as Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, the Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos, the University of Oslo, the University of Wales, and the University of North Carolina (to name a few). It is highly unlikely that these people are simple and ignorant in their chosen profession (the study and application of reinforcement). But the question remains, Is the purposeful use of reinforcement analogous to the carrot-and-stick approach? The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines “carrot-and-stick” as “combining a promised reward with a threatened penalty” (American Heritage, 1992, p. 294). A promised but not received reward and the threat of penalty is a gross misrepresentation of the reinforcement process. At least in fables, a mule may be tricked into plowing a field by tying a carrot to a stick tied to the mule’s head, in front of the mule’s face. The mule walks toward, but never gets to the dangling carrot. The carrot is snatched from the mule just before he can eat it. The carrot-and-stick approach dangles a prize just out of reach to trick someone to work, but the prize is never obtained; the carrot is snatched away at the last moment. But with reinforcement, if the behavior that reinforcement is contingent upon occurs, the reinforcer is obtained. You get to have your cake or carrot and eat it too! It is this frequent, repeated, behavior-reinforcer relation that selects operant behavior. There is no repeated behavior-consequence relation in the false carrot-and-stick analogy . Like the fable boy who called wolf; if individuals are repeatedly offered rewards for work, but the rewards never occur, and instead are snatched away just before they are obtained, then the people would quit working. That is, the work behavior would undergo extinction as would instruction following behaviors in general when rewards were offered in the instructions . The carrot analogy is simply dishonest and does not represent the reinforcement process. The “threat of penalty” or “stick” side of the carrot-and-stick approach to motivation is an approach based on negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is a process in which the rate of behavior increases (reinforcement ) because the behavior removes (negative...