Deborah-- Once you've been on the list a while, you'll discover that the only thing TIPSters love to debate more than religion is the difference between punishment and negative reinforcement. With, maybe, the legitimacy of laughing at student bloopers as a distant third.
Punishment is the reponse to an undesired behavior with an undesired consequence. Negative reinforcement is presenting an undesired stimulus so that a desired behavior will take place to remove said stimulus. Let's say I drink too much champagne, get a hangover, and take an aspirin. The hangover serves as punishment for the drinking, and negative reinforcement for the taking of aspirin. Hence, it is both punishment and negative reinforcement, but for different behaviors. A stimulus cannot be both punishment and negative reinforcement for the same behavior, but it can be for different behaviors (or different people in the same situation). Behaviorists would hate this, but there's really no such thing as an uninterpretable stimulus. No event has a sort of an a priori ontological status as "punishment" or "negative reinforcement" or "reward." It's all contextual. I'd suggest using a different example in class. Because behavior is interpretable, the parent's taking the toy away could be seen as punishment (depriving child of a desired object) or, pragmatically, just removing the opportunity to misbehave. Hope this helps. Robin ********************** Robin Pearce Abrahams Boston University [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 26 Feb 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I am fairly new to teaching psychology (my second semester) and to this list > but hopefully someone can help me. > Here is the scenario: A child is playing with a toy and throws it. The > parent reacts by taking the toy away. > I thought this would be a reasonable example for punishment since it is > likely to decrease the throwing. However, as I was discussing it, I realized > that it could also be explained as negative reinforcement since the negative > condition being "removed" (as I explained it to my students) is the child's > throwing, while the behavior of the parent taking the toy away is likely to > be strengthened; this would fit the bill for the typical definition of > negative reinforcement. Am I completely off-base here? I thought that > reinforcement and punishment were mutually exclusive, so how can this be > better explained? > > Thanks in advance for the help, > Deborah Deitcher > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
