If you reward good behavior, you’ll get more of it. That’s not terribly insightful, I know; but a lot of our policy approaches seem more inclined to demand good behavior rather than create any sort of positive incentive for it. Punishing bad behavior – now that we can get behind. Jails and criminal penalties are not, traditionally, tough sells.
Rewarding good behavior seems to offend our sense of justice at times. “They should be doing that anyway!”
I suppose tax breaks are a sort of positive incentive for good behavior from people who have money. It’s tougher to craft positive incentives for good behavior from people without money.
Not a lot of substance to this post, I suppose. Just an observation that, for some reason, the stick is a more popular policy tool than the carrot.
Some scientific studies seems to think that children learn from rewards and adults respond better to threats of punishment.
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/25/from.12.years.onward.you.learn.differently
Kinda sorta similar to right wing radio, the bitching and whining 24/7 that sells much better than actually discussing the issues and problem solving.
The whole reward/punishment issue gets complicated, but you should definitely look at whether folks succeed in their behavior–what works. The radio ideologues, in their fear-inducement strategies, succeed just fine thank you, so they are likely to keep it up. The same applies to the corporate robber barons who are able to sell half the thing for twice the price, somehow get tax credits for it and richer by the minute. That works, too. If something is working for someone–even occasionally–they are likely to keep it up.
School learning is a fascinating area where folks think that coercion is the most effective strategy, but you always have to ask yourself the following: How much do we have to hurt someone before they want to learn? It’s connected with the saying, “The beatings will continue until morale improves”. Grades are generally middle-class rewards that work in a context, but giving bad grades only leads some folks to dig in, in part because they come from a culture of failure. The same applies to jail and the nasty stuff ingrained in our culture in which people think that punishment always works, and the more severe the better. Pretty sick stuff.
I have also been thinking about this a bit in terms of our gender cultures. What sorts of behavior is most rewarded for boys and men? What sorts of behavior is most rewarded for girls and women? How do these rewards correlate to how we tell them we want them to behave?
We tell girls we want them to be smart, competent, and equal to or better than men; but if we really look at how the rewards stack up, I imagine we find a lot of inducement to focus on being pretty. We tell boys to be kind and industrious; but I’ll bet we find a lot of inducement to focus on being aggressive and strong.
Not up to the most recent research on that–it’s big and complex–but the messages are mixed and confusing for kids. Go to any high school football or basketball event, and you will see what the culture tells kids: Sexualized girls (cheerleaders) with skimpy clothes and boys mashing each other on the field, both getting huge recognition and reward for their behavior, especially from peers and enmeshed parents. But go into the school, and you will see all kinds of rules about appropriate clothing, inappropriate touching and big punishments for being aggressive. No wonder the culture hasn’t figured it out in the areas of sex and aggression.
By the way, there has been a lot of research on the impact of almost everything that kids are involved with. Sports, for example, are held up as teaching sportsmanship, work attitudes, blah blah blah. The data are less complementary. Among other things, they learn how to beat the rules and that aggression is a good way of solving problems. We also know that instead of allowing people to express and thereby decrease levels of aggression, aggressive sports leave players feeling even more aggressive after the game than they were before they played. And then there is the new data (as explored in Frontline and other places) that neuro people in clinical practice have known for 20+ years that football often leaves people with traumatic brain injury and less able to cope with life. That, by the way, does not “heal up”. Folks need to get their priorities re-arranged and decide that maybe it’s not such a good idea to live through one’s children on the football field unless it’s fine with them that their kids will live shorter, less productive and less satisfying lives.