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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (39340)	6/5/1999 10:49:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

No, you're seriously mistaken. "Negative reinforcement" is the withholding of rewards for nonoperant behavior. Punishment is the infliction of pain or deprivation of goods. While most people, even psychologists think a well-planned and executed program of (mild) punishments might well assist learning, experience suggest that we don't know enough about how punishments work. Every dog trainer (and animal trainer in general) knows that punishment is useless and even dangerous. Punished your grizzly recently? One reason I despise capital punishment and life imprisonment without attention as punishments is that we have a huge experimental base to see if we could scare or punish or teach people not to do bad things. In some societies (the early 19th Century Royal Navy) withholding of rum (negative reinforcement) and flogging (punishment) got sailors to face almost certain death. It worked. It wouldn't work in the U.S. Marines today. The Marines would kill the officers who imposed flogging or checked their slop. It's "fragging" the modern declaration of human rights in the military.