Punishment: Definition and Efficacy

Punishment, from the behaviorist perspective, can be defined as a reduction in the rate of a response after presentation of a stimulus immediately following that response (O'Donnell and Crosbie 211). Social psychologists, including Baron and Byrne (474), argue that punishment can be effective in reducing aggression or extinguishing undesired and negatively perceived behaviors, but only when delivered in accordance with certain principles. This brief report will examine punishment and its efficacy, discussing some of the human and animal experiments that have been used to test the theory that properly applied punishment or punishing and therefore aversive conditions can negatively reinforce (leading to extinction) target behaviors (Baron and Byrne 465 - 467).

Numerous experiments including either animals or human subjects have focused on the effects of punishment, conceptually defined in various experiments as the administration of some unpleasant stimulus (e.g., an electric shock) when a target behavior is either forthcoming or, alternatively, not forthcoming (Kagan and Havemann 109). For example, some experiments have placed dogs in divided cages; dogs are asked to jump over a low barrier, and if they do not jump, they are given a mild-to-moderate electric shock. When the dog learns to jump the barrier into the non-wired section of the cage, the process is known as operant escape (Kagan and Havemann 109). If some type of warning is

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Category: Psychology - P