"Threat of Punishment Works, Study Suggests"

[GreenPartyVoter]

The threat of punishment actually does stamp out freeloaders, tending to transform them into rule-following members of a society, a new study suggests.

The research results show how established norms and rules in a society could keep freeloaders in check and increase pro-social behavior, such as helping others or sharing with them rather than looking out for number one.

In the past, studies have found that while punishing freeloaders can increase their cooperation with others, the punishment itself was too costly and in the end, punishment wouldn't be worth it. These past studies were based on short-term effects, however.

The new study shows that over the long term, punishment gets ingrained in people's psyches in a way that causes them to fear getting into trouble. This fear can keep otherwise freeloaders, who would normally act as sponges to soak up the generosity of others without having to contribute any time or money, on the straight-and-narrow.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20081204/sc_livescience/threatofpunishmentworksstudysuggests

My thoughts are that yes punishment can elicit "better" behavior, but I am not sure if it really makes better people. Aren't they being just as self-centered when acting in order to avoid punishment rather than really thinking of others when they "help out?"

Also, I hate the word "free-loader." Just sayin'. (I vaguely recall some theory from college. Stage one was about reward/punishment and it went up to I think 5 stage where the last one was... not sure. Autonomous thought? I do remember being posed the question of "If a father with a dying child breaks into a pharmacy to steal medicine, has he truly acted in the wrong?" Or something like that.)

Edit: I think it was "Moral Reasoning" or something like it. http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Moral_Reasoning

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Chimp....

Chimp...Chimp...

[Jackpine Radical]

2. You may be thinking of Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. Yes, that's it! I always used to confuse it with Maslow's hierarchy (The names, not the actual

info)

[Jackpine Radical]

9. Kohlberg was pretty much inspired by Piaget's model of intellectual development.

He tried to lay out a similar sequence for moral development, but it never worked as well as Piaget's system, for various reasons.

[GreenPartyVoter]

10. Piaget rings a bell too. Child psych or development class. Or maybe history of Education?

Dang. It's been a long time. :(

[Jackpine Radical]

12. Could have been any of those.

Piaget was a French biologist who wrote voluminously about the sequence of intellectual development in children, basing much of his work on observations of his own kids. While he got some details wrong and sometimes mistook culturally determined aspects of development for universal sequences, the grand outlines of his work stand intact, and form the backbone of much of what we know about cognitive development.

[lapfog_1]

3. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

[lib_wit_it]

5. So I guess this means those wall street "free loaders" have never been properly punished. nt

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. I would say not

[laconicsax]

6. Misleading headline. n/t

[Sandrine for you]

8. "punishment gets ingrained in people's psyches "

This exactly what Nietzsche in Genealogy Of Morality:

Morality come from the torture of the body, for the purpose of building a Being who can make a promise
in a large horizon of time.

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. Was Nietzsche a religious fellow at all?

[GreenPartyVoter]

11. All this philosophical stuff makes me thing of only one thing...

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.

[hunter]

14. Why would anyone play that game? It sounds boring.

Can I just leave all my tokens on the table and take a walk?

[Igel]

15. Does it matter?

'My thoughts are that yes punishment can elicit "better" behavior, but I am not sure if it really makes better people. Aren't they being just as self-centered when acting in order to avoid punishment rather than really thinking of others when they "help out?" '

In principle, I agree with what appears to be the presupposition--that producing better people is the goal. That's the moralist in me speaking.

In practice, I really don't care if people do something out of selfishness or altruism, as long as (a) they act properly as far as their public behavior is concerned and (b) they're never put in a position where their improper private behavior can adversely affect me by becoming public behavior. That's the realist in me speaking--people are black boxes, all we get to go on is their behavior.

Although I do insist on viewing their behavior in context, part of which is past behavior. By that token, my pig of a cousin has markedly improved. He holds down a job sufficient to pay his own rent and buy his own food, so he's stopped making a living forging checks and stealing and sponging off of others; and he's stopped (a) being a drug addict and (b) having kids by multiple women (all of which he laughed at for being so stupid as to let him get them pregnant). Yes, he's still a pig, but at least he can pass for human, at least until he opens his mouth. Then it's all "oink oink".