 Here an article by Denise Breton and Christopher Largent about conditioning by rewards and punishments. The page shows badly in my browser, so I'm taking the liberty of including the text at the bottom. They mention the extensive research of Alfie Kohn on the negative effects of reward/punishment conditioning. Here are some of the problems: • Rewards and punishments teach power-over relations. That’s the model. And when being on the receiving end of this model gets tiresome, we begin the mad race to be on top.
• Rewards and punishments corrupt human relationships, starting with the relation between those "higher" and "lower" in the reward-punishment hierarchy. Those under can’t tell the truth to those above them for fear of how "bad news" might further reduce their underling status. Even more commonly, those above don’t want the truth to be told. A May 1999 Frontline on the military career of Admiral Leighton "Snuffy" Smith, for instance, featured Smith confessing that during the Vietnam War (when he was a pilot), his superior wouldn’t let him report that he had failed to achieve his bombing objective. The higher-ups didn’t want the truth; they wanted only "we’re winning the war" reports.
• Rewards and punishments teach image management. Appearing to be good is more important than being good.
• Rewards and punishments require surveillance. We must be seen to be doing good or doing bad to get what we "deserve," so someone must be observing us—all the time.
• Rewards and punishments replace internal motivation with external motivation. This is a biggie, and the crux of it all. We don’t do what our inner guides tell us, what we love to do, or what we feel is right. We do what rewards us outwardly. Our inner motivation, what we get from our souls, is not controllable. For us to be made controllable, we must be unplugged from our soul source, and something external must be put in its place—something others can control. Given this agenda, rewards and punishments are inevitably soul-denying.
• Rewards and punishments teach selfish manipulation: "What’s in it for me?" "Can I avoid being caught?" In Beyond Discipline (p. 22), Alfie Kohn quotes eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant: "If you punish a child for being naughty and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and discovers that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself." It is rather obvious, really. The conditioning approach pre-assumes that you are a mindless robot who can't tell right from wrong, so you need to be trained into the proper pavlovian responses. Right answer: you get a piece of cheese. Wrong answer: you get an electric shock. That is a horribly barbaric view, and a false one. But, seeing that this is the predominant method used in the world of educating us into knowing how to act, it is no great wonder at all that we're rather messed up. • Rewards and punishments hide real consequences, replacing them with artificial reward-punishment consequences. CEOs don’t think about real-world consequences—polluted air and water or human suffering; they think about financial rewards.
• Rewards and punishments replace inner integrity with the model that everyone "has a price." When people work only for rewards and behave selfishly, it doesn’t mean that they’re bad people or that humanity is innately greedy. It means they’re behaving exactly the way the culture has programmed them to behave—and then told them that they’re bad for doing it. How’s that for crazy-making? Well, read the whole thing, this is vital stuff. And I'll give you a gold star.
[ Patterns | 2004-01-16 13:35 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Maglev trains is one of the things we should be having by now here in "the future". Well, there are a very few. And now, what is probably the world's fastest train started last week connecting Shanghai with Pudong at 430km/h. 30km in 7 minutes. But the Chinese has put the plan on hold for the moment for the projected 1,290km Shanghai-to-Beijing line. Because it is all very expensive. Compared to normal trains, that is. Compared with planes, maglev travel stacks up quite favorably. Here's more about Maglevs.
A minor update on my struggle with Budget-rent-a-car previously mentioned here, here and here. They actually, finally answered me. That is, I got a brief e-mail from a person at Cendant Corporation. Very brief, but friendly, apologizing for the late response, saying they would contact their French and German people to try to get a resolution. Now, as I previously mentioned, my bank has already gotten most of it resolved. I.e. they paid some money back. What is remaining is 800 euros. If they get me that back too, I'll be rather satisfied with the whole thing. I'll be back where I started, having rented a car and paid for it. And just wasted a lot of time, and stress. Of course they could decide to be really nice and actually pay me something for my undeserved trouble and extra expenses.