inner peace

Punishment

A passage from a book that made me realize what a mess I was. I took "personality psychology" back in college, and this was the only course that I dropped throughout my college years. clearly, it had the most impact.

Here's an excerpt from Personality Puzzle by David S. Funder

Dangers of Punishment:

The reason why punishment is such a dangerous technique for behavioral modification is that all of the rules...must be followed....A punisher has a to be extremely disciplined to follow all these rules, for several reasons:

1) Punishment arouses emotion....as a result, the punishee is unlikely to "learn a lesson."...HOw welld o you learn a lesson when you are fearful, in pain, confused, and humiliated?

2) It is hard to be consistent....it is difficult to be clear and consistent. Punishments tend to vary according to the mood of the punisher. Imagine that, one day at work, you lost a big acct, got yelled at by your boss...etc etc. When you arrive home, you find that your child has thrown a baseball through your living-room window. What do you do?

Now, imagine another day, when you landed a big acct, got promoted by your boss, etc...You arrive home and find a baseball through the windown. Now, what do you do?

Very few people would react to the child's behavior the same way under both circumstances. (Those who can are saints). Yet the child's behavior was exactly the same in both cases. Punishments tend to vary with the punisher's mood, which is one big reason why it is rearely applied with consistency.

3) It is hard to gauge severity...A rebuke from a parent, teacher, or boss can be a severe humiliation. It can cause more psychological distress than the punisher may imagine, and can provoke desires for revenge or escape that will only make the situation worse (The reason why I have this blog, my disorder, and my bad afternoon, and why I'm writing this entry hahaha).

4) Punishment teaches about power. Big, powerful people get to hurt smaller, less-powerful people. As as result, the punishee may think, I can't wait to be big and powerful so that I can punish too!...Why does abuse get transmitted "generationally" in this manner? A punishment act can create victimes far beyond the person immediately punished, therefore. It also may lead to harm to the punishee's own, eventual victims. (moi again, but i hope that i'm not doing this to my cats :P )

5) Punishment motivates concealment. The prospective punishee have good reasons to try to conceal from the punsiher anything that concevably might be punished. Have you ever been in an office where the boss rules through the use of punishment? Nobody talks to anyboyd, least of all the boss, if they can avoid it, and the boss soon becomes very deatched from what is really going on in his or her own office.
The use of reward has just the reverse effect. When workers anticipate being erwarded from good work instead of being punished for bad work, they are naturally motivated to bring the boss's attention everything they are doing, in case it might merit reward. They will have no reason to conceal nything that is going on,and the boss will be in much better contact with the opterations he ro she is supposed to be running.
This works at home as well. A child who expects punishment from his or her parent soon cuts off as much contact and communication as possible. A child who expects revers, naturally does the revers. Thus, at home or at work, one impt. side effect of punishment is that it tends to cut off comunication.

So the bottom line is this: Punishment works great if you apply it correctly. But to apply it correctly, you need to be a genius (lol by me) and you need to be a saint (lol again). If you have any shortcomings in either department, you might be best advised to stay way from it, whenever possible.

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whew...feel much better now.

conclusion: buy this book if you liked this excerpt. took me 6 years to get over the fact that he was so right. hahaha. that i am human and thus is prone to being vulnerable.

Funder, D.C. (2004). The Personality Puzzle (3rd Edition). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

you can google this book or buy it online. suppor the good work!

posted by Y @ 3/21/2006 09:45:00 PM