#behaviorism

So something that a lot of you have likely figured out but many haven’t:

• Psych and education programs are often full of ableism. The more disability related it is, the worse it can get.
• Psych and especially education fields are often the last to change what they are doing despite having a legal requirement on practicing with evidence.
• Education programs especially love to pump their students full of misinformation on behaviorism. PBIS is based off ABA. ABA is based off behaviorism. Behaviorism is all education cares to know about mental health (and it’s not even supported by the research) . They won’t be changing course anytime soon (and yet they wonder why they have “behavior” problems in schools).

They prey on people wanting to help others and convince them that this the only way.

Punishments and rewards, sticks and carrots: How behaviorism is detrimental to learning and growth.

After posting about the myriad ways that classroom behavior charts are harmful to children, many teachers and therapists DMed us to ask if the use of token charts and reward-based systems is better, or if we approve of those methods.

The answer is that anycoercivebehavior modification method is detrimental to the learning process. This is true in all circumstances, and for all people: parents, teachers, and therapists.

Yesterday, I discovered a person named Alfie Kohn. He has written many books filled with research on the ways that behaviorism fails children. I ordered one of his books, called “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes.”I’ll update you all when I start reading it.

Anyway, I went to his website, and I started reading an article he published called “The Risks of Rewards.” In this article, he cites dozens of studies that have proven that rewards are just as harmful as punishments. Instead of being opposites, they’re two sides of the same coin.

Instead of trying to paraphrase everything he wrote, I’ll just quote most of it here:

Studies over many years have found that behavior modification programs are rarely successful at producing lasting changes in attitudes or even behavior. When the rewards stop, people usually return to the way they acted before the program began. More disturbingly, researchers have recently discovered that children whose parents make frequent use of rewards tend to be less generous than their peers (Fabes et al., 1989; Grusec, 1991; Kohn 1990).

Indeed, extrinsic motivators do not alter the emotional or cognitive commitments that underlie behavior–at least not in a desirable direction. A child promised a treat for learning or acting responsibly has been given every reason to stop doing so when there is no longer a reward to be gained.

Research and logic suggest that punishment and rewards are not really opposites, but two sides of the same coin. Both strategies amount to ways of trying to manipulate someone’s behavior–in one case, prompting the question, “What do they want me to do, and what happens to me if I don’t do it?”, and in the other instance, leading a child to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what do I get for doing it?” Neither strategy helps children to grapple with the question, “What kind of person do I want to be?”

To summarize: rewards are not effective in “training” people to behave a certain way, because once the rewards stop, people are no longer motivated to continue acting the way they were before. This creates a chronic lack of self-direction and a sense of purpose. Behaviors are no longer internally motivated, they are externally directed. People then become dependent on prompts and incentives to complete tasks.

Let’s continue with the article:

Rewards are no more helpful at enhancing achievement than they are at fostering good values. At least two dozen studies have shown that people expecting to receive a reward for completing a task (or for doing it successfully) simply do not perform as well as those who expect nothing (Kohn, 1993)… In general, the more cognitive sophistication and open-ended thinking that is required for a task, the worse people tend to do when they have been led to perform that task for a reward.

There are several plausible explanations for this puzzling but remarkably consistent finding. The most compelling of these is that rewards cause people to lose interest in whatever they were rewarded for doing. This phenomenon, which has been demonstrated in scores of studies (Kohn, 1993), makes sense given that “motivation” is not a single characteristic that an individual possesses to a greater or lesser degree. Rather, intrinsic motivation (an interest in the task for its own sake) is qualitatively different from extrinsic motivation (in which completion of the task is seen chiefly as a prerequisite for obtaining something else) (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Therefore, the question educators need to ask is not how motivated their students are, but how their students are motivated.

To summarize: when rewards (external motivators) are provided for the completion of interesting, inherently motivating tasks, the intrinsic motivation and interest people have in the tasks plummets. People perform better on tasks they’re interested in when they’re *not* rewarded, compared to when they are.

Now, let’s read what Kohn wrote about a study demonstrating this concept:

In one representative study, young children were introduced to an unfamiliar beverage called kefir. Some were just asked to drink it; others were praised lavishly for doing so; a third group was promised treats if they drank enough. Those children who received either verbal or tangible rewards consumed more of the beverage than other children, as one might predict. But a week later these children found it significantly less appealing than they did before, whereas children who were offered no rewards liked it just as much as, if not more than, they had earlier (Birch et al., 1984). If we substitute reading or doing math or acting generously for drinking kefir, we begin to glimpse the destructive power of rewards. The data suggest that the more we want children to want to do something, the more counterproductive it will be to reward them for doing it.

To summarize: in this study, the children who were rewarded or praised for drinking an unknown beverage drank more of it, but enjoyed it much less. Whereas, the kids who drank it and weren’t rewarded liked it just as much, if not more, than they did before.

So, what does all of this mean? What is a better way to help children learn and grow? What tools should parents and teachers use when trying to foster a healthy learning environment? Kohn writes:

First, classroom management programs that rely on rewards and consequences ought to be avoided by any educator who wants students to take responsibility for their own (and others’) behavior–and by any educator who places internalization of positive values ahead of mindless obedience. The alternative to bribes and threats is to work toward creating a caring community whose members solve problems collaboratively and decide together how they want their classroom to be (DeVries & Zan, 1994; Solomon et al., 1992).

This concept is familiar to me as a Unitarian Universalist. In our Youth groups, at conventions, and at summer camp, we create group covenants. Covenants are a list of rules/guidelines that everyone agrees on. It’s an open, democratic process. Anyone who wants to add something to the covenant is able to, and the covenant itself is a living document that can be revisited and edited at a later time if need be. Every time the composition of the group changes (for example if a new session of camp starts), a new covenant is created.

Creating a classroom, a group setting, or a therapy room that involves a collaborative relationship between mentors and students, is the best way to foster healthy learning and growth. When students are involved in setting expectations for themselves, they are more engaged and more willing to abide by the agreement. Allowing for flexibility and change in the covenant itself also allows the rules to shift over time to fit the needs of the students.

In UU spaces, the process of accountability is not punishment or rewards based. When someone violates the covenant, trained counselors discuss the situation with them and anyone else who was involved. Then, a restorative justice model of conflict resolution is engaged. Everyone involved works together to find a solution to the problem at hand.

This isn’t some unrealistic, utopian dream. It’s the model of learning and growth that is most suited to the way human brains actually work. And yes, that includes autistic people.

There are many ways to engage with nonspeaking and/or intellectually disabled autistic people to ascertain what their boundaries are, what they’re intrinsically motivated by, and what they care about. Creating a covenant in a classroom for autistic kids might be more challenging from a communication standpoint, but that doesn’t make it impossible. Quite honestly, not enough people are even trying.

But I hope that after reading this, you will.

~Eden

…The approach of behaviorism is in some respects different from that of panphysicalism, but it resembles the latter in its hopeless attempt to deal with human action without reference to consciousness and aiming at ends. It bases its reasoning on the slogan “adjustment.” Like any other being, man adjusts himself to the conditions of his environment. But behaviorism fails to explain why different people adjust themselves to the same conditions in different ways. Why do some people flee violent aggression while others resist it? Why did the peoples of Western Europe adjust themselves to the scarcity of all things on which human well-being depends in a way entirely different from that of the Orientals?

Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms.Behaviorism wants to observe human behavior from without and to deal with it merely as reaction to a definite situation. It punctiliously avoids any reference to meaning and purpose. However, a situation cannot be described without analyzing the meaning which the man concerned finds in it. If one avoids dealing with this meaning, one neglects the essential factor that decisively determines the mode of reaction. This reaction is not automatic but depends entirely upon the interpretation and value judgments of the individual, who aims to bring about, if feasible, a situation which he prefers to the state of affairs that would prevail if he were not to interfere. Consider a behaviorist describing the situation which an offer to sell brings about without reference to the meaning each party attaches to it!

In fact, behaviorism would outlaw the study of human action and substitute physiology for it. The behaviorists never succeeded in making clear the difference between physiology and behaviorism. Watson declared that physiology is “particularly interested in the functioning of parts of the animal… Behaviorism, on the other hand, while it is intensely interested in all of the functioning of these parts, is intrinsically interested in what the whole animal will do.”2 However, such physiological phenomena as the resistance of the body to infection or the growth and aging of an individual can certainly not be called behavior of parts. On the other hand, if one wants to call such a gesture as the movement of an arm (either to strike or to caress) behavior of the whole human animal, the idea can only be that such a gesture cannot be imputed to any separate part of the being.

But what else can this something to which it must be imputed be if not the meaning and the intention of the actor or that unnamed thing from which meaning and intention originate? Behaviorism asserts that it wants to predict human behavior. But it is impossible to predict the reaction of a man accosted by another with the words “you rat” without referring to the meaning that the man spoken to attaches to the epithet.

Both varieties of positivism decline to recognize the fact that men aim purposefully at definite ends. As they see it, all events must be interpreted in the relationship of stimulus and response, and there is no room left for a search for final causes. Against this rigid dogmatism it is necessary to stress the point that the rejection of finalism in dealing with events outside the sphere of human action is enjoined upon science only by the insufficiency of human reason. The natural sciences must refrain from dealing with final causes because they are unable to discover any final causes, not because they can prove that no final causes are operative. The cognizance of the interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the regularity in their concatenation and sequence, and the fact that causality research works and has enlarged human knowledge, do not peremptorily preclude the assumption that final causes are operative in the universe.

The reason for the natural sciences’ neglect of final causes and their exclusive preoccupation with causality research is that this method works. The contrivances designed according to the scientific theories run the way the theories predicted and thus provide a pragmatic verification for their correctness. On the other hand the magic devices did not come up to expectations and do not bear witness to the magic world view.

It is obvious that it is also impossible to demonstrate satisfactorily by ratiocination that the alter ego is a being that aims purposively at ends. But the same pragmatic proof that can be advanced in favor of the exclusive use of causal research in the field of nature can be advanced in favor of the exclusive use of teleological methods in the field of human action. It works, while the idea of dealing with men as if they were stones or mice does not work. It works not only in the search for knowledge and theories but no less in daily practice.

The positivist arrives at his point of view surreptitiously. He denies to his fellow men the faculty of choosing ends and the means to attain these ends, but at the same time he claims for himself the ability to choose consciously between various methods of scientific procedure. He shifts his ground as soon as it comes to problems of engineering, whether technological or “social.” He designs plans and policies which cannot be interpreted as merely being automatic reactions to stimuli. He wants to deprive all his fellows of the right to act in order to reserve this privilege for himself alone. He is a virtual dictator.

As the behaviorist tells us, man can be thought of as “an assembled organic machine ready to run.”3 He disregards the fact that while machines run the way the engineer and the operator make them run, men run spontaneously here and there. “At birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords.”4 Starting from this manifest falsehood, the behaviorist proposes to operate the “human Ford” the way the operator drives his car. He acts as if he owned humanity and were called upon to control and to shape it according to his own designs. For he himself is above the law, the godsent ruler of mankind.5

As long as positivism does not explain philosophies and theories, and the plans and policies derived from them, in terms of its stimulus-response scheme, it defeats itself.

          — Ludwig von Mises, Theory & History, Chapter 11