Positive reinforcement works better for helping people quit :(
Especially when quitting smoking tanks a person’s dopamine levels. It takes weeks for the body to re-regulate production.
To anyone reading this who has quit/is quitting: congratulations! It’s tough, you have shown a force of willpower and should be proud of yourself.
Love, a fellow Canadian.
Edit:
As with other forms of punishment, aversive methods are generally less effective than positive approaches. It is more important to reward and praise desirable behaviors than to react negatively to unwanted ones. Encouraging a person’s ability to enjoy self-affirmation and self-pride will help them internalize healthy attributes and to become a person deserving of admiration…Shame doesn’t motivate prosocial behaviors; it fuels social withdrawal and low self-esteem.
I know intellectually that’s true but in my cursed heart I really don’t want to be nice to people who are, like, barely approaching a reasonable standard of behavior. Not just with smoking. Like, littering, taking up too much space on the subway, whatever.
It’s just frustrating how everyone (including me some of the time, I’m sure) is just like an emotionally fragile toddler. Except if you’re not nice to them, they might shoot you.
edit: Thinking about it, my parents were always like “You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you”, so that’s probably why rewarding someone for doing the basics feels insane to me.
You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you
My parents said the same thing over 15 years ago, but this kind of shit just isn’t true. When you own your home or business, doing what’s expected of you results in your investments retaining or even increasing their value. That’s why the owner works 12 hours a day, and the homeowner fixes the broken windows.
When you’re just living or working somewhere but you don’t have a stake in it, what do you actually get out of your efforts? Communities of all types, big and small, are held together by the stake we have in them. If people have no stake, they have no reason to care. This is why you pay employees, and this is why parents should thank their kids for doing the damn chores.
Problem is so many people believe that you don’t deserve thanks for “doing what’s expected” while also refusing to allow young people the opportunity to become invested in their communities. This is why the social contract is destroyed and no one cares anymore. Why should they? The youth will never get to be part of their community the way we are. They will never benefit from it the way we do… Unless things change.
I guess what I took away from my upbringing is the rewards are intrinsic. You don’t get a cookie for cleaning your room, but now your room is clean. You don’t get $20 for passing your math test, but now you (hopefully) learned some math and don’t have to worry about it anymore.
The owner in your example is the same. His rewards are inherent to the action.
Covering someone with praise and rewards when they do stuff they’re supposed to do anyway I guess works, but seems unsustainable. If they’re only doing it for external validation, how are they going to feel when that’s absent?
Saying “thank you” for doing chores isn’t what I had in mind. It was an overly effusive “omg you did so good I’m so happy here’s a pony you didn’t throw your cigarettes on the ground! You’re such a good boy and very handsome!”
I’m not trying to convince someone to quit; that’s up to them to derive enough motivation to do so on their own.
I’m just pointing out that their disgusting habit affects everyone around them, if it’s not killing them through second-hand smoke.
I say this as someone who used to smoke 1–2 packs a day, and WISH that someone told me that I smelled as bad as I did. To me, smoking was never about impacting other people, so having known that, I would have at least been more mindful.
That’s not quite what positive reinforcement is but im not sciency enough to understand it either lol
I’ll paste Wikipedias explanation:
In the behavioral sciences, the terms “positive” and “negative” refer when used in their strict technical sense to the nature of the action performed by the conditioner rather than to the responding operant’s evaluation of that action and its consequence(s). “Positive” actions are those that add a factor, be it pleasant or unpleasant, to the environment, whereas “negative” actions are those that remove or withhold from the environment a factor of either type. In turn, the strict sense of “reinforcement” refers only to reward-based conditioning; the introduction of unpleasant factors and the removal or withholding of pleasant factors are instead referred to as “punishment”, which when used in its strict sense thus stands in contradistinction to “reinforcement”. Thus, “positive reinforcement” refers to the addition of a pleasant factor, “positive punishment” refers to the addition of an unpleasant factor, “negative reinforcement” refers to the removal or withholding of an unpleasant factor, and “negative punishment” refers to the removal or withholding of a pleasant factor.
This usage is at odds with some non-technical usages of the four term combinations, especially in the case of the term “negative reinforcement”, which is often used to denote what technical parlance would describe as “positive punishment” in that the non-technical usage interprets “reinforcement” as subsuming both reward and punishment and “negative” as referring to the responding operant’s evaluation of the factor being introduced. By contrast, technical parlance would use the term “negative reinforcement” to describe encouragement of a given behavior by creating a scenario in which an unpleasant factor is or will be present but engaging in the behavior results in either escaping from that factor or preventing its occurrence, as in Martin Seligman’s experiment involving dogs learning to avoid electric shocks.
(These paragraphs are one after the other but I can’t figure out proper formatting)
Just looked into this, and yeah, you’re right. TIL. It’s pretty counterintuitive imo and I don’t think being told it’s wrong from a “how words work sense” is helping anyone, but you are correct and I was incorrect.
negative reinforcement is what punishment for undesired behavior is called.
positive reinforcement is rewarding when the desired behavior is exhibited.
edit: negative reinforcement requires forever conditioning and develops sick and twisted conditioners eventually. positive reinforcement takes longer to work but it doesn’t require forever conditioning. And rarely causes revolutionary acts.
Negative reinforcement is punishing for doing it rewarding for not doing
Positive reinforcement is rewarding for doing or punishing for not doing
I don’t think the person who started this was talking precisely though as positive reinforcement isn’t at all effective in getting someone to stop doing something
Positive reinforcement works better for helping people quit :(
Especially when quitting smoking tanks a person’s dopamine levels. It takes weeks for the body to re-regulate production.
To anyone reading this who has quit/is quitting: congratulations! It’s tough, you have shown a force of willpower and should be proud of yourself.
Love, a fellow Canadian.
Edit:
Source: took some psych courses
&
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/longing-nostalgia/201705/why-shaming-doesnt-work
I know intellectually that’s true but in my cursed heart I really don’t want to be nice to people who are, like, barely approaching a reasonable standard of behavior. Not just with smoking. Like, littering, taking up too much space on the subway, whatever.
It’s just frustrating how everyone (including me some of the time, I’m sure) is just like an emotionally fragile toddler. Except if you’re not nice to them, they might shoot you.
edit: Thinking about it, my parents were always like “You don’t get rewarded for doing what’s expected of you”, so that’s probably why rewarding someone for doing the basics feels insane to me.
My parents said the same thing over 15 years ago, but this kind of shit just isn’t true. When you own your home or business, doing what’s expected of you results in your investments retaining or even increasing their value. That’s why the owner works 12 hours a day, and the homeowner fixes the broken windows.
When you’re just living or working somewhere but you don’t have a stake in it, what do you actually get out of your efforts? Communities of all types, big and small, are held together by the stake we have in them. If people have no stake, they have no reason to care. This is why you pay employees, and this is why parents should thank their kids for doing the damn chores.
Problem is so many people believe that you don’t deserve thanks for “doing what’s expected” while also refusing to allow young people the opportunity to become invested in their communities. This is why the social contract is destroyed and no one cares anymore. Why should they? The youth will never get to be part of their community the way we are. They will never benefit from it the way we do… Unless things change.
I guess what I took away from my upbringing is the rewards are intrinsic. You don’t get a cookie for cleaning your room, but now your room is clean. You don’t get $20 for passing your math test, but now you (hopefully) learned some math and don’t have to worry about it anymore.
The owner in your example is the same. His rewards are inherent to the action.
Covering someone with praise and rewards when they do stuff they’re supposed to do anyway I guess works, but seems unsustainable. If they’re only doing it for external validation, how are they going to feel when that’s absent?
Saying “thank you” for doing chores isn’t what I had in mind. It was an overly effusive “omg you did so good I’m so happy here’s a pony you didn’t throw your cigarettes on the ground! You’re such a good boy and very handsome!”
I’m not trying to convince someone to quit; that’s up to them to derive enough motivation to do so on their own.
I’m just pointing out that their disgusting habit affects everyone around them, if it’s not killing them through second-hand smoke.
I say this as someone who used to smoke 1–2 packs a day, and WISH that someone told me that I smelled as bad as I did. To me, smoking was never about impacting other people, so having known that, I would have at least been more mindful.
Positive reinforcement tends to work best, but people should never underestimate the power of “you smell like an old leather ashtray”
Positive reinforcement is the act of adding either a reward for good behavour or a punishment for bad behavior.
It seems like both of you are doing that.
That’s not quite what positive reinforcement is but im not sciency enough to understand it either lol
I’ll paste Wikipedias explanation:
(These paragraphs are one after the other but I can’t figure out proper formatting)
Interesting. I’ve never made that distinction between reinforcement and punishment.
Positive punishment is different from positive reinforcement. Shame is a punishment
Adding a shame or punishment is “positive” in the sense of the words positive and negative reinforcement.
Positive is adding to as a response:
Negative is removing from as a response
Punishment for bad behaviour is negative reinforcement.
In a non-technical sense, yes.
In a clinical/technical/literal/how words work sense, no.
Just looked into this, and yeah, you’re right. TIL. It’s pretty counterintuitive imo and I don’t think being told it’s wrong from a “how words work sense” is helping anyone, but you are correct and I was incorrect.
negative reinforcement is what punishment for undesired behavior is called.
positive reinforcement is rewarding when the desired behavior is exhibited.
edit: negative reinforcement requires forever conditioning and develops sick and twisted conditioners eventually. positive reinforcement takes longer to work but it doesn’t require forever conditioning. And rarely causes revolutionary acts.
Negative reinforcement is punishing for doing it rewarding for not doing
Positive reinforcement is rewarding for doing or punishing for not doing
I don’t think the person who started this was talking precisely though as positive reinforcement isn’t at all effective in getting someone to stop doing something
Negative reinforcement is removing a thing when a behavior is exhibited.