Hard News: The Arguments
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these are so frequently misapplied terms i just can't resist:
positive reinforcement = the addition of an appetive stimulus contingent upon the performance of a behaviour, resulting in an increased likelihood of the repetition of that behaviour (ie. candy following 'being good')
negative reinforcement = the removal of an aversive stimulus contingent upon the performance of a behaviour, resulting in an increased likelihood of the repetition of that behaviour (ie. taking aspirin following 'a headache)
positive punishment = the addition of an aversive stimulus contingent upon the performance of a behaviour, resulting in a decreased likelihood of the repetition of that behaviour (ie. smacking following 'being bad')
negative punishment = the removal of an appetitive stimulus contingent upon the performance of a behaviour, resulting in a decreased likelihood of the repetition of that behaviour (ie. time out following 'being bad')
i suggest a googling of Premack theory for a more interesting discussion on the principles of reinforcement
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merc,
What say the kid takes getting a beating as a good thing (because I'm bad) and dishes it out to other kids because that's a good thing?
And the problem with conducting experiments on animals and applying them to human behaviour is well documented, ref. Little Albert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_albert -
Well, parliament already has a whole heap of laws which are not always applied - most of the crimes act this applies to. You can steal something trivial from work and not get charged, you can kill someone in self defence (sometimes), and you can break the speed limit if you're rushing to the hospital in a life and death situation. They are only sometimes applied, and assault on children, similar to assault on adults, will only sometimes be charged.
I have no problem with laws that are not always applied. Of course Parliament doesn't want theft of a pen prosecuted, but it sometimes wants theft of office supplies to be charged so it hasn't carved out an office supplies exception.
No MP I've heard talk about this bill wants parents who lightly smack to be charged. Ever.
Parliament does not want those who race to the hospital charged, so you can 'break' the speed limit lawfully in the manner you describe because of the defence of necessity; Parliament does not want those who reasonably kill in self-defence charged because the law recognises a defence of use of reasonable force in self-defence (in certain circumstances).
Given that Parliament does not want parents who lightly smack to be charged ever, it should follow suit in this case - an amendment to the law in the form supported by the Law Commission and proposed by Chester Borrows is a good idea.
Parliament wants people to be able to charged with speeding, so there's a law against speeding, but it doesn't want them to be charged with speeding to a hospital, so there's a defence of necessity. In other circumstances it sometimes wants a charge/fine and sometimes not, so it leaves this grey area up to the cops.
Parliament wants people to be able to be charged with assaulting a child, so there's a law prohibiting assault of children, but it doesn't want them to be charged with lightly smacking children in the terms proposed by Borrows, so there should be a defence. In other circumstances it sometimes wants a charge (e.g. a beating) and sometimes not (e.g. a light smack with a wooden spoon - which would not be protected under Borrows' amendment), so it should leave this grey area up to the cops.
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On the reinforcement thing: the point the animal trainers make is that some things that look like punishment are actually rewards because in certain contexts *any* attention, good or bad, is a reward.
Those of us old enough to remember when Transactional Analysis was popular know that cold pricklies are sometimes better than nothing, even if they are not as good as warm fuzzies.
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merc,
Exactly, and a child's obvious need not to equate parent with mistrust or abuse of power.
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merc,
Oh dear, maybe that is the idea behind beating the child...
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Hope it's OK to post some (long but I hope juicy) notes on Deborah's scolding of me!
We all know that children need teaching: what is at issue here is the method(s) we use to teach them.
Fine, so long as you don't go directly to that point rather than, as it were, via the "under authority" step.
We do ignore assaults all the time. A friend gets into a heated situation at a pub: we grab them by the arm and pull them away. A stranger steps out in front of a bus: we push them back, roughly.
Right, and in these cases [the security guard case is a little different] there is no relation of authority involved so that patient's consent etc. is really central, and (a) it'll normally be fulsomely given with thanks a few seconds later and (b) arguably it was there all along implicitly (perhaps particularly clearly so in the friend case): "You have my back. If I ever get into trouble, just get me outta there, right?" But the basic vision of a sovereign individual over whom you have no authority (not even if you are married to them) is intact.
And let's be quite clear that we have not, for a long time, accepted that the personal nature of a relationship somehow makes violence more acceptable.
OK, but you're already starting to run stuff together, and to risk begging the question. The thing that's been rebuked from history is the idea that some adults, e.g., women, aren't properly the authors of their own lives, and that, instead, rather like large children, they are properly always under some other adult's authority (hence don't vote, don't own or inherit property, don't get custody, may be controlled and disciplined by anyone who has authority over them, and so on). It was a long haul through the 20th Century to get courts to take seriously that wives in no way cede authority over themseves to their husbands and in particular to get various sorts of domestic assaults taken seriously. In sum, domesticity doesn't amount to anyone becoming an authority over anyone else. Violence is one way that someone's illegitmate authority over you can be expressed, but it's only one. If someone won't let you leave the house but otherwise treats you very nicely, they're still imprisoning you, and wronging you. The issue is your ability to be an authority in your own right and to direct your own life as you see fit. Violence is bad according to this analysis not intrinsically, whatever that would mean, but because it conflicts with/massively undermines your capacity to direct your own life.
Chlldren. They aren't authorities in their own right. They have no consent to give. They don't get to direct their own lives, so the absolute sovereignty framework just described does not apply to them. A parent is not endeavoring to respect her child's autonomy (it doesn't exist yet), she's trying to raise it to be autonomous: installing autonomy, growing it. That doesn't mean a parent as the relevant authority figure has carte blanche w.r.t her children, but it does mean that there can be no automatic inference from what's (even in principle) criminal behavior w.r.t. adults to what's criminal behavior w.r.t. one's kids. That there will be massive differences between these two cases is inevitable (childhood as imprisonment, haw haw!), but there will be a hell of a lot of overlap: anything that injures the child for a start.
Remember the 'It's not just a domestic' campaign? It used to be that giving the missus the biff was thought to be just a private matter, deplorable maybe, but nevertheless not something the police needed to worry about, even if the missus had bruises and broken ribs.
I agree that domestic matters including child-rearing (in any reasonably developed society) can't ever be a purely private matter, or in any way beyond the reach of the law. Abusive and injuring parents should of course be prosecuted. That's what "unreasonable force" was supposed to get at in s. 59, and any acceptable precisification of that clause will reproduce at least that level of prohibition/criminalization.
The analysis in the child case is, however, necessarily more complex than in the partner/other adult case and it just does leave open logical room for there to be a category of physical punishment that's non-injuring, non-abusive, non-cruel, non-inhumane, and non-degrading. The analysis itself does not guarantee that there's anything actually in that category, but evidently many parents and long tradition do think that there is something called "smacking" that fits the bill. And they are not be preapred to be talked out of that (which is the status quo after all) by any combination of the shady moves I've tended to complain about on this thread!
We do care about what happens in personal relationships, we do think that physical violence is unacceptable, and we do not think that it is right for one person to impose their will on another by the use of force.
I agree.
But before you say, "Oh, so the police will interfere in every case," remember that the police do not turn up every time a wife pushes a husband, or a husband pushes a wife. The police turn up, and prosecute, when bodies are bruised and broken, and then it is simply not acceptable to claim that you were using reasonable force to correct your partner's behaviour.
Again I agree for all the reasons mentioned above. It's certainly is very depressing to think about the realities of adult relationships. So much for absolute personal sovereignty when in the real world nothing gets done before somebody's injured. Deborah, I'm now completely de-pressed.
As for erring on the side of caution - we do, in general, accept this principle. We have a speed limit of 100kph, even though in some cases, it would be safe to drive faster.
That case doesn't have enough structure to decide whether there's anything especially cautious going on! The main cases I mentioned were cases in which whether some critter has some status is a matter of passionate debate, at least in some circles. (Curiously, big animal-rights supporters tend to be big pro-choice-on-abortion people, and big fetal-rights people tend to the huge carnovores! So almost everyone is pro-choice about either eating meat or about abortion, hence almost all of us endorse at least one on-going holocaust according to at least one impassioned group in society. Yee-haw!)
Abortions are generally limited to the first trimester, because we are just not sure enough about the status of the fetus past about say, 23 weeks (the first trimester ends around 13 or 14 weeks).
Like driving at 100 Kph this doesn't count as being cautious to the true-believers!
We eschew capital punishment, just because it is too easy to get it wrong.
I'm against the death penalty on two practical grounds that are very important in the normal run of criminal justice (i) the problem of (uncorrectable!) error, and (ii) the problem of equitable administration (which was and is the big stumbling block as far as US jurisdictions are concerned - e.g., Maryland recently abandoned it because they had simply horrible black/white stats). But, hey, for example, I'm all for killing Saddam and other dictators (not the way they actually did it tho'!) where error's not an issue and the whole trial is "one-off" and outside the normal run of criminal justice.
True anti-death penalty believers, however (e.g. Helen Clark), think the DP is wrong in principle hence oppose it even for dictators. In Clark's eyes I'm not sufficently cautious, and probably you aren't either.And if a principle of caution operates anywhere in this debate, it operates in favour of overturning section 59, because it would lead us to protect the vulnerable i.e. children.
See earlier remark about abortion. Tthe true believers think that as soon as the zygote starts dividing the genetic fuse has been lit that will burn until that creature with that genetic formula dies, and that any line-drawing after that point is arbitrary. (Curiously, some creationists who couldn't give a crap about DNA and parallel phylogenetic trees in general, love the DNA in this case!)
Claiming that the principle of caution leads us down some slippery slope is a cheap debating trick
I wasn't urging the existence of a slippery slope (google Eugene Volokh's wonderfully complex papers on the topic if you haven't tho'). I was saying that when there's a seemingly intractable debate about moral status, we mostly do and should leave it up to individuals to make the decision about what to do. Knowing that they're the ones who'll have to live with the consequences of doing the wriong thing if it is wrong, we don't cautiously substitute our decision for their own.
That's absolutely the case with smacking. Your child's around in your life until you grow old and die... if there is a price to be paid for smacking them you'll have to pay it. And if you're cold or cruel/cutting or diffident or uninvolved with then, you'll hear about that later too...
it is dead easy to make judgments at either end of a slippery slope, and very difficult in the middle. But that's what we are being asked to do here.
I think that the authority dimension represents a fundamental disjunction so that there's not a single phenomenon or hyper-slope (e.g., of violence-and-imposition-of-will level) we're crawling down in this case.
Just becuase we can analogise to one end or the other of the slippery slope, and make an easy judgement there, doesn't mean that our judgements about the middle are correct. So quit playing around with pseudo philosophical structures, and start telling me exactly why you think we should be able to hit children, without any jargon or labels. What is it about children that makes it acceptable to hit them?
I think I've already answered this in the sense that I've explained why setting things up in this way is a trap. But....I do tend to think that smacking (not "hitting", "beating" etc. ) is a move within the parenting game that very occasionally some parents will want to make. You've tried everything else, you really have, and it's come to some point where the options are just ugly: some real pain is necessary and nothing's risk free. They may hate you forever if the punishment is that they don't get to to camp or whatever it is. Smacking may be the least of it in my view and better that than have the parent access their own cruelty and malevolence.
Example: My own most hated punishment experience as a child was from a teacher (standard 2) who confiscated something of mine - a stencil set birthday present from my sister I'd just brought to school that day on my birthday. For no very good reason, the teacher had another child take the stencils to the incinerator specially to ensure they'd be burned. God I hated that woman. Still do.
I don't think the anti-choicers about smacking are for this sort of malevolent crap, but I in fact fear that this sort of harder to quantify stuff is what's truly damaging and what freaks kids out most, and perhaps may receive a boost if smacking had to end. Call this the "unintended consequences" argument.
Beyond that: the parenting world is indefinitely complex and various. Bloody. Hard. Job. I'm squeamish about pronouncing definitively to anyone about how to do such things. I love your chocolate frogs for example. But I'm suspicious about my love for them. It's kind of clever-clever - the sort of thing a bo(urgeois)bo(hemian) could love maybe. But if I like it, it probably shouldn't be a rule for everyone! Call this the "I'd rather be ruled by the first 1000 names in the Boston phone-book than by the Harvard faculty" argument.
I also, deep down, wonder about about the perspective of small families vs. big families. I have the sense that in very large families there isn't time for anything fancy so that there ends up being a causalization of "clip round the ear" stuff that is in fact harmless and doesn't mean what your average tut-tutting twin-bobo family having-its-first-kid in-their-late-30's thinks it means. I revolt at the thought of imposing "my" own class's values and sensibilities on others who I'm prepared to believe are considerably salt-o'-the-earthier than me. (But I would have found some way to keep some smoking bars too.) Call this the "Bro'town" argument (which either complements the Unintended Consequences argument or subtlely undermines it - I'm not sure which!)
Lose the hi-falutin' tone
Hi-falutin'? Moi?
and start arguing directly, and trying to prove exactly why children should not have the same basic rights as other New Zealand citizens.
That I can't do... _It's_ exactly the wrong way to set things up. We may have isoloted a meta-disagreement that we cannot get around.
Tell you what, if you don't agree with my views, why don't you come around and smack me to set me right and teach me how to behave?
Ouch! You are yourself an authority Deborah. No one can teach you anything you don't want to be taught! Anyway, you have your cheerleaders!
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In the Bro'Town arument - the "clip round the ear" remark taken literally isn't consistent with the Borrows amended proposal. Not sure what to say about that. Perhaps just that it feels to me like there are some class issues that haven't been been much addressed in this debate.
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That's absolutely the case with smacking. Your child's around in your life until you grow old and die... if there is a price to be paid for smacking them you'll have to pay it.
....and maybe others will too?
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Stephen J - yes precisely, that's why premack theory is a more sophisticated way of thinking about reinforcement.
merc - for every little albert there are 100,000 cases of appropriate generalization - we are animals too after all. and actually little albert was the sad product of really stupid analysts and nought to do with the veracity of the theory.
every bit of contemporary behavioural therapy come from principles that apply across the species. obviously there are species-specific considerations, but the principles are universal.
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Belt,
I do get the point of David H's post with respect to S59 and human beings, but let me point out that training dogs is all about establishing dominance, and therefore the example doesn't really hold much water.
Ok, spleen venting time.
Establishing dominance can be done without hurting the dog if you're patient and use basic techniques - essentially you act like a dog; the alpha leader of the pack. What absolute CRAP about just rewarding positive behaviour. Step 1: establish dominance over your dog, Step 2: make sure it understands your spouse, children and other fragile pets have your protection. Step 3: make sure it understands people, ANY people, are higher up in the hierarchy than it is.
People who "raise" their dogs using the reward-only method take a huge gamble that the dog doesn't understand its place in life. A very typical example happened to me 2 weeks ago at a public park when a Golden Labrador bowled over my 3 year old who I ordered to stand still in the face of the dog bearing down on him at speed (I could see it had play in mind). I was holding a 7 week old baby in my arms at the time - talk about offering a sacrifice ;). The dog was off the leash and "controlled" by an 8 and a 12 year old that could only offer a "sorry".
Dogs are animals, and they are pack animals. They need dominating and a strong sense of where they belong in the pack. That's why they get fed last, get trained to have kids take food out of their bowls while they're eating and simply accept it, and so on. THAT is dog training. FFS!!!
Puppy school my ass. People don't even know jack shit about dogs and are overly concerned with the dog being hurt in some way. Well, I am more concerned about my dogs hurting someone else. Silly me.
And having said that - I love dogs. But I wish people realised that they have a responsibility to other people first, and their dog second.
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Belt wrote:
... with respect to S59 and human beings... let me point out that training dogs is all about establishing dominance, and therefore the example doesn't really hold much water.
Several others have made the same point to me by email, and just to clarify...
I'm not suggesting that dogs are the same as children. I'm not suggesting that we should treat dogs and children the same (for example, I don't think we should castrate children or execute them when they bite somebody).
I think we should treat children better than dogs.
As I said when I posted the article, my intention was to respond to some of the email messages that I've received (RE: my previous post on Section 59) which argue that physical punishment is necessary and beneficial for a child.
As with the 'Modest Proposal' post I wasn't necessarily trying to prove anything -- just to leave the reader with a mildly interesting question.
To spell out the question very loudly: "If physical punishment is necessary for 'training' children, then why is it that we can reliably train dogs (and chimps, and seals, and elephants, and dolphins, and birds, and octopi, and whales, and sheep, etc. etc. etc.) without resorting to physical punishment, but we can't do the same for human children?"
I use the word 'train' in the sense of "to teach (a person or an animal) a particular type of behaviour".
I don't know the answer to this question, but I think it's an interesting one...
P.S. Sorry to hear that your child was knocked over by a dog. I don't have your apparent expertise in animal training, so I'm not going to comment on your claims that modern positive reinforcement methods are dangerous and often produce undisciplined dogs. But I would note that Joanne Hammond (the dog training expert in the interview) certainly knew all about dominance, and talked about it at great length (but only a small section of this discussion was transcribed for the interview).
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David, just a cautionary note about your use of "phys. punish. is necessary". It's the doubly modally-indexed "phys. punish may be necessary" - or whether phys. pun. is ever necessary - that's closer to being the nub of the matter. The former could be refuted by a few (let alone a wide range of) cases of perfectly-well-raised-without-any-smacking children, the latter can't be. [Note that the singly indexed version can rightly sound insulting and presumptuous, since anyone who avoids phys. punish. would then be failing to do what's necesssary and hence making a kind of mistake! (I seem to remember Bradford bristling along these lines at some point.) The doubly indexed version doesn't imply this - e.g., in your context (of which you are the best judge) phys pun. wasn't necessary - and so avoids gratuitously insulting anyone.]
I mention this in part because this is one of David Lange's errors in his Oxford Union Address (which PA has covered a fair bit). Lange argues (among other things) that nukes can't be a necessary evil because it's possible not to have them, e.g. in the South Pacific. Unfortunately for Lange, it's necessity in specific contexts (e.g., Western Europe in 1985) that's at issue not a notion of necessity that holds across all contexts. That nukes aren't necessary in the South Pacific doesn't show they can't be necessary somewhere else.... It's whether nukes are ever necessary evils (or whether they may be necessary) that Lange needs to find some way to reject. But he never does....
Anyhow, I think your remarks are fine as they are... but tempting error looms unless you are careful! Cheers.
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I have no problem with laws that are not always applied. Of course Parliament doesn't want theft of a pen prosecuted, but it sometimes wants theft of office supplies to be charged so it hasn't carved out an office supplies exception.
No MP I've heard talk about this bill wants parents who lightly smack to be charged. Ever.
I feel like you've made my point here. To transpose into your office supplies sentence:
Parliament doesn't want 'light smacking' charged, but it sometimes wants 'smacking' to be charged, so it isn't going to carve out a smacking kids exception.
Personally I don't think there should be any exemptions to this law to remain, even the ones that the select committee has currently put in regarding child safety or safety of others. No police officer is even going to think twice about arresting and charging someone who aggressively pulls a kid from out in front of a car for their own safety. The exemptions have been put in as a recognition of the paranoia that is being carried along with the idea of this bill - there's a lack of understanding of how police and crown prosecutions work, and that's causing fear that laws are always applied.
The boundaries between 'charge this person' and 'don't charge this person' will always be figured out by the judicial system, in the mangled interaction of prosecution, defense, judges, and juries. Parliamentary law is way too blunt an instrument to figure out those details of exactly where the boundaries lie. This is nothing new.
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exactly. and indeed with the exception of the discussion on PA there has been a profound lack of understanding or discusssion of how the law and judicial systems work ihn relation to issues like this.
the only voices that seem to get any airplay are the hysterical, paranoid and ignorant 'beat your kids to show you love them' brigade. -
Er wotcher Mr. Walker, Trubba not.
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On rewards and reinforcement.
Positive Reinforcement may well work for dogs but I would love to see someone try this on the local cats (perhaps I could throw food in the neighbours back yard….mmmmm).
On the more serious issue of reward contingent behaviour and training kids.
This over simplifies both the argument and the child.
More important than the reward is the perception of that reward. Two flavours are generally described - controlling and informational. Controlling is just used to control behaviour a la giving sweets etc. Informational on the other hand provides information about competence. The beauty of this is that the competence based rewards are more likely to increase the probability of that behaviour being repeated in the absence of other rewards (notwithstanding conditions of choice). Controlling rewards are rarely as effective.
Not surprisingly punishment or negative rewards don’t accrue any such benefits.
This is a poor interpretation of a critique of behaviourism first launched in the 1970’s which is discussed in far greater depth http://www.psych.rochester.edu/SDT/cont_reward.html.
For another view on perceptions of reward and behaviour look http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bandura.
And yes mis use of these ideas does mess with education badly……as I know to my pain.
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While we're bandying psych theories and rebuttals around, it's also worth nothing that some behaviourists believe that pain and fear are different to other rewards/punishments, and work through more primitive channels. That is, most other stimuli applied in a learning paradigm take multiple exposures to produce learning, but not always so with those 2. Whether that's good or bad is up to your interpretation.
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Point taken - though at risk of being a hair splitting pedant I would prefer to regard pain and fear differently. Fear unlike pain is generally thought of as a meta-cognitive experience requiring a greater degree thought/interpretation. Hence, fear falls into the category of emotions and beyond the scope of strict behaviourist theory.
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merc,
As all Dark Rulers of the Parentage know, we must not use the powers for evil...
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My husband and I were both spanked growing up.
Please write to; fornacation101@hotmail.com
Thanks.
Laurey -
Laurey, your husband wouldn't happen to be a palm oil enthusiast, would he?
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"Positive Reinforcement may well work for dogs but I would love to see someone try this on the local cats"
My friend Bill successfully trained the family cat to jump from one stool to another through a hoop, a la the classic circus lion trick in miniature. Positive reinforcement with titbits was his only technique.
That same cat has now taught her kittens.
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Just looked at the number of page views generated by this thread. 27116 and counting. Crikey.
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Yay behavioural psychology, especially positive reinforcement (when used by people who understand it and actually have the skills to impliment etc) but some of the above reminds me of something.
During first year psych a few of us noted there's a kind of self-fullingness in the definitions. What's a 'reward'? any thing that increases the behaviour when they get it. How do you increase the behaviour? 'Reward' them.
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