No Stupid Questions - 82. Which Is More Powerful: Reward or Punishment?

Episode Date: January 16, 2022

How is “negative reinforcement” different from punishment? Could positive reinforcement encourage prosocial behavior on a national scale? And what’s the deal with Taiwan’s dog-poop lottery?

Everyone, get into your seats right now. You're listening to No Stupid Questions, the podcast that explores the weird and occasionally wonderful ways in which humans behave. Here are your hosts, Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth. Angela Duckworth. Angela, I have today the question, I think, to end all questions. Great. We'll be finished with the whole podcast. I think we're done after this.

Drops mic. This is elemental, and you're the person to answer it. Okay, no pressure. And I can't believe it took me a year and a half of making this show to ask you. I'm on tenterhooks. What are tenterhooks anyway? The things you hang a side of beef? Yeah, there's a carcass involved or something.

The metaphor works because why? I guess if you're on them, you really want to get off. But doesn't the phrase mean when you're on tenterhooks, like, I can't wait to... Yeah, yeah, because I want to get off these tenterhooks. It's very uncomfortable. That feels like a very halfway metaphor. It doesn't connote what I think it really wants to connote. How about baited breath? How do you even spell baited? Not with a worm baited, but B-A-T-E-D. But what the hell does B-A-T-E-D mean?

Maybe it's short of abated, like your breath used to be abated, but now it's only baited. Anyway, I can't wait, Stephen. What's the question? Here's the question. My breath is baited. Which is more powerful, positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement? And of course, I want to know upsides and downsides of each. Okay. And you don't mean negative reinforcement in the sense of removing something that's bad in order to reward. You just mean punishment, right? Do you want to ask about reward and punishment or do you want to ask about positive and negative reinforcement? Because they're different. I guess I need you to tell me the difference. Let's start with a little glossary. So reward is when you pair something

good with a behavior in order to get it to happen again. So you provide points for going to the gym and people can redeem those points for Amazon credit. That sounds suspiciously like an actual reward that you and your colleagues have been working on. It came to mind because we, as you know, Stephen, recently did a big study on that. And bottom line is that works. It's an effective incentive. But, but you know we do this all the time you praise people for doing things like hey you know just want to thank the person who brought in bagels today props to you or you say things like oh I'm really proud of you you certainly have I'm sure given Fifi treats to reward certain behaviors we don't say that word we it. That's really the only word she knows in her life, but it's an important word.

So we know what rewards are intuitively. I think punishments like bad dog or if you yell at somebody for doing something wrong, that's punishment. And I think the reason why these things seem to be the two tools in the armory is like, well, you can reward the good or you can punish the bad. So that's what rewards and punishments are. And negative reinforcement has a very non-intuitive meaning. So I apologize on behalf of all psychologists. Negative reinforcement, first of all, sounds like punishment, but negative reinforcement actually means that you are

rewarding a behavior, you are promoting it, you are incentivizing it by removing a punishment. So you are taking away something bad and thereby making something more likely to happen. Drugs are one example of this. If you have back surgery or you get your knee replaced and your doctor prescribes an analgesic, that drug is negatively reinforcing because it is taking away the pain. How would you describe the relationship between negative reinforcement and punishment? So negative reinforcement would be getting somebody to do this behavior more by taking away pain. Punishment would be getting somebody to do it less by creating pain. Although the punishment could be the withholding of something that they want also, correct? Yes, that's true. Do you feel that the universe

generally dispenses more reward or punishment? I would say two things. One is that we must be rewarded more than we are punished in some absolute sense because we're alive. And it depends on what you consider to be a reward. But it's like you breathe, you go to sleep and you wake up and you're still there. Meaning that rewards are outweighing punishments, I guess, in some cosmic universal objective sense. In terms of our psychology, we're much more sensitive to bad things in our life than good things. I know we were recently talking about Roy Baumeister, the great social psychologist, and one of his seminal papers is called

Bad is Stronger Than Good, which is that we are always scanning the horizon for threats. We are much less likely to be reflexively grateful. We more ruminate on the bad things. Now, doesn't that in and of itself suggest that we as a species tend to respond pretty strongly toward punishment or negativity generally, at least as opposed to positivity? Yeah, that might lead you, if that's all you knew about this thing called a human, to say like, well, you should definitely try to change their behavior through punishment because look at them. They are just really good at noticing and being sensitive to bad things.

Whereas if I pat them on the head and say, job well done, et cetera, et cetera. They might not even notice it. Or they might stop working as hard as they worked to get to the place where they earned the reward in the first place. Yeah, I mean, fear and even loathing, like these are very strong emotions and they do change our behavior immediately and noticeably. So if you shout at someone to stop doing something, you tend to get an immediate response. And so this is, I think, one of the reasons why there's a lot of punishment in leadership and in parenting. And I say that as somebody, you know, when I raised my kids, I would yell at them all the time. Don't do that. Stop it. And that is all in a way punishing the negative. Right. I wasn't spanking them, but I was still dispensing verbal punishment.

You weren't saying, wouldn't it be nice, Lucy, if you stopped hitting Amanda in the face? So the person whose work I read at the time my kids were younger, his name is Alan Kasdan. He's at Yale, and he is a clinical psychologist who has this extremely long career. He's seen a lot of different forms of bad behavior from mild to extremely dysfunctional. And one of his key recommendations is that parents so often react with punishment to things that their kids are doing that are bad. And that is, again, understandable. You know, if you do yell at your kid to stop doing something, you may not get the optimal reaction, but your kid might stop what they're doing for a second. His recommendation, though, is to reward the positive. He calls it a positive opposite. Say, for example, a younger kid

might leave all their toys somewhere. What Alan Kasdan would say is you have to actually pause and think to yourself, what is that opposite? If your kid is leaving their stuff everywhere, the opposite behavior is for them to be cleaning up, putting things away. And now you have something to look for.

Every time your kid is cleaning up, you go out of your way to praise it. You're like, hey, Stephen, good for you for putting those blocks away. That is such a big help to mommy. Thanks, mom. I really appreciate that. What about rather than just sitting back and waiting for the positive thing to happen, what about facilitating it? What about removing the obstacles that prevent it? Yeah, you can kind of set them up for doing that. And that goes by the incredibly unhelpful term scaffolding. Scaffolding is when you make a hard problem easier for your kid. It's kind of like rigging the system.

And I think that's a good idea, too. What's interesting is that I knew this research when I was parenting Lucy and Amanda, and I didn't do a very good job of doing any of this, like naming the positive opposite, looking for ways to praise the positive opposite. Like, oh, Lucy, I'm just so happy when you and your sister are getting along. It makes me so happy when you're sharing your toys. I would just yell at them. Even when you know it in the way that a graduate student in psychology might know the right thing to do and yet not do it. These reactive strategies,

this like, oh, don't do that. They take no forethought. They just happen after the fact. And this positive opposite praise, that takes a lot of energy and a lot of proactive, strategic thinking. So you're saying you need a little bit more planning or thought to create the reward ahead of time versus the punishment, which just comes out of your mouth naturally. But it's not just the response that's very quick to make. It also produces a really fast outcome. Whereas a reward, the outcome may be much more nuanced, right? It might be smaller. In other words, you don't stop bashing someone on the head. You start becoming a slightly more mature and kind person, whatever. Also, there's no guarantee that that process will continue unabated. And thirdly, it might take a really long time. So

the more I hear you talk, I think, wow, reward and punishment are not just flip sides of the same coin. They're totally different. So if that is true, then what we really want to know is what's the best way to think about problem solving on balance. We know that negativity is powerful. We know that punishment happens intuitively and quickly, and it often works quickly, whereas all the stuff on the reward side is a little bit more costly, a little bit more nuanced. That sounds like it's going to be hard to wait for. Would you encourage people to nevertheless cut down on the punishment and bulk up on the reward, even though the

benefits may not manifest so quickly? This one is a really clear answer. You should definitely cut down on punishment and increase the praising of the positive. This is a classroom management trick that I used to use, too. You walk into a room and there's a moderate level of mayhem. You got to class maybe like three minutes after the bell rang for some reason, and the kids are already like they're off. And what do you do? Do you yell at everyone? Like, everyone, stop talking. I said said, everyone get into your seats right now. Mrs. Duckworth is so mean. Mrs. D, as they used to call me.

I'm surprised you let him even do that. I thought it was like hip at the time. But here's what a more skilled teacher says. Stephen, thank you so much for having your homework out. Julie, I see you've got a pencil. Excellent. You're ready to go. So you identify the positive behavior and pay attention only to that. Yeah. And I will tell you, you don't have to wait like a day or a week for that to take effect. It actually works relatively quickly. And you can imagine that those little moments of praise, the kids don't forget it. They clearly are sort of moved by it. I know bad is stronger than good

in some ways, but there is something about that approval that you get that one could argue that that is stronger than being criticized. Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss how positive reinforcement and rewards could be used to encourage nationwide pro-social behavior. Hey, I'll pay you 10 bucks if you vote. Before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about incentives, I'd like to share some of your thoughts on the topic.

We told listeners to let us know about their experiences with reward and punishment. At Somninat shared the approach that they use with their son. Overall, we use rewards and punishments to get quick and often temporary results in critical situations or to mark an instance of exceptionally good or bad behavior. In normal situations, we just explain a lot and try to convince him to do what we want, and he mostly complies. At Caleb Mezzi writes, Punishment is setting a standard, not just for the kid, but for those punishing.

If X happens, Y follows. If a bad word was said, the kid must say sorry. And so should the parent when the kid tells daddy he said that bad word. Hold everyone accountable. At JeromeDB says that his mother used an incentive for behavior change that didn't involve reward or punishment. When I was a kid, my mother always told me that there would appear a black cross on my forehead when I was telling a lie. Once, she dipped her finger in the ashes of the fireplace without me knowing it and made the cross sign on my forehead and then said for me to look in the mirror. I didn't

dare tell a lie for more than a year until she told me what she really did. If you'd like your thoughts to appear on an upcoming show, make sure to follow our Twitter account, at NSQ Show. Now, back to Stephen and Angela's conversation about how incentives affect behavior change. Now, what about the fear, since we're talking about children, the fear that overpraise can create a sense of entitlement, endowment? You know, a kid ties their shoes and you're over the moon about how brilliant they are. They're going to think they're the next Einstein. In fact, they don't know anything about math at all. I think that you want to avoid two things. One is inauthentic praise. It really does become empty. I have to say my late stepmother-in-law, God rest her soul, she used to say of all of her

grandchildren that they were perfect. And she used to say it all the time. Like, oh, Amanda, you're just perfect. Lucy, my perfect grandchild. And I was like, you know, at some point the word perfect starts to lose its currency. I do think that you should be looking for opportunities to praise, but it should still be authentic. If you really think your kid's piano playing sounds like cats mating, you shouldn't be like, oh, my gosh, this is incredible. You can praise something else. I think it's great that you can sit through your own horrific piano playing. Yeah, exactly. So I do think that authenticity matters. And people are pretty good at any age at rooting out the inauthentic from the authentic compliments. And the other thing is there is this idea of intermittent reinforcement from animal experiments mostly, which is the following phenomenon. You can praise somebody or in animal experiments reward them with a little pellet of chow or some sugar water. You can do it every time an animal, say, presses a lever or does something that you're trying to

teach the animal to do. You can do it 100% of the time or you could do it, say, 80% of the time. And you might expect that rewarding a behavior 100% of the time, that's the strongest form of reinforcement. That's the best kind of reward. But there are experiments that show that in some ways, the 80% reward, you know, most of the time it comes out, but one out of five times it doesn't. And you don't know when that would be. That can actually be more lasting. So some would argue that with kids, you shouldn't praise 100% of the time, not only because it's inauthentic,

but also because you want to get a little bit of this uncertainty into the system. That's debated. Okay, so avoid inauthentic praise. I want to consider intermittent reward. What about you personally? Not as dispenser, because we already know that you love to punish.

You understand the power of rewarding, but it sounds like you're naturally inclined toward punishment. I wasn't a very good parent. We've got to get your kids on the show and get to the bottom of this. But let me ask you this. Not you as the dispenser of reward or punishment, but you as the recipient. Tell me about that. How do you respond best? I sometimes imagine what the world would be like if everybody got as much praise as I get daily, if not hourly. I am often praised. I get emails like, oh, I love your

podcast, or I get students who write me. And as a recipient of all that praise, I think about what it would be like if all people got this much praise. I think people would be so happy, and I also think they'd be really productive. I don't think you would make people into complacent underperformers. It really makes me more excited to do better. Now, it's probably hard to establish causality there, though. In other words, does the praise make you more productive or are you praiseworthy because you already are productive and you're just keeping on keeping on? Or are you praiseworthy because you already are productive and you're just keeping on keeping on? I know economists like to ask the question of reverse causality. Is X really driving Y?

Or could it be that Y drives X? Maybe it's the umbrellas that are making the rain come down. Exactly. But you know what? I think when it comes to human interaction, almost always X drives Y and Y drives x in a kind of virtuous or vicious cycle meaning i get praised and then i have a little more confidence and i feel like when i do well it's rewarded right that makes me try harder which earns me more praise etc and i think if you ask the question about so many psychological dynamics, it's both.

And that's why these cycles get entrenched. It's an estuary of praise is what you're describing. Not a limited reservoir of praise. What about governments? Let me ask you whether you feel in that realm, whether reward or punishment is more effective, because governments typically are on the punishment side of things. Yeah. Think about the whole judicial system, the penal system. You know, nobody's praising the positive opposite of burglary and other more serious crimes. They're all kind of after the fact negative consequences, which are in theory supposed to have some dissuasive effect.

Well, our mutual friend Richard Thaler, who's an economist at the University of Chicago, he wrote an op-ed in the Times. This was some years back. It was called Making Good Citizenship Fun. So we're not talking about crime and punishment here. We're talking about compliance, things like that. And he gives a couple examples of how it's a good idea to use what he calls positive reinforcement,

you would call reward, versus punishment. I would also call it positive reinforcement. I just wouldn't call punishment negative reinforcement. Okay, okay. So he gives a bunch of examples of companies and governments around the world that have implemented fun tools to help people do the, quote, right thing. So this is all very much in keeping with the Thaler brand of what he calls nudging. Here's an example, though. New Taipei City in Taiwan

recently initiated a lottery as an inducement for dog owners to clean up after their pets. Somehow it always comes back to dog poop on the show. There's a theme here. It's a leitmotif. Owners who deposited dog waste

into a special depository were made eligible for a lottery to win gold ingots, thus literally turning dog waste into a special depository were made eligible for a lottery to win gold ingots, thus literally turning dog waste into gold. The top prize was worth about $2,000. The city reports that it halved, cut in half, the fecal pollution in its streets during the initiative. So that's a nice, happy ending story. There are also probably a whole lot of other cases where something like that is tried and it doesn't work. So would you suggest that governments try to take a little bit more from the positive playbook than they typically do? And if so, how would you suggest that they ensure that it does work?

I love the idea that we should try some things. I think the Taiwanese dog poop lottery is a completely plausible story. I do wonder about how that could get us into other problems. So you're immediately thinking a lot of counterfeit dog poop and you're stuffing the ballot box with fake dog poop to get the gold ingots. Well, there's moral hazard, but there's also, you know, we can reward people not just through dollars and ingots of gold, but like, think about raising children. I don't think many parents would say that a monetary system of financial incentives and fines is the best way to parent. I think we also want our children to want to earn our admiration or our respect. So if the government could find ways of dispensing incentives that aren't just financial, and the reason is not just a dollars and cents budget cost thing. incentives. Like, hey, if you do this, I'll pay you five bucks. I'll pay you like 10 bucks if you vote. That also sends the message that's the reason why you would do those things. And I think

there are other reasons that you would do those things like it's the right thing. It's good for everyone. So you have to be careful about how you reward things. But I think we should try. And it is interesting now that you say it. Almost everything governments are set up to do is about punishing the bad and almost nothing is about rewarding the good. The notion of using a positive reinforcement or reward to prevent someone from doing the bad thing, that's really, to me, the hardest part of that matrix. And people have talked about this over the years, you know, give a bounty to potential criminals rather than committing the crime rather than dealing drugs, which hurts society overall, wouldn't it be nice to incentivize people to do the pro-social thing? But not only is that a slippery slope morally, as you put it, if you pay someone $10 to vote

this year, do you expect $20 next year? And then what if you don't have $30 the next year? And also having you undermine the institution of democracy by saying that this is something that people would only do because we paid you. But I have to say, when I look around the world generally, all the world, the governments, the institutions, firms, families, and so on. When you look around the whole world. Yes, Stephen, go on. When you look around the whole world, yes, Stephen, go on. It feels like, at least in most of the Western cultures that I'm more familiar with, the standard tool we reach for is the negative, is the punishment. Is the fine.

It's the prohibition. I think back to something I learned a couple years ago, actually, at the conference that you put together, the first Behavior Change for Good conference, where you had Danny Kahneman come and talk. He was interviewed by Max Bazerman from Harvard. And Danny talked about his primary influence. Oh, Kurt Lewin? Kurt Lewin. And how Kurt Lewin's realization, this goes back probably 100 years now, is if you want to get someone to do something, remove the barriers that prevent them from doing it. And similarly, I think if you flip that, if you want to get someone to not do something, well, our standard response is find a way to lock it down or to threaten them. And I'm just curious whether all this learning that you and your peers have been doing for the past hundred years or so might provide us with some clever

opportunity to think even in a tiny way about flipping that script a little bit and using some kind of reward or positive reinforcement to prevent bad behaviors, antisocial behaviors a little bit more than we're doing currently. I remember when Danny said there's a smart way and there's a foolish way to change behavior. That's the same thing that we're talking about here. there's a foolish way to change behavior. That's the same thing that we're talking about here. I mean, there's differences between rewards and punishments and the particular principles he was talking about with Lewin. But what they have in common is that sometimes the smart way is really the non-obvious way. Like, what do you do when your kid's throwing their stuff everywhere? Tell them not to. That's the obvious thing to do. But the smart thing is not obvious. You know, this is another thing that Alan Kazin said. If you have a really, really disruptive kid, like they are hardly doing anything that you can praise.

And they're certainly not doing the positive opposite. He was like, just praise anything. Literally just praise them when they're just sitting there. You don't even have to praise extraordinarily great behavior. Just praise them when they're not doing something terrible. And so I do think this non-obvious route is very often the smart route. And it's maybe for lack of wherewithal or just that we are kind of frazzled. We do the more foolish, reactive, but less effective thing. Well, Angela, I have to say, I think,

parenthesis, authentic praise, you handled this question really well today. I also think, parenthesis, authentic praise. You handled this question really well today. I also think, intermittent praise, you almost always do that. And therefore, I think, parenthetically, as a friend, that we should probably do this again next week. And it's probably time to go. Parenthesis, smile, end parenthesis. Thank you, Stephen. No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Stephen and Angela conclude that

tenter hooks are tools used to hang slabs of meat. This is incorrect. A tenter is a frame on which fabric is stretched to prevent shrinkage while it dries. Tenter hooks attach the material to the tenter. The phrase to be on tenter hooks originated from this method of drying and was used to mean being in a state of suspense or anxiety. Angela wonders about the definition of baited, as in baited breath, and Stephen says it might just be a shortened version of abated, an adjective meaning to lessen in intensity or amount. This is correct. The phrase baited breath,

meaning to hold one's breath in suspense, was first used in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Today, baited is rarely used outside of that one specific phrase. Later, Stephen references a 2012 New York Times op-ed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler, and he reads the following passage about dog owners in New Taipei City. Owners who deposited dog waste into a special depository were made eligible for a lottery to win gold ingots, thus literally turning dog waste into gold. Sorry, Professor Thaler, but I have to fact-check you here. They figuratively turned dog waste into gold. Not literally. A literal transformation would mean a bizarre form of alchemy that would certainly result in humans exuberantly collecting and investing their pet's defecation, rather than depositing it into a

special bin and waiting for the results of a lottery. Finally, Stephen thinks that in most Western cultures, punishment is the standard tool. According to the World Prison Brief, the United States is the most punitive country in the world, with 629 prisoners per 100,000 people. in the world, with 629 prisoners per 100,000 people. But some non-Western countries have high incarceration rates as well. Rwanda comes in second on the list with 580 prisoners per 100,000 people. And Turkmenistan is third with 576. That's it for the fact check. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, what happens when something you've believed for a long time turns out to be wrong? And he said, yeah, that guy, he's the epitome of stupidity. That's next week on No Stupid Questions. No Stupid Questions is produced

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