Why you shouldn’t Punish when it comes to behaviour change.

We are all familiar with the concept of carrot and stick, and maybe you think that both have their place in your toolbox for influence and behaviour change.

However, as with most of my posts, I want to challenge your heuristics (mental shortcuts).

The stick proposition is that punishments can be useful to change behaviours we want to see changed. This can be achieved through one of two approaches:

1 Through adding something that results in a punishment. E.g.
Adding a list to a website, thereby shaming organisations e.g. for not hitting their targets
The objective here would be to reduce lazy or thoughtless behaviour.

2 Through taking something desirable away, which is effectively a punishment. E.g.  
Removing invitations to a Xmas party because of unwanted behaviours or outcomes.
 
NB Behaviourism:
An important consideration regarding behaviourism is that you have to account for the individual. For example, what is a punishment to you (no Christmas Party) might be music to my ears!

Back to the problems of punishment:
Physical punishment results in more aggression and fear in the future (a very serious consideration for parents). NB This does happen in workplaces as well as home settings.

Unintended consequences and classical conditioning—e.g., if the boss tends to yell every time you have a monthly team meeting, you will associate those meetings with yelling, fear, and anxiety, and this can become very dysfunctional. These thoughts and anxieties will impact you for much longer than the hour-long meeting!

However, THE KEY INSIGHT is that punishment is not helping as it does not support the behaviour change we want to see because it does not support a new learned behaviour.

As a rule, positive reinforcement is much preferred because you are developing what IS required – which is much more proactive and healthy.

So instead of shaming performance on a website and withdrawing the Xmas party invites, find out why the performance has been poor (e.g. it could be due to very poorly managed meetings) and then provide the appropriate training.

Then use classical conditioning in a positive sense, i.e. praise and reward (it doesn’t have to be financial) every time the new behaviours are visible (e.g. better agendas / more timeliness / video minutes etc.) and then inevitably performance will improve too – but in a much more positive environment.