A teacher scolds a student every time they talk out of turn in class, but the behaviour keeps recurring. A colleague suggests this is because scolding is acting as a reinforcer rather than a punisher. Explain how the same consequence (scolding) could function as either punishment

Question

A teacher scolds a student every time they talk out of turn in class, but the behaviour keeps recurring. A colleague suggests this is because scolding is acting as a reinforcer rather than a punisher. Explain how the same consequence (scolding) could function as either punishment or reinforcement, depending on the situation.

Accepted Answer

This situation illustrates an important, easily overlooked feature of reinforcement and punishment: whether a given consequence functions as reinforcement or as punishment is defined entirely by its actual effect on the frequency of the behaviour it follows — not by whether an outside observer judges the consequence to be pleasant or unpleasant in general.

Punishment is meant to reduce or suppress a response, and a reinforcer is, by definition, any stimulus or event that increases the probability that the response it follows will occur again. Scolding a student for talking out of turn is clearly intended as punishment — from the teacher's perspective, it is an unpleasant consequence meant to discourage the behaviour. Yet the fact that the student's talking-out-of-turn behaviour persists, or even increases, despite repeated scolding is exactly the kind of evidence that should prompt reconsidering what the scolding is actually accomplishing for this particular student.

If a student's underlying need is for attention, then even a scolding — despite being unpleasant in a general sense — may function as a form of attention, and if that attention is sufficiently reinforcing to this student (perhaps because they otherwise receive little attention, or because the alternative is simply being ignored), it can end up reinforcing rather than suppressing the very behaviour it was meant to punish. This is entirely possible within operant-conditioning principles, because reinforcers and punishers are defined by their functional effect on behaviour, which can differ between individuals depending on what needs and reinforcing histories they bring to the situation — what suppresses one student's behaviour may, through a different underlying mechanism, actually strengthen another's. …

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