Positive Punishment

In psychology, there are four basic types of conditioning that can
result in changes in behavior. They are positive reinforcement, negative
reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment.
Reinforcement involves a conditioning that increases the execution of an
act. Punishment involves a conditioning that decreases the execution of
an act. Positive conditioning involves presenting a stimulus that either
reinforces or punishes. Negative conditioning involves eliminating a
stimulus, and thus either reinforcing or punishing. All four are
effective in experiments with animals. Yet ever modern psychological
standard calls for only positive reinforcement to be used in shaping
human behavior.

The reason for this is simple. This focus on punitive damages, this
idea that you change the world by hurting those who are making it
imperfect - it's dangerous. It's ineffective. It's violence begetting
violence. I don't believe in evil, and so I don't believe in evil
people. Hell, I don't even believe in free will. There is only
causality. And when we inhabit a society where people are caused to do
awful, terrible things to women, that's a world that should be changed.
But I don't think you can really change it by punishing those people who
have wronged us. You lock up one rapist, and you take him off the
streets. You kill that rapist, and you ensure he'll never hurt anyone
ever again. There's something positive that comes from that, and that's
why it's important that we maintain a legal system that prevents
predators from committing their harmful acts. But just as capital
punishment has been statistically proven to present only an extremely
minor aversive effect and to largely not influence the rates of capital
punishment-worthy crimes, so too do punitive acts fail to really
accomplish what our goals should be. I don't plan to discipline my
children my spanking them. Why would I discipline a rapist by killing
them, or torturing them, or hitting them?

There's something wrong here, and it's salient and it's important and
it should be dealt with. And as I said in my project, I get why there's
a reason to be angry, and I get why you might want to stand up and say,
"You should be angry too, and I'm going to make you that way." But is
that really the path we want to go down? Is that really what will be
best for us in the long run? I don't know. I hope not.