Reward and punishment
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Reward and punishment is the idea that people perform better when offered rewards, or when threatened with punishment. Both ideas are now generally believed wrong in psychology although they persist in many kinds of politics, especially those based on hate, specifically "punishing bad people" to create fear of being considered such a bad person.
Regression towards the mean is one explanation of why people believe "punishment works" when it provably does not: after a good performance, the next performance is most likely to be worse. A reward is not likely to make someone able to perform much better than their current best, so, rewards appear not to work. However, after a bad performance, the next performance is most likely to be better. Thus punishment will be perceived to work, even if the better performance has nothing to do with it and it is simply a "more average" performance.
People who do not understand, or claim not to understand, this, are common in political life, but they have no credibility at this point, and stems from a pain and pleasure view of self.
[edit] See also
- risk and reward.