A comparison of the punishing effects of response-produced shock and response-produced time out.

Fantino (1967) compared two punishers head-to-head. Squirrel monkeys pressed a lever for food. Every press also gave either a quick shock or a 30-second time-out from food. The team varied how often each punisher followed the response. They also gave some animals a dose of pentobarbital to see if the drug changed the results.

Both shock and time-out cut lever pressing to nearly zero when they followed every response. The same drop happened whether the monkey got a shock or simply lost food for half a minute. If the punishers came only sometimes, or if the animal had pentobarbital on board, the suppression was weaker. After the session ended, shock-treated monkeys bounced back to normal rates faster than time-out monkeys.

Nigro (1966) set the stage. That study showed time-out only works when it is tied to the target response, a rule Fantino (1967) kept in place. Branch et al. (1977) later added pentobarbital to the same shock-vs-time-out design. They found the drug undid shock punishment but left time-out punishment untouched, a finer-grain picture that builds on E’s drug data.

Green et al. (1975) seems to disagree. In their set-up, taking time-out away actually strengthened responding. The key difference is the baseline: L’s animals worked to escape shock, so losing the escape chance felt like a loss of relief. E’s animals worked for food, so losing food felt purely bad. Same procedure, different function.

Schroeder et al. (1969) extended the idea to humans. They showed that intermittent shock still suppresses behavior, but the pattern of suppression depends on whether the person is paid on a steady or a variable schedule, echoing E’s intermittent-punishment findings.

You now have evidence that time-out can match shock in pure suppression power, at least when the behavior is maintained by something positive like food or praise. If you choose time-out over shock for ethical or policy reasons, you are not giving up effectiveness, but you should expect slightly slower recovery once the punishment phase ends. Always check what is keeping the behavior alive; the same time-out can punish or reinforce depending on that baseline.