The effects of response-cost punishment on instructional control during a choice task.
A small, immediate loss of something valuable can keep people following rules, but only if the reward for breaking the rule stays small.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four college students sat at a computer. They could follow instructions or ignore them.
Each time they broke the rule, they lost 25 cents. The researchers flipped this penalty on and off to see if the money mattered.
What they found
When the 25-cent penalty was on, all four students followed wrong instructions more often.
When the penalty was off, they quickly went back to ignoring bad rules.
Even with the fine, students still cheated if the payoff for cheating got big enough.
How this fits with other research
Rilling et al. (1969) found the same thing with speech disfluencies. Losing a penny per stutter cut stuttering fast.
Mueller et al. (2000) showed response cost works with kids too. Taking away tokens cut destructive behavior by a large share.
Kruper (1968) looked scary at first.. That study said punishment barely worked. But they used electric shocks, not money. Money is less harsh, so people accept it more easily.
Why it matters
You can use tiny response costs to keep clients on task. A lost sticker, token, or minute of screen time can nudge rule-following without big fights. Just remember: if the payoff for breaking the rule gets too large, the penalty won’t hold.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study investigated the effects of punishing responses inconsistent with rules on instructional control during a choice task. In a procedure modeled after Hackenberg and Joker (1994), 7 adults were presented with repeated choices between progressive- and fixed-time schedules of reinforcement and were given instructions (rules) for how to respond to maximize earnings. Across sessions, the progressive-time schedule step size was manipulated so that the instructions became increasingly inaccurate, and deviating from the instructions produced greater earnings. The experiment consisted of two phases, Penalty and No Penalty. During the Penalty phase, deviating from the instructions produced a money-loss penalty (response-cost punishment). Two participants showed persistent instructional control and therefore completed only one phase (Penalty or No Penalty), and 1 participant showed little instructional control during the Penalty phase until the punishment magnitude was increased. In all 4 participants who experienced both Penalty and No Penalty phases, punishment increased the consistency of choices with the instructions, and in 2 of these participants punishment increased the progressive-schedule step size at which choices began to systematically deviate from the instructions. These results show that monetary penalties for breaking with rules may enhance instructional control, but that deviations from rules still occur under punishment when such deviations produce greater reinforcement than rule following.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2013 · doi:10.1002/jeab.20