Basic FACT; comparing animals instinctive behavior to human rational behavior is an apples and oranges situation. Though some human beings are little more than animals, those who discipline and train their children for adulthood do not fall into that category.
For that look at the failures to teach and train, not the successes.
Behaviorism in psychology, and many of the school policies coming out of it, were designed by behaviorists, studying lab rats.
And yes, if you treat kids like animals they will begin to act like animals. Turns out that the only school children who “follow the formulas” that they concoct from lab rat studies to a pretty strong degree, are autistic and “slower” students. That’s where all this time-out **** was done and about the time they started bribing kids with candy and pop for good behavior in school. And gum-chewing if you can believe that. The “good” kids got to chew gum in class from time to time.
From one class last semester I have a virtual lab rat “Sniffy” that we had to train to do different things, and I can actually put him in “timeout” for 24 hours, and then watch whether that changed his behavior. And guess what? Some of their behavior was changed “for the better” during those time-out periods. Another thing was that if the rat was scared of a light coming on because it meant an electric shock, and then you just present the light without the shock, eventually the rat gets used to it and quit demonstrating freezing behavior. Put him in 24 hours of timeout and show him the light then, and the fear is renewed. So yeah, it must be a good idea to have kids sit in time-out because maybe then they’ll respond better to teachers’ verbal threats. Yeah, so this is how we designed school policy. With animals. And that’s half the reason, in my opinion, that so many humans act like animals.
Here’s another person’s screen shot of Sniffy in his Skinner box. This Sniffy looks exactly like my Sniffy because he runs off the same software.
But the behaviorists intentionally and loudly ignored anything “inside” the head. It was all about behavior modification through various forms of incentives and punishments. They chided other psychologists because they were studying how people think because it was not directly and objectively observable. This, of course, was before we had things like fMRI to observe brain activity directly.
As it turns out, kids who performed average or above were pretty indifferent to these. Giving them candy here and there had very little effect on their school performance or their behavior. Turns out the kids who were doing better either didn’t care about the incentives, or they learned to game the system. But that didn’t stop them. Behavior mod became the norm, because we used what we learned from rats and applied it to children.
You’re the one who brought up references to animals, as if they were somehow more noble than humans.
Now let’s look at your comments that you made to another poster, that inspired me to compare behavior with animals:
So now people who spank their children are like animals?
Pardon me if I think you are making a deeply uninformed and ridiculous statement with that.
Animals don’t have a concept of disciplining their children. They don’t analyze what options that they have available and then implement it as need arises.
You seem to have this uninformed idea that parents that spank their kids are just reacting like some baboon or something and that is categorically wrong for most of us.
Just thought you should know before you let out an y more condescending and insulting comparisons, bro.
I was just offering an example of an animal who “analyzes her options” so why are you getting your panties in a wad about it?
I guess you just wanted more people to be against you so you could tell us we’re condescending and insulting in making the comparisons? Psychologists made those comparisons for decades and that’s both part of the solution but also a big part of the problem. Parents and teachers were getting lectured about how to “modify behavior” and all this stuff became as gospel.
So yes we have been treating them like animals, and the other poster was right in hoping we could rise above such behavior.
You should be on my side in this, but of course you aren’t because you’ve chosen not to be. Please give me your next insult so that I can decide whether I need to try to one-up it.
Either that or just make your point if you have one.
