Reinforcements and punishments in education: what are they and how are they used?

All the things we do, we do because they have worked for us before. In other words, if I am a person who yells at others, it is because at some point I learned that I can get some benefit from yelling. On the contrary, if I am a passive person, tending to avoid conflict, it will be because at some point I have learned that shouting it does not provide me with benefits, or it provides me with greater damages.

However, behaviors that have always provided me with benefits may stop doing so when the context changes. For example, it may have worked for me in my high school class to be aggressive towards my classmates because that's how they treated me. homework, but maybe I run into other types of people when I get to university, less vulnerable to my aggressiveness (or more aggressive). In that case, I will have a serious problem, because I will have run out of behavioral resources to function in that aspect of my life.

For all these reasons, for an educator it is of vital importance pay close attention to what is and is not reinforcing

, since early behaviors will evolve over time and, without an adequate guide in growth (the which will not always exist), we can find adults who respond "like children" to their social situations.

• Related article: "Educational psychology: definition, concepts and theories"

Punishments and reinforcements to educate

First of all, it is worth clarifying the importance of the contingencies between behaviors and consequences, especially at very early ages, in which basic mental processes such as thought, memory or language are in early stages of their development and therefore will not be as effective as a tool educational.

Organisms establish behavioral patterns through the consequences that follow them. If the result of a behavior makes it easier for said behavior to be repeated in the future, it will be called reinforcement. and, if, on the contrary, its probability of appearance decreases, we will call this consequence: punishment.

From this we deduce that the same consequence, in different people, may or may not be a reinforcement or a punishment. For example, taking away TV time may be punishing for one child, but not for another. Sending a child to her room can be reinforcing if what is in the room pleases the child (toys, game consoles…), and a congratulations or an approving smile may be reinforcing enough (or it may not).

• You may be interested in: "What is positive or negative reinforcement in Psychology?"

The need for coherence between school and society

We must know our audience very well, and exercise good contingency between the behaviors displayed and the consequences we administer. And in that sense, we must be very careful depending on what behavior we are interested in establishing. Praise is a social reinforcer for most children. and when, for example, we instinctively say "Very good!" a child for whatever he does, we can fall into not reinforcing both the child's activity and the call for attention.

This can lead to an association between self-esteem and social reinforcement, which can lead to seeking that self-esteem in the approval of our physical appearance, economic level, likes on instagram and other banalities that society tends to reinforce (through fiction, advertising, etc.).

Another example is given in the case of "informers". In a society that increasingly promotes social responsibility, and encourages us to get involved in cases of gender violence (calling the police when we hear screams next door) or fraud (both by a company and by an individual), the culture of the class continues to be, on many occasions, that of punishing the informer when he warns us that So-and-so has copied or Menganita has hit Zutanita.

The importance of promoting appropriate behaviors

Without going into which social model is the most appropriate, the incoherence between a society that, through the school, educates in a value (silence) that he does not consider desirable in the society his infants are going to join, and that he will try to modify through campaigns etc

Reinforcements and punishments operate continuously in the educational context, and it is vitally important to detect which behaviors we are reinforcing and which ones are not, as well as what it means to reinforce said behaviors for the society to which these are going to be incorporated. citizens in formation, because whether we like it or not, childhood and adulthood are nothing more than arbitrary conventions, and from the moment we are born until we die, we are nothing but developing people.