In our everyday lives, we are continually faced with situations
wherein those who are charged with the duty of maintaining law and
order threaten to punish us if we do not comply with the demands of
society. As adults, we know that if we exceed the speed limit and get
caught, we will end up paying a substantial fine. If it happens too
often, we will lose our licenses. So we learn to obey the speed limit
when there are patrol cars in the vicinity. Youngsters in school know
that if they cheat on an exam and get caught, they could be humiliated
by the teacher and severely punished. So they learn not to cheat while
the teacher is in the room watching them. But does harsh punishment
teach them not to cheat? I don't think so. I think it teaches them to
try to avoid getting caught. In short, the use of threats of harsh
punishment as a means of getting someone to refrain from doing
something he or she enjoys doing necessitates constant harassment and
vigilance. It would be much more efficient and would require much less
noxious restraint if, somehow, people could enjoy doing those things
that contribute to their own health and welfare—and to the health and
welfare of others. If children enjoyed not beating up smaller kids or
not cheating or not stealing from others, then society could relax its
vigilance and curtail its punitiveness. It is extremely difficult to
persuade people (especially young children) that it's not enjoyable to
beat up smaller people. But it is conceivable that, under certain
conditions, they will persuade themselves that such behavior is unen-
joyable.
Let's take a closer look. Picture the scene: You are the parent of a 5-
year-old boy who enjoys beating up his 3-year-old sister. You've tried
to reason with him, but to no avail. So, to protect the welfare of
your daughter and to make a nicer person out of your son, you begin to
punish him for his aggressiveness. As a parent, you have at your
disposal a number of punishments that range from extremely mild (a
stern look) to extremely severe (a hard spanking, forcing the child to
stand in the corner for 2 hours, and depriving him of television
privileges for a month). The more severe the threat, the greater the
likelihood that the youngster will mend his ways while you are
watching him. But he may very well hit his sister again as soon as you
turn your back.
Suppose instead you threaten him with a very mild punishment. In
either case (under the threat of severe or mild punishment), the child
experiences dissonance. He is aware that he is not beating up his
little sister and he is also aware that he would very much like to
beat her up. When he has the urge to hit his sister and doesn't, he
asks himself, in effect, "How come I'm not beating up my little
sister?" Under a severe threat, he has a ready-made answer in the form
of sufficient external justification: "I'm not beating her up because,
if I do, that giant over there (my father) is going to spank me, stand
me in the corner, and keep me from watching TV for a month." The
severe threat has provided the child ample external justification for
not hitting his sister while he's being watched.
The child in the mild-threat situation experiences dissonance, too.
But when he asks himself, "How come I'm not beating up my little
sister?" he doesn't have a good answer because the threat is so mild
that it does not provide abundant justification. The child is not
doing something he wants to do—and while he does have some
justification for not doing it, he lacks complete justification. In
this situation, he continues to experience dissonance. He is unable to
reduce the dissonance by simply blaming his inaction on a severe
threat. The child must find a way to justify the fact that he is not
aggressing against his little sister. The best way is to try to
convince himself that he really doesn't like to beat his sister up,
that he didn't want to do it in the first place, and that beating up
little kids is not fun. The less severe the threat, the less external
justification; the less external justification, the greater the need
for internal justification. Allowing people the opportunity to
construct their own internal justification can be a large step toward
helping them develop a permanent set of values.
To test this idea, I performed an experiment at the Harvard University
nursery school in collaboration with J. Merrill Carl-smith. For
ethical reasons, we did not try to change basic values like
aggression; parents, understandably, might not approve of our changing
important values. Instead, we chose a trivial aspect of behavior—toy
preference.
We first asked 5-year-old children to rate the attractiveness of
several toys; then, in each instance, we chose one toy that the
children considered quite attractive and told them they couldn't play
with it. We threatened half of the children with mild punishment for
transgression—"I would be a little angry"; we threatened the other
half with more severe punishment—"I would be very angry; I would have
to take all of the toys and go home and never come back again; I would
think you were just a baby." After that, we left the room and allowed
the children to play with the other toys—and to resist the temptation
of playing with the forbidden one. All the children resisted the
temptation; none played with the forbidden toy.
On returning to the room, we asked the children again to rate the
attractiveness of all the toys. The results were both striking and
exciting. Those children who underwent a mild threat now found the
forbidden toy less attractive than before. In short, lacking adequate
external justification for refraining from playing with the toy, they
succeeded in convincing themselves that they hadn't played with it
because they didn't really like it. On the other hand, the toy did not
become less attractive for those who were severely threatened. These
children continued to rate the forbidden toy as highly desirable;
indeed, some even found it more desirable than they had before the
threat. The children in the severe-threat condition had good external
reasons for not playing with the toy—and they therefore had no need to
find additional reasons; consequently, they continued to like the toy.
Jonathan Freedman extended our findings and dramatically illustrated
the permanence of the phenomenon. He used as his "crucial toy" an
extremely attractive battery-powered robot that scurries around,
hurling objects at a child's enemies. The other toys were sickly by
comparison. Naturally, all of the children preferred the robot. He
then asked them not to play with that toy, threatening some children
with mild punishment and others with severe punishment. Then he left
the school and never returned. Several weeks later, a young woman came
to the school to administer some paper-and-pencil tests to the
children. The children were unaware of the fact that she was working
for Freedman or that her presence was in any way related to the toys
or the threats that had occurred earlier. But it just so happened that
she was administering her test in the same room Freedman had used for
his experiment—the room where the same toys were casually scattered
about. After she administered the test to the children, she asked them
to hang around while she scored it—and suggested, off-handedly, that
they might want to amuse themselves with those toys someone had left
in the room.
Freedman's results are highly consistent with our own. The
overwhelming majority of the children who had been mildly threatened
weeks earlier refused to play with the robot; they played with the
other toys instead. On the other hand, the great majority of the
children who had been severely threatened did, in fact, play with the
robot. In sum, a severe threat was not effective in inhibiting
subsequent behavior—but the effect of one mild threat inhibited
behavior as much as 9 weeks later. Again, the power of this phenomenon
rests on the fact that the children did not come to devalue this
behavior (playing with the toy) because an adult told them it was
undesirable; they convinced themselves that it was undesirable. My
guess is that this process may well apply beyond mere toy preference
to more basic and important areas, such as the control of aggression.
Partial support for this guess can be derived from some correlational
studies performed in the area of child development indicating that
parents who use severe punishment to stop a child's aggression tend to
have children who, while not very aggressive at home, display a great
deal of aggression at school and at play away from home.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson - 8th Edition 1999
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
