Posted: April 24th, 2025

Discussion

Consider your Sidman reading this week. He indicated that often positive reinforcement is not used because many consider it to be nothing but bribery. Today, that attitude is growing stronger. Many popular educational sites shun using “rewards” because it causes a “decrease in intrinsic motivation” and that people should not be rewarded for “doing things they are supposed to be doing”. What is your position on this argument? Please defend using scholarly resources and writing, all in behavioral terms. 

(Note: You must include ALL required readings for this week and include 1 outside reference to earn full credit! Also remember you must respond to peer to earn full credit.)

1

This Coercive World

W e live in a coercive world, bombarded by warning signals
and threats. The governmentwarns, “Obey the law or go to
jail.” Law enforcement agencies pay attention to us only

when we have done something punishable. In our churches we hear,
“Sin not lest your souls be damned.” The landlord never thanks us
for the rent, but if we miss, tells us “Pay up or get out.” When
mortgage payments are delinquent, the usually unresponsive bank
threatens to send the sheriff. Educators tell us, “Spare the rod and
spoil the child,” and bemoan the permissive society that forbids them
the use of the rod and the switch. The boss orders, “Get here on time
or be fired.” Options like “Eat your vegetables or else no dessert” or
“Say that again, and I’ll wash your mouth with soap” teach children
“what is good for them.” Legal, business, and social institutions
communicate with us most frequently by advising uswhatwe should
do…or else. The common meaning of “Behave yourself’ is “Do what
I want you to do.” Coercing us, pushing us around-threatening us
with punishment or loss, or telling us what we have to do to escape
or avoid punishment or loss-is the predominant technique for
getting us to “behave.”

Sometimes people tell us what they are going to do to us if we fail
to act as they would like. When the threatener is also going to
administer the punishment, the coerciveness is quite open. At other
times, people warn us of dire consequences that will come from
someone else, perhaps even from an impersonal Nature; those
warnings, although technically coercive, are just good advice. When
we remind someone to carry an umbrella in order to keep from getting
wet, we do not have to be concerned that we are coercing them. But
even this benevolent warning illustrates in a minor way our general
acceptance ofcoercion. Although we need not worry ourselves about
this mild and unimportant instance, it is worth noting that we could
achieve the same result-getting someone to carry an umbrella-by
reminding them not that they could keep from getting wet, but that
they could stay dry.

17

Coercion and Its Fallout

At the other extreme, a friend pushes us violently to prevent a
falling object from striking our head. The push, although technically
a form of coercion is really a kind of physical “good advice,”
something we learn to handle without suffering the undesirable side
effects that I shall be concerned with throughout this book.

Between these extremes. we have instances like that of the
physician who warn . -stop molting or die of cancer,” with caring
friends and family echoing the threat. Is it fair to accuse a physician
ofcoercion when he tells us the dangers ofcontinuing to smoke? I am
concerned, in this in ta.nee. because the “treatment” could have
taken a positive rather than a negative form. Instead of simply
warning us again t the dire consequences of smoking, the physician
could have tried to get our family and friends to be especially nice to
us when we did something incompatible with smoking.

Teaching a patient what to do is more likely to accomplish the
desired goal than is warning the patient what not to do. Physicians
who simply warn a patient of impending death unless he stops
smoking are likely to find that the patient continues smoking but
stops coming to them for advice. As I shall show later, we react to
coercion by avoiding or escaping from our coercers if we can. The
patient’s avoidance of the physician shows that the advice, however
good its intentions, functioned as a threat.

This book, too, tells of the prevalence of coercion in our lives,
describes the disastrous side effects of coercion, and even warns of
catastrophe if we fail to eliminate or reduce our coercive practices;
the book itself could be considered, technically, an example of
coercion. It does not, however.just threaten. It also provides guiding
principles-in some instances, specific courses ofaction-that could
permit us to apply noncoercive techniques instead ofresorting to the
“solutions” of coercion when we want to or have to influence others.

Because we so frequently coerce each other, many of us take
coercion for granted; we fail to recognize how great a role it plays in
our interactionswith each other. Actually, coercion has its beginnings
in our interactions with the physical environment.

The Hostile Environment

. ature itself sets the example. The physical environment constantly
threatens to overwhelm us with cold, heat, wind, rain, snow, flood,

This Coercive World

earthquake, and fire. “Ifyou do not want to freeze,” it tells us, “build
helter;” “construct darns or floods will sweep away your homes;”

-famine is coming; store food.” Watching the skies and listening for
weather predictions has become almost second nature. We are
always defending ourselves against the environment.

ature, of course, never tells us what we have to do ifwe want to
avoid discomfort and catastrophe. We cannot logically attribute
intent to nature; being impersonal, it cannot really intend us to build
dams and store crops. And yet, experience tells us that the forces of
nature will come down hard on us ifwe do not take precautions. Our
conduct follows general laws that are independent of the personal or
impersonal character of the coercer, and of the coercer’s intent or
lack of intent. Reacting to warning signals from the inanimate
environment just as we do to coercion imposed by our fellows, we
tend also to personify nature, even if only in our speech.

In the face of nature’s overwhelming power, we have learned to
appreciate its gifts-the resources it does make available to ingenuity
and industry, and its awesome beauty. But nature exacts its price for
everything, threatening to take away with one hand what it has given
with the other. Famine always follows feast.

We also seem unable to deal with many of the natural marvels our
intelligence has discovered. Nuclear energy promises to make up for
the impending depletion of coal, oil, and gas reserves, but its deadly
residues are already poisoning our planet’s soil, water, and
atmosphere. Stockpiles of nuclear weapons, intended to prevent
war, require only a madman’s command to ensure the ultimate
meltdown. Plant hybridization has made it possible to produce
enough wheat, corn, and rice to feed the world, but by reducing
genetic diversity it leaves those critical food sources vulnerable to
complete destruction in one quick catastrophe.

Our internal environment, too, threatens us with physical
discomforts that may eventuate in illness and death. The pleasures
we derive from alcohol and otherdrugs make us biologicallydependent,
reducing our ability to adapt to nature’s realities. That biological
imperative, sexual reproduction, threatens to overpopulate the
earth, creating poverty, deprivation, and social tensions that express
themselves in warfare.

As we grow older, threats from the inside intensify. We defend
ourselves against our own body’s coercion by supporting a huge,
expensive medical establishment, at the same time making ourselves

19

This Coercive Worl

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Coercion and Its Fallout

vulnerable to the cold mercy of an avaricious insurance industry.
The tax code gives depreciation allowances for machinery, but not for
human bodies.

Because a large segment of society has succeeded in overcoming
the external and internal stresses the natural environment imposes,
many of us have lost sight of the extent to which nature coercively
shapes our conduct. We pay specialists to act as buffers between us
and nature; how much effort did it take to obtain the money we pay
them? How much of our income goes to rent or purchase the roof over

our head that lets us ignore storms and uncomfortable temperatures?
How great a share of our time and labor goes toward repairing leaks
in that roof, or keeping up, beautifying, and increasing the efficiency
of the structure? The escalating cost of the fuel that permits us to
avoid life-threatening temperatures is a reminder of our vulnerability
to environmental coercion, and arouses fear even among the well-to­
do that income and savings will not suffice to guarantee future

protection. The cost of modem medical technology is forcing hard
decisions about who is to survive and who is to be allowed to die.

How much of our time and labor goes for the clothing that keeps
us comfortable and dry no matter how inclement the weather? The
manufacture and maintenance of clothing, once a major occupation

of the female half of the world’s population, persists as an important

segment of industry and retains high status as a leisure-time activity
even among the affluent.

In this country, a few agriculturalists produce food for everyone.
Other specialists devote themselves to food preparation, and many
people now depend for sustenance on restaurants, precooked foods,
and packaged meals. Incredible increases in agricultural productivity
and distribution efficiency, along with levels of personal income
previously undreamed of, have made it possible for most of those in
economically developed countries to forget about the threat of
starvation. Cost escalations in recent years, however, sent many
scurrying back to leisure-time gardening and cooking. The depletion
of soil resources and natural stores of water in the service of
increasing food production, and the pollution of those resources in
the service of energy production, have once again sharpened our
awareness of the possibility of mass starvation.

Pharmaceutical companies stand ready to counter this threat, but
their artificial foods, vitamin pills, and energy capsules raise new
fears about biological adaptation and about the quality of life itself.

20

This Coercive World

Our body’s economy requires more than bare calories and chemicals.
Besides, who looks forward to meals that come in squeeze tubes,
powders, and capsules? And so, some of the answers to nature’s
coercion seem in tum to be generating new kinds of threats.

Even if we consider only shelter, clothing, and food, nature has
exacted tremendous tribute as the price ofsecurity and forgetfulness.
Although each individual may play only a small role in directly
counteracting nature’s coercion, what would our society look like if
the construction, clothing, and food industries were to close down?
Housing, clothing, agriculture, and animal husbandry-the sudden
disappearance of these and their associated and interdependent
industries, distribution networks, and marketing enterprises, would
immediately expose our individual vulnerability. Like those who live
in parts of the world where extremes of cold or heat force them into
a precarious struggle for existence, all of us would spend nearly all
our time counteracting environmental pressures. The illusory quality
of our current freedom from nature’s coercion would become
immediately evident. Many of us would not survive.

Because we have been able successfully to relax our vigilance, we
have come to consider as well-justified expenditures the enormous
commitment of time, effort, and resources that society devotes to
overcoming normal and everpresent forms ofenvironmental coercion.
We have not dealt so successfully with natural catastrophes, either
because their magnitude is overwhelming or because their
intermittency and unpredictability preclude any practical system of
control. Huge disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires,
tomados, floods, or volcanic eruptions remind us occasionally ofour
vulnerability, but we tend to regard these as exceptions to our
prevailing freedom from environmental constraints. In fact, they are
only extreme cases of threats that are always present, against which
we are always paying ransom from our store of physical, social, and
biological resources.

But here, rather than struggle against nature’s hostility, we accept
itwith a philosophical rationalization: “That’s life.” Natural disasters
like storms, floods, hurricanes, or earthquakes that leave us homeless
are “acts ofGod.” By simply accepting the inevitability ofunavoidable
catastrophe, we blind ourselves to its coercive character.

Even religious symbolism reflects environmental coercion. Gods of
the elements and of natural phenomena-fire, oceans, thunder,
fertility, seasons, winds-were afforded as much status as were

21

Coercion and Its Fallout

deities that were presumed to direct and pass judgment on human
social values and practices- the gods oflove, justice, music, drama,
and knowledge. According to more modern interpretations of God’s
will, His wrath is visited on mankind in the form of lightning bolts,
famines, floods , earthquakes. olcanic eruptions, plagues, epidemics,
and more recently, AIDS.

Environmental coercion ha found its way into our language, in the
ways we describe and explain our own conduct: ·some of us are
starved for affection. thirsting for knowledge, burning with passion,
or coldly logical; we ha,·e breezy. sunny, stormy, or even volcanic
personalities; young people on the way up the career ladder are
advised not to make aye : peedsters run like the wind; irate
parents thunder at their children: ideas flash into our heads;
misfortunes rain on u : the clouds ofwar gather; fiery orators speak
incendiary word : financial bubble are always bursting; our armed
forces make lightnin attack : mobs erupt in violence.

Warnings of impendin unplea ant or catastrophic weather and
other natural di asters permit u to prepare defenses and ward off
or reduce their eYerit:y: ·e honor and handsomely recompense the
prophets. The 1′” indu try. ·hich Yalues time in thousands ofdollars
per second and bow to audience size as the supreme arbiter of
success or failure, deYote thousands ofseconds per year to weather
forecasts . It dazzle u jth marvelous and fabulously expensive
displays of m eteorological and ,idea technique. The decision to
devote such effort, expen e. and ingenuity to reporting the weather,
and at the same time tone ect the qualityand amountofprogramming
in education, science. politic . drama. and music, reflects community
priorities. In spite of our \\i hful assumption of supremacy, we
remain subservient to nature even d uring our leisure.

The Hostile Community

Perhaps the everpresent ph sical coercion is responsible for the
general acceptance of social coercion, too , as a fact of life. I have
heard punishment advocated as a teaching technique for the
developmentally disabled on the ground that any method not
involving punishment runs counter to the principle ofnormalization.
“Normalization” refers to the notion, ordinarily quite reasonable,
that we should bring the handicapped back into the main stream

22

This Coercive World

rather than continue to segregate them. In this instance, the
proponent of punishment argued that a classroom without
punishment is an abnormal environment, to which no children
should be exposed. He seemed to be saying, “Life is hard; our
children should find that out early.” This warping of a basically
decent notion-normalization-comes, I believe, from unthinking
adaptation to the coercive model that even nature provides us with.

Social coercion is indeed accepted as natural. Inhabitants of the
world’s great cities take it for granted that they must bolt their doors,
secure their purses, carry an extra wallet with a few small bills to
hand over when faced with a knife or gun, and lock their car doors
even when driving, lest an intruderjump inwhen they stop at a traffic
light. No women and only foolish men walk after dark in that famous
cradle of liberty, the Boston Common; mugging, rape, and robbery
are inevitable there, and the police react with contempt for the
victim’s ignorant carelessness. On a larger scale, terrorism has
become a standard expression of economic, religious, or political
dissatisfaction in many parts of the world.

But not only the lawless practice social coercion. We punish
children and criminals in the hope of forestalling repetitions of
unacceptable conduct. In our educational system, the typical school
attempts to get children (and adults) to learn by threatening them
with failing grades if they do not; successful learning receives little
notice. Our legal code is largely a catalogue ofpenalties for every kind
of civil and criminal infraction; it defmes desirable conduct mainly
so that we might recognize and punish deviations. We threaten war
to keep other nations from seizing our possessions and corrupting
our values; superior force is the basis ofmodern “diplomacy.” Going
outside the law ourselves, we deny employment, schooling, and even
hospitalization to people who suffer illness that might have come
about through nonstandard sexual behavior. Attempts to institute
prayer in public schools never cease, even though the U. S. Supreme
Court has stated, “Prayer exercises in elementary and secondary
schools carry a potential risk of indirect coercion; students should
not be made to feel like outcasts by religious observance not their
own.” Workers go on strike to force concessions from their employers,
and companies threaten bankruptcy in order to nullify previously
negotiated agreements. Property developers do not hesitate to force
tenants out ofapartments that are to be turned into condominiums;
the landlord-tenant relationship has become adversarial.

23

Coercion and Its Fallout

Our “free enterprise” system, supposedly based on the principles
of supply and demand, is more free for the suppliers than for the
demanders. In their own self-interest, the suppliers, whose rewards
are limited only by their intelligence, energy, resources, and
ruthlessness, subject the rest of society to coercion. In turn, the
demanders, limited by the severity of their needs, attempt through
governmental regulation to coerce the suppliers into restraining
their quest for wealth. In recent years, this countercontrol has
become less and less effective. Our increasingly prevalent tendency
to let the unrestrained self-interest of the marketplace determine
prices, wages, profits, interest rates, corporate size and scope, and
resource conservation is sometimes called “social Darwinism” –
a direct acknowledgment of economic coercion, analogous to the
environmental coercion that gives rise to the biological “survival of
the fittest.”

Although people influence each other in many ways, they tum
more readily to coercive means to get results than to other means.
The news media are filled with reports of murder and destruction.
Hardly a day goes by without an account of child abuse by parents,
parent abuse by children, spousal abuse, or sexual coercion in the
workplace. We expect to be warned, intimidated, threatened, pushed
around, and perhaps beaten even by those who employ, teach,
protect, govern, or love us. Threats of punishment, deprivation, or
loss are standard practice in the workplace and classroom, establish
a one-way dominance relation between police and citizenry, provide
the basis for attaining political objectives, and even color the most
intimate interactions within families.

At ourjobs, we are accustomed to being reprimanded for bad work
and ignored for good. We resign ourselves to forced contributions to
charities and even to individuals we do not care for. In spite of
campaign finance laws, municipal and state employees are quite
aware of the consequences in store for failure to contribute to a
political campaign. And job security is always an issue in labor­
management disputes.

For many students, high grades function as rewards not for their
own sake but because they signify the avoidance of low grades.
Millions of pupils would escape from school immediately if the law
permitted; even in college, with students paying high tuitions,
professors who do not require attendance expect only a fraction of
the registered students actually to attend classes. In the elementary

24

This Coercive World

grades and all the way through high school, teachers are concerning
themselves more with coercive techniques for maintaining discipline
than with effective methods of instruction.

We punish crimes, but only tolerate lawfulness. Virtue is supposed
to be its own reward, but within the legal code, virtue being its own
reward means simply that it keeps us out ofjail. And our police, on
whom we rely for everyday protection and security, are taught to
accomplish their task by intimidation, force , and punishment; they
have come to represent a power to be feared, a formerly benevolent
institution that now demands subservience.

We watch our legislative bodies with callous amusement as our
representatives cut each other down in revenge for rebelling against
the leadership or for nonconforming votes. In the highest councils of
government, individuals seek to consolidate their power or prestige
by discrediting rivals, even at the cost of compromising matters of
principle and national security.

Within families , the question of”who is boss” often has to be settled
before acts of giving become possible; intimidation and submission
are frequently the prerequisites for sexual interaction. Family coercion
starts early. As soon as infants begin to move about on their own,
“getting into” things, adults resort to restraint and punishment to set
limits. It is not unusual to find parents who rarely speak to their
children except to scold, correct, or criticize. Even as infants we are
exposed to the coercive model; we learn quickly to participate in a
system in which coercion is the standard way to get others to do our
bidding. Ifbabies could talk, we might hear many of them say, “I am
justgoing to keep on screaming until you give me what Iwant.” These
kinds of coercion do not happen because we are by nature cruel or
mean, or because we want to instill those qualities in our children,
but because we have not been exposed to effective alternatives.
Nature rarely provides any other model for us to emulate.

Perceptive cartoonists are quite aware of the role of coercion in the
family and in other parts of our lives. In one comic strip, a child who
has been shown being scolded and having toys taken away, ends up
saying to a friend , “I’m going to be wailing hysterically for the next two
hours.” In another strip, the cartoonist displays a fine appreciation
of the essence of coercion: The early frames show a mother trying to
get her children to “behave” by making such threats as, “Eat your
dinner or there will be no dessert,” “Sit up straight or leave the table ,”
“Drink your milk or no 1V tonight,” and “Keep your feet off the table

25

Coercion and Its Fallout

or go to your room.” In the final frame, the husband comes home and
asks, “What’s for dinner?” She replies, “My specialty, chicken a la
ultimatum.” In yet another comic strip, we see a teenager saying to
his friend, “My mother is a psychologist. All I have to do is act a little
twisted and she’ll do anything it takes to bring me back to normal.”
And then, a cartoon shows a bar with a sign in the window, “Eat,
drink, and be merry… or else!” Many more examples are available;
cartoonists, who have a special talent for picking out life’s
incongruities, especially actions that are out of keeping with our
stated ideals, often find coercion a fertile field for satire.

The social life of teenagers among their peers continues and
intensifies the coercive model. The first tobacco produces dizziness;
the first alcohol tastes terrible; the first pot is disappointingly dull;
the first sex is often awkward and sometimes humiliating.
Nevertheless, the threatened expulsion of those who fail to go along
with the group is enough to push the beginner over these initial
barriers.

Like environmental coercion, social coercion is so prevalent that
we find it hard to imagine life without it. Freedom, one of our most
cherished values, has no qualities of its own; just as we would have
no need for the concept of plenty were it not for our experience of
deprivation, it is the absence of coercion that gives meaning to
freedom. If all were supplied with the basic necessities of life, the
concept of freedom from want would never have arisen; freedom of
speech and freedom of the press would never have found their way
into our vocabulary were it not for the existence or threat of
censorship; the principle of freedom of the seas would never have
been enunciated were it not for piracy and war; the notion of free
enterprise is a reaction to governmental control; when Franklin D.
Roosevelt announced as a national goal the achievement of freedom
from fear, he touched a universal longing that arises from our
constant exposure to environmental and social threats of all kinds.

B. F. Skinner advanced the thesis that the concept of freedom
would be unnecessary, and even without meaning, if our society
could eliminate the conditions from which we were always seeking
freedom. Ifwe had never enslaved one another, the ideal of freedom
from bondage would not have been needed. More generally, ifwe did
not try to control each other by threats of punishment, deprivation,
re triction, and loss, we would all be free without the concept of
freedom ever having arisen. Freedom would then be a fact of life, but

26

This Coercive World

the term, in its present connotations, would not even have entered
our language.

The notion that we might possibly exist without coercing one
another was so incomprehensible that many otherwise thoughtful
readers denounced Skinner because they believed he was attacking
the ideal of freedom itself. In reality, he was arguing for the
elimination of those “facts of life” from which we all yearn to be
freed-in particular, from the coercive techniques that we use to
control each other’s conduct.

Coercive control permeates our lives. Because many of us
underestimate its prevalence, it is important to point out that those
who advocate and use coercion for therapeutic purposes-sometimes
called “aversive therapy”-are acting well within established and
accepted social norms and customs. I believe they are wrong but they
are not the evil, unfeeling caricatures that some of their more self­
righteous critics paint them to be.

To place practitioners ofaversive therapy in the context ofa society
in which coercive control is an established policy, however, is to point
out that as scientists, they are making no discoveries; as therapists,
they are doing nothing that requires special training or competence.
Heads of state, military leaders, law-enforcement officials, and
prominent members of the educational establishment have long ago
taught us by their example all we would ever need to know about how
to control others coercively. Today’s aversive therapists, saying and
doing what has always been said and done, are contributing nothing
new. But in this instance, failing to contribute is wrong; it is wrong
because their science has made it possible to do better.

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