Most people want to be sincerely praised. Someone who reads this post and applies it poorly is going to be saying praise while their body language says something else entirely. Or acting out of character for themselves, leading the reinforcee to suspect that the praise is insincere. Or they may go around praising seemingly everything, causing the reinforcee to interpret the praise as meaningless noise.
There are lots of ways for using praise as reinforcement to go wrong, and if someone is in one of those environments for long enough they will end up being conditioned to interpret praise as neutral or negative.
I suspect it is common enough that when you observe that praising someone doesn’t reinforce their behavior or makes them uncomfortable, you should consider that they might have an unusual aversion to praise.
I suspect it is common enough that when you observe that praising someone doesn’t reinforce their behavior or makes them uncomfortable, you should consider that they might have an unusual aversion to praise.
And also, that you might just be really bad at it. ;-)
This was my problem for quite a while: believing that I ought to praise people, while alieving that there wasn’t anything to praise and that they didn’t deserve it, due to all their obvious imperfections.
This, as you can imagine, produced sub-optimal results. ;-)
I’d have to say that it shouldn’t be that common. Most people want to be praised.
Most people want to be sincerely praised. Someone who reads this post and applies it poorly is going to be saying praise while their body language says something else entirely. Or acting out of character for themselves, leading the reinforcee to suspect that the praise is insincere. Or they may go around praising seemingly everything, causing the reinforcee to interpret the praise as meaningless noise.
There are lots of ways for using praise as reinforcement to go wrong, and if someone is in one of those environments for long enough they will end up being conditioned to interpret praise as neutral or negative.
I suspect it is common enough that when you observe that praising someone doesn’t reinforce their behavior or makes them uncomfortable, you should consider that they might have an unusual aversion to praise.
And also, that you might just be really bad at it. ;-)
This was my problem for quite a while: believing that I ought to praise people, while alieving that there wasn’t anything to praise and that they didn’t deserve it, due to all their obvious imperfections.
This, as you can imagine, produced sub-optimal results. ;-)
Yep. It’s not a situation you’re likely to come across often, but when you do, it’s worth having the alternate theory available to check.