Credibility also can be useful. Most importantly: Are the threats, precommitments and offers you make credible? Could and would you actually go through with them if you found yourself in a situation where the conditions you stated are fulfilled? If you arrange the exchange in such a way that acting on your words imposes a low cost (better yet: no cost) on yourself, you’ll gain lots of bargaining power.
A quick example: When educating children, misbehaviour has to have consequences. Now, you have to choose these punishments in such a way that they impose little organizational and emotional cost on yourself while being serious enough that kids want to avoid them (but, of course, also not too serious ;)). If done correctly, you’ll have to punish a few children a few times, but then they will have learned. If done incorrectly, you continuously threaten with punishment, but there is no clear line where you have to act, and put in such a situation you don’t even want to punish them, so the children will continue to misbehave.
Unfortunately, this quick example is something that teachers and school administration often don’t get. If you make a threat for misbehavior, you must follow through, otherwise you have seriously undermined your and every other teacher’s credibility, and then you will predictably get misbehavior on almost every lesson since now.
Unfortunately, the reality is often that teachers make empty threats, hoping that using big words will scare students, and when this does not work, they rationalize not following through by “they are just children” and “they need to get a second chance”, although some students already had literally hundreds of “second” chances. And the worst thing is when teacher insists on the punishment, but after a phone call from parent, the school administration overrides their decision. Of course students share their “success stories”, so the next day the whole school know about the winning strategy.
Unfortunately, this quick example is something that teachers and school administration often don’t get.
It is possible that their target audience is their superiors, not the students. Threat is cheap, punishment is expensive, and they can always report to their superiors (and possibly parents) “we do not condone this behavior, see, we threatened them with ”.
Thomas Schelling proposed a useful strategy: make small threats for small infractions, and then follow through on them. This gives credibility to your larger threats, without too much inconvenience for either party.
(And, of course, try to make the whole thing as predictable as possible; never be capricious with your own authority.)
From an article about the US justice system, but the relevance to misbehaving schoolchildren (or simply schoolchildren whose behaviour one doesn’t like) is obvious:
Cesare Beccaria—the Italian criminologist from whom Jeremy Bentham borrowed not only the term “utility” but many of his ideas for criminal-justice reform—identified three characteristics that determine the deterrent efficacy of a threatened punishment: its swiftness, its certainty, and its severity. Of the three, severity is least important. If punishment is swift and certain, it need not be severe to be efficacious. If punishment is uncertain and delayed, it will not be efficacious even if it is severe. (It was only two and a half centuries after Beccaria that psychologists and behavioral economists discovered that some degree of excessive present-orientation, and excessive discounting of the risk of large losses, is normal.) The sort of bad gamble represented by most offenses tends to attract precisely those whose departures from rationality are most egregious.
[...]
Not only is severity an inadequate substitute for swiftness and certainty, it actually interferes with them. The more severe a punishment is, the more due process (leading to delay) is required to impose it, and (if severity is measured in sentence length) the less often it can be imposed before the prisons fill up.
eterrent efficacy of a threatened punishment: its swiftness, its certainty, and its severity.
Interestingly, these correspond to delay, expectancy and value in the procrastination equation. It’s interesting to see “negative” values used to form a kind of anti-motivation.
I hadn’t noticed that. That’s a pretty shrewd connection! Come to think of it, the “excessive discounting”/”excessive present-orientation” Kleiman mentions is suspiciously similar to the procrastination equation’s remaining term, impulsiveness.
I wonder whether criminologists discovered this independently of psychologists & neuroscientists? Might be an example of two parts of academia converging on the same answer from different directions.
Credibility also can be useful. Most importantly: Are the threats, precommitments and offers you make credible? Could and would you actually go through with them if you found yourself in a situation where the conditions you stated are fulfilled? If you arrange the exchange in such a way that acting on your words imposes a low cost (better yet: no cost) on yourself, you’ll gain lots of bargaining power.
A quick example: When educating children, misbehaviour has to have consequences. Now, you have to choose these punishments in such a way that they impose little organizational and emotional cost on yourself while being serious enough that kids want to avoid them (but, of course, also not too serious ;)). If done correctly, you’ll have to punish a few children a few times, but then they will have learned. If done incorrectly, you continuously threaten with punishment, but there is no clear line where you have to act, and put in such a situation you don’t even want to punish them, so the children will continue to misbehave.
Unfortunately, this quick example is something that teachers and school administration often don’t get. If you make a threat for misbehavior, you must follow through, otherwise you have seriously undermined your and every other teacher’s credibility, and then you will predictably get misbehavior on almost every lesson since now.
Unfortunately, the reality is often that teachers make empty threats, hoping that using big words will scare students, and when this does not work, they rationalize not following through by “they are just children” and “they need to get a second chance”, although some students already had literally hundreds of “second” chances. And the worst thing is when teacher insists on the punishment, but after a phone call from parent, the school administration overrides their decision. Of course students share their “success stories”, so the next day the whole school know about the winning strategy.
It is possible that their target audience is their superiors, not the students. Threat is cheap, punishment is expensive, and they can always report to their superiors (and possibly parents) “we do not condone this behavior, see, we threatened them with ”.
Thomas Schelling proposed a useful strategy: make small threats for small infractions, and then follow through on them. This gives credibility to your larger threats, without too much inconvenience for either party.
(And, of course, try to make the whole thing as predictable as possible; never be capricious with your own authority.)
The justice system of the old Soviet Union had, rather ironically, the following maxim:
From an article about the US justice system, but the relevance to misbehaving schoolchildren (or simply schoolchildren whose behaviour one doesn’t like) is obvious:
Interestingly, these correspond to delay, expectancy and value in the procrastination equation. It’s interesting to see “negative” values used to form a kind of anti-motivation.
Awesome, this is worth its own post IMO.
I hadn’t noticed that. That’s a pretty shrewd connection! Come to think of it, the “excessive discounting”/”excessive present-orientation” Kleiman mentions is suspiciously similar to the procrastination equation’s remaining term, impulsiveness.
I wonder whether criminologists discovered this independently of psychologists & neuroscientists? Might be an example of two parts of academia converging on the same answer from different directions.