Thorndike (1932) e a assimetria entre reforçamento e punição: uma replicação

Abstract

In a series of researches, Thorndike concluded that punishment does not produce direct effects as reward on behavior because some responses of participants continued to be repeated when followed by announcement of “Wrong” (punishment) and the ones followed by “Right” (reward) were all repeated. His results are widely cited to justify the asymmetric interpretation between the effects of the behavioral processes. The present work systematically replicated a study of Thorndike, through three interlinked experiments (20 university in each), in order to discuss the magnitude of the effects of punishment and to contribute to the debate on symmetry and asymmetry between this operation and the reinforcement. A vocabulary list (from a factorial arrangement of 200 or 50 questions and of five or three response alternatives) was presented six times to the participant and the proportion of responses repetition was analyzed. In Experiment 1, with printed lists, “Right” and “Wrong” were the consequences and this last was more effective (suppression of responding of all participants) on the list with 50 questions and three alternatives, confirming previous studies observing greater effectiveness of punishment as the number of items was reduced. In Experiment 2, with the automated task, there were not consistent results of suppression by “Wrong” and, therefore, revealing the manual task with the greater influence on punishment effectiveness. There were also no systematic results in Experiment 3 and the university repeated more errors even when they generated monetary loss. All experiments replicated results as the original work: repetition of some incorrect responses was not suppressed for the potentially punishing consequences. However, repetition of some correct responses was apparently weakened by the potentially reinforcing consequences. Thus, the effectiveness of the behavioral processes may be more linked to the conditions of test and the symmetry or asymmetry between them to the optical of interpretation.