Reinforcement works as Skinner said it would. Initial studies on helping families with behavior problems showed that getting parents to reinforce children’s appropriate behavior reduced aggressive behavior (for
example, Zielberger, Sampen, and Sloane Jr. 1968). But what made chil-dren aggressive in the first place? The pursuit of this question led to work that was unprecedented in human history. The direct observation and analysis of the moment- to- moment interactions of family members revealed that coercion is at the root of human conflict. Coercion involves using aversive behavior to influence another’s behavior. When you realize how pervasive this process is, you begin to see that reducing coercion is essen-tial to creating a nurturing society.
Jerry Patterson was one of the first psychologists to show that rein-forcement affects children’s behavior. I describe his seminal contributions to behavioral parenting skills training in chapter 2. But I think his work on coercion was even more important (Patterson 1982). He and his team of researchers were the first to go into homes to observe interactions between aggressive children and their parents and siblings. Observers coded the talk of each person in terms of whether it seemed pleasant or unpleasant and the immediate reaction of others. For the first time, scien-tists studied in real time the consequences that each person provided to other family members’ behavior and the effects of those consequences.
At the time, no one believed that such mundane interactions between parents and children could produce career criminals. But Patterson and his colleagues showed that these seemingly trivial events are the crucible that molds lifelong patterns of aggressive, intimidating, and cruel behavior.
You might think that families would shut down when strangers were sitting in their living rooms, but they didn’t. Early in this line of inquiry, researchers discovered that families with aggressive children couldn’t fake good behavior— even when instructed to do so. For families with a great deal of conflict, negative reactions to each other are so ingrained that they seem to happen automatically.
Patterson found that families with aggressive children— usually boys— had more conflict and handled conflict differently from other fami-lies. One person might tease, criticize, or needle another person. The other person might deal with that by teasing back. Because neither person liked what the other was doing, eventually one of them would escalate, getting angry, shouting, or hitting. That got the other person to back off.
Patterson looked at this in terms of negative reinforcement. Rather than a positive event, such as praise or attention reinforcing the behavior,
removing an unpleasant or aversive event functioned as the reinforcer. For example, say Timmy teases his older brother Dustin, and Dustin gets mad.
He says something like “Fuck you!” Timmy laughs at him and calls him a baby. Dustin hits Timmy, and Timmy runs to his room.
What just happened? Timmy’s teasing was aversive to Dustin. An aversive event is one a person is motivated to terminate. For example, if you were wired up to a machine that gave you a shock, you would work like hell to get it to stop. If you had a lever that stopped it, you would press it frequently and vigorously. Dustin got irritated because that is how people respond to aversive stimuli. He said, “Fuck you!” because sometimes that had worked to get people to stop teasing. He was pressing a lever that worked for him in the past.
Not this time. Timmy keeps teasing. So Dustin escalates and hits Timmy. This works. Timmy leaves him alone. Dustin is reinforced for hitting because it ends Timmy’s teasing. And Timmy is reinforced for running away because it allows him to escape further assault from Dustin.
However, each is left feeling angry at the other, which makes another occurrence in this ongoing and increasingly destructive cycle more likely.
Patterson’s careful analysis of hundreds of hours of these types of interactions revealed that highly aggressive children live in families where bouts of coercion are common and the only thing that works to terminate them is one person escalating. On average, a deviant child is aversive once every three minutes at home and on the playground. A bout of such con-flict occurs about once every sixteen minutes. People in these families have a hair trigger. Each person is skilled in using taunts, threats, anger, and physical aggression to get others to back off. No one is happy, but anger and aggression are what work to get people to stop being aversive.
This pattern has clear evolutionary roots. Organisms under attack are more likely to survive if they fight back. If they are reinforced by signs that their attacker is harmed or by the attack ending, they are more likely to be effective fighters. Followers of Skinner (Azrin, Hutchinson, and McLaughlin 1972) demonstrated this process. They found that monkeys who were shocked would press a lever repeatedly if it gave them an oppor-tunity to attack other monkeys. The monkeys assumed that the shock was due to the other monkeys. After all, monkeys didn’t evolve around psy-chologists, they evolved around other monkeys.
Thanks to our genetically determined tendencies to counteraggress and our propensity to be reinforced when counteraggression harms the attacker or buys even a brief respite from others’ aggressive behavior, humans readily fall into patterns of coercive interactions. Patterson and his colleagues followed a sample of aggressive and nonaggressive children into adulthood (Capaldi, Pears, and Kerr 2012). Early on, they found that, thanks to repeated bouts of coercion in their families, aggressive children had a finely honed repertoire of aggressive behavior by the age of five.
Unfortunately, they had not learned “nicer” skills like taking turns, obeying adults, inhibiting their first impulse, or using humor to soften family interactions— skills found in the families of nonaggressive children.
The results were disastrous at school. The aggressive children were uncooperative with teachers and therefore did not learn as much. They were irritating to other children, who then avoided them. So they learned fewer of the social graces that emerge in the normal course of interactions with others.
When the aggressive kids in Patterson’s study reached middle school, they were falling behind in academics and had few friends. Due to conflict at home, their parents had given up trying to monitor what they did or set limits on their activities, so they were free to roam the neighborhood with other aggressive, rejected kids.
Since Patterson began this work, an enormous body of evidence has accumulated showing that families with high levels of conflict and coer-cion contribute to all of the common and costly problems of human behavior. Children raised in coercive families are more likely to act aggres-sively, fail academically, begin smoking, develop drug and alcohol prob-lems, and become delinquent. As adults, they are more likely to battle with their partners, get divorced, and raise children with the same prob-lems (Biglan et al. 2004). These children are also likely to have depression.
And due to the stress these young people experience— in their homes and in their often conflictual relations with others— they are more likely to develop cardiovascular disease later in life (Wegman and Stetler 2009).
The work on coercion is an example of an important but subtle shift in how we think about behavior. It is easy to see a child’s aggressive behav-ior. Because it is troubling, we may pay a great deal of attention to it, discuss it, complain about it, punish it, worry about it, and so on. But it is much harder to see the consequences of behavior, let alone to see how
consequences select behavior. Until the twentieth century, no one realized that behavior could be selected by its consequences. Getting people to see consequences is itself an important step in the evolution of our culture.
Indeed, getting people to see the consequences that influence behavior and to work toward having consequences that shape and maintain the kind of behavior that benefits them and those around them could be one of the most important developments in cultural evolution.