Children’s and Adults’ Views of Punishment as a Path to Redemption

The current work investigated the extent to which children (N=171 6- to 8-year-olds) and adults (N = 94) view punishment as redemptive. In Study 1, children—but not adults—reported that “mean” individuals became “nicer” after one severe form of punishment (incarceration). Moreover, adults expected “nice” individuals’ moral character to worsen following punishment; however, we did not find that children expected such a change. Study 2 extended these findings by showing that children view “mean” individuals as becoming “nicer” following both severe (incarceration) and relatively minor (time-out) punishments, suggesting that the pattern of results from Study 1 generalizes across punishment types. Together, these studies indicate that children—but not adults—may view punishment as a vehicle for redemption.     

Fire play: ICCARUS—Intelligent command and control,acquisition and review using simulation*

Is it possible to educate a fire officer to deal intelligently with the command and control of a major fire event he will never have experienced? The authors of this paper believe there is, and present here just one solution to this training challenge. It involves the development of an intelligent simulation based upon computer managed interactive media. The expertise and content underpinning this educational development was provided by the West Midlands Fire Service. Their brief for this training programme was unambiguous and to the point:

• 1 Do not present the trainee with a model answer, because there are no generic fires. Each incident is novel, complex, and often ‘wicked’ in that it changes obstructively as it progresses. Thus firefighting demands that Commanders impose their individual intelligence on each problem to solve it.
• 2 A suitable Educational Simulator should stand alone; operate in real time; emulate as nearly as possible the ‘feel’ of the fireground; present realistic fire progress; incorporate the vast majority of those resources normally present at a real incident; bombard the trainee with information from those sources; provide as few system‐prompts as possible.
• 3 There should also be an interrogable visual debrief which can be used after the exercise to give the trainees a firm understanding of the effects of their actions. This allows them to draw their own conclusions of their command effectiveness. Additionally, such a record of command and control will be an ideal initiator of tutorial discussion.
• 4 The simulation should be realisable on a hardware/software platform of £10 000.
• 5 The overriding importance is that the simulation should ‘emulate as nearly as possible the feelings and stresses of the command role’.

     

Choice behavior in transition: Development of preference in a free-operant procedure

Twenty acquisition curves were obtained from each of 8 pigeons in a free-operant choice procedure. Every condition began with a phase in which two response keys had equal probabilities of reinforcement, and, as a result, subjects’ responses were divided fairly evenly between the two keys. This was followed by a phase in which one key had a higher probability of reinforcement than the other, and the development of preference was observed. In all but a few cases, response proportions increased for the key with the higher probability of reinforcement. In most conditions, the two probabilities differed by .06, but the actual probabilities varied (from .16 and .10 in one condition to .07 and .01 in another). Development of preference for the key with the higher probability of reinforcement was slower when the ratio of the two reinforcement probabilities was small (.16/.10) than when it was large (.07/.01). This finding is inconsistent with the predictions of several different quantitative models of acquisition, including the kinetic model (Myerson & Miezin, 1980) and the ratio-invariance model (Horner & Staddon, 1987). However, the finding is consistent with a hypothesis based on Weber’s law, which states that the two alternatives are more discriminable when the ratio of their reinforcement probabilities is larger, and, as a result, the acquisition of preference is faster.