Personally, I don't get the impression that this is Skinnerian operant conditioning so much as a bizarre ritual intended to foster group loyalty. It sounds like there's at least as much social psychology as behaviorism being applied here. People are being punished and humiliated in private, probably in order to control them while giving them some sense of belonging to something special (if I manage to endure this, I must be elite). The fact that they are free to leave and have chosen to stay and be abused makes the influence even stronger than if they were imprisoned. They are in effect telling themselves that they are willingly enduring this for a reason. The negative reinforcement techniques have a place, but (imo) this isn't it. The way they are used is by immediate reinforcement when we perform a (usually compulsive) behavior that we are trying to stop. A classic technique is wearing a rubber band around your wrist, and snapping it to inflict sudden pain when you get the impulse to do something you are trying to stop. Simple, direct, immediate, well-contained, and the connection with a specific undesireable behavior or impulse is clear. The limitation of negative reinforcement is that it helps your nervous system learn to expect pain following certain cues, but it doesn't provide a positive alternative. Learning to do something differently means also providing an alternative, especially in cases where there is cognitive decision making involved, not just compulsive behavior we want to stop. The behaviorist concept of negative reinforcement is not _punitive_, it is supposed to be _conditioning_. Paddling someone an hour or a day after they make a bad business decision can't really be justified as a form of classical or operant conditioning. The cumulative effect of negative reinforcement under these kinds of conditions is just to make people less likely to make decisions that put them at risk. Companies that humiliate employees over their mistakes tend to have employees who are afraid to do anything, and spend a lot of time and energy learning to cover themselves from blame. On the other hand, leaders of groups who are trying to impose behavioral control often use bizarre secret rituals as a way of fostering group unity. This is a longstanding tradition in some elite military groups for example. This is probably a more accurate way of explaining this odd activity than comparing it to Skinner's birds. There's a good discussion of conditioning applied to behavior control outside of therapy in Denise Winn's book, "The Manipulated Mind." For a more thorough treatment, try the excellent introductory text, "The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence"
by Philip Zimbardo and Michael Leippe.
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