Punishments

So far we have considered how behaviour can be encouraged through reinforcement. Let us now turn our attention to how to stop undesirable 

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There are two conditions that have to be satisfied if punishment is to be effective - the behaviour is punished immediately after it occurs, and the behaviour is punished every time it occurs. In other words, if you want to use punishment as a way of influencing behaviour, you have to be in a position to catch every infringement and punish it immediately. If you wanted to use punishment, by itself, to get people to wear ear defenders, for example, you would have to have a manager watching every worker all the time they were at work and be ready to issue some form of punishment, even just a rebuke, every time they failed to put on their ear defenders in a noisy environment. Contrast this with the much easier requirement for keeping the behaviour (even undesirable behaviour) going, for example, variable ratio reinforcement  

The major point that comes out of the behavioural approach is very simple. 

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Introduction The enchanting flame has held a special mystery and charm the world over for thousands of years. According to Greek myth, Prometheus the Titan stole fire from the heavens and gave it to mortals—an act for which he was swiftly punished. Early people made use of it anyway. Soon the ancients came to regard fire as one of the basic elements of the world. It has since become the famihar sign of the hearth and the mark of youth and blood—as well as the object of intense curiosity and scientific investigation. 

Y"et, corrosion engineering and science is no longer an empirical art dissecting a large corrosion problem into its basic mechanisms allows the use of quite sophisticated electrochemical techniques to accomplish satisfactory results. On that positive side, there is real satisfaction and economic gain in designing a component that can resist punishing seiwice conditions under which other parts fail. In some cases, we cannot completely prevent corrosion, but we can try to avoid obsolescence or the component due to corrosion. 

Electrical insulation is continually being improved. The motor manufacturers make use of this and other technological developments to put more power into smaller, lighter, more efficient packages. Modem insulating materials can withstand heat, moisture, and corrosive atmospheres, and new metals can withstand more mechanical punishment. Computer design techniques are also helpful. 

The CPI would benefit from the application of human factors principles to improve safety, quality, and productivity. These arise from applying quality management to get at the underlying causc-.s of errors rather than after-the-fact blame or punishment. Crosby (1984) advocates error cause... 

This chapter describes accidents caused by those slips and lapses of attention that even well-trained and well-motivated persons make from time to time. For example, they forget to close a valve or close the wrong valve. They know what they should do, want to do it, and are physically and mentally capable of doing it. But they forget to do it. Exhortation, punishment, or further training will have no effect. We must either accept an occasional error or change the work situation so as to remove the opportunities for error or to make errors less likely. 

Chapter 1, The Role of Human Error in Chemical Process Safety, discusses the importance of reducing human error to an effective process safety effort at the plant. The engineers, managers, and process plant personnel in the CPI need to replace a perspective that has a blame and punishment view of error with a systems viewpoint that sees error as a mismatch between human capabilities and demands. 

This chapter has provided an overview of the book and has described its underlying philosophy, the system-induced error approach (abbreviated to the systems approach in subsequent chapters). The essence of the systems approach is to move away from the traditional blame and punishment approach to human error, to one which seeks to understand and remedy its underlying causes. 

Traditional Safety Engineering approach (control of error by motivational, behavioral, and attitude change) Occupational safety Manual operations Selection Behavior change via motivational campaigns Rewards/punishment Very common... 

Traditional Safety Engineering A safety management policy that emphasizes individual responsibility for system safety and the control of error by the use of motivational campaigns and punishment. 

Aufelektron, n. outer electron, valence electron. Aufenthalt) m. stay, stop abode, residence, auferlegen, v.t. impose (on or upon) punish, auffahren, v.i. rise up, drive up, fly up, start up. 

Strafe,/, punishment penalty, fine, straien, v.t. punish fine rebuke, reprove, straff, <2. stretched, tight, tense, taut, straffen, v.t. tighten, stretch. 

Some laboratory planners insist on using the same type of work tops throughout. Like the Mikado, a prudent planner wiir let the punishment fit the crime and thereby cut costs substantially. In... 

They did compromise by using laboratory grade plastic laminate in the instrument room, where chemical spills were rare. It proved to have a higher resistance than anticipated. The monolithic tops, as expected, took a great deal of punishment with no damage. The laboratory operator, though, would have settled happily for the far less expensive ceramic tile. 

The tests generally involve some form of maze but the simplest is the passive avoidance test. In this the animal learns that in a certain environment it will be punished with an electric shock for some particular action, like stepping onto a special part of the floor of the test chamber. The test of memory is how long the rat avoids (remains passive to) making the movement that will initiate the shock. Of course, drugs that reduce the animal s anxiety also modify the response. Using a maze in its simplest T shape, the animal is placed at the base of the vertical arm and a food reward at the end of one of the horizontal arms. Clearly the animal has to learn which arm contains the reward. Memory is assessed by the time taken for a food-deprived animal to reach the reward and the number of false arm entries. This simple system can be made more complex by introducing many more arms and branches but the principle is the same. 

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