Punishment
A punishment is loosely defined as an ‘aversive’ stimulus. This means that the organism must find the stimulus to be negative - something that it wishes to avoid.
Punishments can be as small as the dampness and coldness caused by rain, to the horrible beeping my alarm clock makes at 6am in the morning. Severe punishment could be an electric shock. Or as the case may be with human beings, a punch in the face, or being imprisoned for a long time.
Punishment is bad.
HOW IT ALL WORKS..
Organisms must associate a given behaviour (action) to a consequence. That is, the behaviour must lead to an occurrence: either a positive reinforcer or a negative reinforcer.
This occurrence must be both ‘contiguous’ and ‘contingent’ to the behaviour in order for Operant conditioning to occur.
CONTIGUITY
‘Contiguity’ refers to closeness in time. The more contiguous an occurrence is to a behaviour, the closer in time it will occur to the behaviour.
For example, eating food and being zapped when you swallow, is far more contiguous than eating food and feeling sick half an hour later (however I will explain later why we would learn not to eat food that makes us sick, rather than learning what food gives us an electric shock).
CONTINGENCY
‘Contingency’ refers to meaningfulness. An occurrence that is contingent shares meaning with the behaviour that led to the occurrence.
For example, it would be relatively meaningless if we got a sharp bright light shone in our eyes every time we reached for a pen. Having a light shone in our eyes when we reach for a pen, would probably not be very successful in reducing our ‘pen-grabbing’ behaviour! If however, we had a bright light shone in our eyes every time we looked up, we would probably have more success in reducing the behaviour of ‘looking-up’. Harsh light is meaningful to looking up, because the sun is often above our heads.
Contingency is very important in the strongest form of operant conditioning - ‘conditioned taste aversion’. The sensation of taste is intimately related to the food we eat. Humans have a highly developed preparedness to associate illness to sensations of taste that we have experienced most recently. If for example, someone got sick from eating a pie, half an hour after eating it, this would probably put them off pies for a long time. In contrast, if a person had a bucket of water dropped on their head the last time they ate a pie, this would probably not put them off pies. Sickness is contingent upon taste in most instances - our bodies know this.