Why not only positives?

As strongly as I advocate the use of positive strategies in classroom management (“Catch ‘em being good!”), I have to acknowlege that there are at least three reasons it is impossible to create behavior management systems that exclusively employ positive reinforcement. Here’s why reasonable folks should resist the superficial appeal of the all-positive or positives-only Chimera.

First, the context for the occassional study (e.g., Pfifner, Rosen, & O’Leary, 1985) showing that carefully constructed, individualized, highly focused systems of positive reinforcment can yeild high levels of appropriate classroom behavior must be taken into account, as shown by Rosen and O’Leary (1987). In the latter study, Rosen and O’Leary demonstrated that skillful application of positive reinforcement contingencies without negative contingencies could sustain appropriate behavior, but that those effects depended on the students having previously learned to behave appropriately when negative contingencies had been in effect. That is, in the absence of a history of negative contingencies, positive contingencies were not particularly effective. What is more, Rosen and O’Leary reported that a combination of positive and negative contingencies resulted in higher levels of work completion, accuracy of work, and on-task behavior for the participants in their study.

Second, consider the matter logically. There are two ways it is logically impossible to have all positives. If there are only positives, then positives are meaningless. There is nothing to which to compare positives, so they have no valence. Try it this way. Look at this string of digits: “5 9 2 6 5 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 2 3 8 4 6 2 6 4 3 3 8 3 2 7 9 5 0 2 8 8 4 1 9 7 1 6 9 3 9 9.” Are there digits there? “Yes!” Consider a sequence of positive reinforcers. Are there positive reinforcers there? The answer in both cases is, “Of course!” Unless there are not positives present (i.e., negatives; letters, characters), then there is no comparison. For the literary among us, John Keats captured this idea in his Ode to Melancholy, when he noted that only those who have known joy can experience melancholy (see the box at the right).

The second logical problem is that the very absence of positive reinforcement is often a negative condition (i.e., extinction). Indeed, to teach discriminations, teachers must put behavior on extinction under one condition and reinforce it under another condition. All of the differential reinforcement schedules (DRL, DRI, DRO) require non-reinforcement periods which, if not out-right aversive, are inherently punitive (in the sense of reducing the probability of behavior recurring in the future).

All of this is not to say that I do not support efforts to develop systems of positive behavior support, school-wide discipline plans predicated on shared procedures for reinforcing appropriate student behavior. Educators who adopt school-wide PBS systems will serve students well. Note that well-designed PBS models incorporate plans for responding to violations of behavioral expectations in addition to their strong emphasis on teaching appropriate behavior and rewarding students who display appropriate behavior throughout school buildings.

References

Pfifner, L. J., Rosen, L. A., & O’Leary, S .G. (1985). The efficacy of an all-positive approach to classroom management. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 18, 257-261.

Rosen, L. A., & O’Leary, S .G. (1987). The efficacy of an all-positive management as a function of the prior use of negative consequences. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 20, 265-271.

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