Dean Richards > Quotes

“If there’s any way to continue a behavior and avoid a threatened punishment, that’s usually what we’ll do.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“Punishments that are very severe become the focus of attention rather than the behavior being punished.  But punishments that are mild just aren’t aversive enough to stop any behavior worth doing.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“one corollary is that if humans start using words differently from before, the words will acquire new meanings as a result.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“The dictionary wasn’t just a place to look up words you didn’t know, or to look up spellings (provided you could spell the word well enough to look it up).  It was a history of language, and, consequently, a history of human experience.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“One way to avoid punishment in the future is to stop the behavior that is being punished.  But it’s not the only way to do so.  In fact, stopping the behavior isn’t even the most likely outcome when we use punishment.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“when we’re arguing to win, we usually marshal the evidence on our side of the argument and emphasize it.  Meanwhile, we do our best to sweep the evidence supporting the other side of the argument under the rug and hope no one notices the bulge it makes there. Note,”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“But the behavior hasn’t been extinguished – it’s just gone underground.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“If you cannot resolve it by some form of direct or indirect observation, it’s not in the realm of science.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“reward makes the behavior that was rewarded more likely to occur in the future.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“punishment, we usually view it as the opposite of reinforcement.  This makes sense on the surface, because as the punisher we’re certainly taking the opposite action as we do when we were reinforcing people.  Reinforcement involves bringing good things to an organism or taking away bad things, whereas punishment involves bringing bad things to an organism or taking away good things.  Reinforcement makes a behavior more likely to occur in the future.  Punishment is the opposite of reward.  So if reward makes a behavior more likely to occur again, then punishment makes it less likely, right?”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“The only criteria by which we can judge the goodness of a theory is whether the theory fits the data, and we can’t judge that until we have learned the theory.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“There’s an irony here, because it means that punishment is most effective when it’s used the least.  The more it’s used, the more the person adjusts to it and the less aversive it is.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“Science is empirical,”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“The smile is reinforcing and the frown punishing, even though that may not be our deliberate intent.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“subjective in nature.  That is, it was collected by people who expected a certain outcome when they were making their observations.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“an explanation for a collection of data is called a theory.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“we simplify the process of our thinking as much as possible, using shortcuts when we can, cribbing from past memories if we have them, and ignoring minor details and nuances if they complicate the task.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“punishment, in order to be effective, must meet three criteria.  It needs to be unavoidable, moderately severe, and immediate.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“The essence of the argument concerning linguistic superstition, then, is that words have no existence separate from the existence of human beings.  They acquire meaning only when humans agree upon that meaning.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“assuming that words have set meanings in and of themselves, meanings that exist irrespective of who is using the words.  Those meanings are denoted the “right” meanings, and any deviation from them would be improper usage.  Professional linguists have a phrase they use to refer to this belief.  They call it “linguistic superstition” (Gray, 1991).”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“A study that makes sure that neither the person doing the observations nor the people participating in an experiment know who is in which treatment group is called a double blind study.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“Punishments must be moderately severe, because mild punishments just aren’t going to stop any behavior that’s very much fun, and very severe punishments will probably distract the child from focusing on the misbehavior to focusing just on the punishment”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“habituated to the punishment, and it’s no longer all that aversive.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“second limitation to belief is that you can’t make anyone believe anything just because you believe it.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“beliefs are limited by two things”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“empirical questions are always resolvable by observation.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“first problem is simply that there are no constraints at all to what you can believe.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“context of the poem, the meaning of the words is at least partially clear to all and often crystal clear, and the poem itself is understandable even though it includes almost two dozen of Dodgson’s made-up words.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“A hypothesis is simply a possible way things could be.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English

“Smiles and frowns, like many other facial expressions, are instinctual muscular reactions to our emotions.  The positive reactions of others to our smiles and the negative reactions or others to our frowns are also instinctive.”
― Dean Richards, Psychology in Plain English