Post originally by Kobold Lord at 2003-05-24 20:41:33
Converted from Phorums BB System

"Which one is more likely to teach you to wash my car? Assume I can not directly communicate to you, except by providing either positive reinforcement or punishment."

This is an absurdly artificial assumption. It is theoretically impossible to block communication.

Since we do, in fact, communicate, we have two scenarios:

"Hey, wash my car and I'll give you a cookie."
"In advance?"
"Sure."
*munchmunchmunch* "Okay, let me work. Okay, done."
"Hey, you missed a spot."
"That'll cost you another cookie. In advance."

"Hey, wash my car and I won't stave your skull and break your legs."
"No."
*crunch* "There goes one leg, now get to work."
"Yessir... Okay, done. Ow."
"You missed a spot. You want that skull and other leg or not?"
"I'll get it, I'm hurrying."
"Oh, hey, you... See what I did to this guy's leg? That happened because he didn't wash my car as fast as he was supposed to. Wash my house or I'll stave your skull and break your legs."

I don't know where your philosophers are getting their information, but in the real world crime does pay, and rewarding someone incessantly just provokes them to abuse their sugar daddy. In the isolated car-washing example, for instance, the positive reinforcer ends up losing quite a few cookies to get the job done, and the trainee ends up learning how to extract cookies with the highest efficiency, until eventually the cost of cookies for the positive reinforcer are higher than the cost of a dirty car. The trainee holds the job hostage for additional cookies. The negative reinforcer, on the other hand, is the one holding the trainee hostage. It costs the negative reinforcer nothing to distribute punishment, so time and economics are on the negative reinforcer's side.

The best solution, of course, is a combination of positive and negative reinforcement. A cookie now and then doesn't hurt to make the trainee ingratiated, but the instant they start expecting extra cookies remind them where control lies.

Sure, there is always the chance of a blowback if you engage in negative reinforcement; the guy you're forcing to wash the car might manage to steal your club and kill you with it. On the other hand, however, the guy you're attempting positive reinforcement is just as likely to decide it is easier to get your cookies by force than it is by service, and grab a club to kill you with it. Either way, the fact remains that people are greedy and evil, and playing to their selfishness only works as long as they don't think they've spotted a better offer.

If Bob and Dave are taking their characters (whether these characters are arbitrarily labeled "Lawful Good" or "Generous Pacifists" being essentially irrelevant), giving them an xp carrot every time they start to get out of hand and kill random innocents is only going to encourage them to get out of hand more often, perhaps branching out into burning orphanages or something, because doing so turns on the GM's xp spigot. What they really need is the cold hard slap of reality and common sense, that actions have consequences. If they don't quite grasp the concept of role-playing yet and are therefore insensitive to the plight of the dead orphans, then it may not be unreasonable to abstract that in the sense of stiff game-related penalties, such as taking away their aligned magic items or denying them experience for a set length of time.

It's like you DIDN'T want them to wash the car. Give them a cookie for walking past it without washing it, and they've got no clue what you're doing. Beat them senseless immediately after they wash the car, and they won't do it again. Perhaps that's the key difference; postive reinforcement only motivates them to take some action, not abstain permanently for some other action. You can't positively reinforce a negative without at least a little negative reinforcement there to help.