From: elg@elgamy.jpunix.com (Eric Lee Green)
Date: 16 Dec 92 16:46:42 CDT
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Psychology and Interrogation
Distribution: world
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home

From article <DLB.92Dec14152938@fanny.wash.inmet.com>, by dlb@fanny.wash.inmet.com (David Barton):
> In article <00724175210@elgamy.jpunix.com> elg@elgamy.jpunix.com (Eric
> Lee Green) writes:
>    You first train compliance for simple tasks. Then you gradually
>    train compliance for more and more complex tasks. Eventually -- and
>
> Have you any support for this rather remarkable statement?  Are you
> really stating that ANY individual can be "trained" to comply with ANY
> order in six months?  Is there any data to support this?

I am really not sure whether it is possible to train compliance for
intellectual tasks, considering that intellectual behaviors are not
amenable to observation and thus immune from modification via behavioral
procedures. However, I WOULD say that it is possible to train any ordinary
person to comply with orders that they, as human beings, would not
voluntarily do in the real world. My Lai is a perfect example -- seemingly
ordinary people blowing away civilians simply because they were ordered to,
and not showing any remorse until later, after they were outside the realm
of contingencies imposed by Army discipline.

There are rare counterexamples of people "bucking the trend" and refusing
to comply despite being exposed to current state-of-the-art in compliance
training. In the Vietnam era, though, they proved to be a rarity, because
the alternative to compliance was prison.

Boot camp is an example of compliance training, by the way, albeit not a
totally state-of-the-art technique. I'll report it to you as it was
reported to me by a former Marine: First, the drill sergeants set up an
incredibly punishing environment, both physically and verbally. The raw
recruits comply due to negative reinforcement, i.e., to avoid punishment.
Then compliance is gradually reinforced by praise and by actual physical
consequences for compliance (i.e., the new recruits slowly realize that
they can now run farther and do more pushups than they could ever do in
civilian life). By the end of boot camp, reported my ex-Marine, "You felt
like you could do anything. They tore you down, then they built you up into
a Marine." Obviously those contingencies were not maintained AFTER boot
camp -- my friend is now an EX-Marine :-). But, it works.

As for whether ANY person can be trained for obedience: I refer you to a
chilling book titled _Obedience to Authority_, where we find that most
people ALREADY have been trained for obedience. Obviously, obedience
training takes place in our natural environment. A scientific obedience
training program with systematically administered contingencies could most
probably get even better results.

I've seen it at work in my own classroom, by the way. Two of my students
are labeled as "Emotionally disturbed-- oppositional." In the beginning,
the children would comply to a few requests, but would not comply with the
majority of requests. I lavishly rewarded compliance for those few things
that they would comply with, and enforced consequences for non-compliance
(timeout, loss of priviliges, "logical consequences", etc.). I was
extremely consistent with the behavioral system. The children slowly
generalized from the specific requests that they were rewarded for, to
all requests in general. As a result, I have very few instances of
non-compliance in my classroom, and most of them are resolved by me saying
"Follow directions", repeating the directive, and removing my attention (at
which point the child grumbles and mumbles and then gets back to work doing
what I told him to do). For those of you who complain that this is
authoritarian -- yes, it is. On the other hand, I have found no other way
to maintain a safe and consistent working environment for these children,
one where they will learn what they need to learn rather than play in the
destructive way that these children play (which results in fights, bloody
noses, etc. -- these are street kids). I am a teacher, not a therapist. I
teach. If this is what I must do in order to teach, it is what I do. In my
experience, basic compliance is a must for teaching the severe population
that I teach, and basic compliance training does the job. It is not used in
a punishing manner or as a power trip -- I have been highly praised for the
positive manner in which I interact with my students, I listen to my
students, and I give them choices whenever appropriate. But children need
to learn math, spelling, and grammar in addition to learning how to make
choices -- and most of the children that I teach will not voluntarily sit
down and do math unless they have been given a direct instruction and they
have been trained to follow that direct instruction, regardless of what
type of verbal persuasion you try.

--
 Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.jpunix.com   Dodson Elementary
 (713) 664-6446                             Houston, TX
                "Kids are kids, no matter what"