Coercion and Its Fallout

Rating:
Summary: Excellent discussion of aversives, and why not to use them
Review: Murray Sidman is undoubtedly one of the most influencial of the applied behavior analysts. In Coercion and its Fallout, he provides the most in-depth discussion yet regarding the unanticipated and unfortunate side effects of the use of aversive stimuli (punishers). While I might have a bit of a disagreement with him regarding the way punishers are defined (not in terms of the stimuli's effect on behavior), the arguments are persuasive. This is a must read for anyone designing behavior change procedures.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent discussion of aversives, and why not to use them
Review: Murray Sidman is undoubtedly one of the most influencial of the applied behavior analysts. In Coercion and its Fallout, he provides the most in-depth discussion yet regarding the unanticipated and unfortunate side effects of the use of aversive stimuli (punishers). While I might have a bit of a disagreement with him regarding the way punishers are defined (not in terms of the stimuli's effect on behavior), the arguments are persuasive. This is a must read for anyone designing behavior change procedures.

Rating:
Summary: Informative, exciting and urges the reader to reflect
Review: This book is too good not to have a review, so here it comes. It containes a great amount of information about positive reinforcement vs punishment, how these two principles effect laboratory rats as well as us humans, like students, criminals, children, employees, soldiers. It even explains how the Nazis were able to control the Jews in the concentration camps.

If you struggle with these questions, either from a philosophical point of view or in real life, for example when bringing up your child (or even your dog!)or trying to make your employees work harder - this is a great book for you. To me it's as exciting as a good novel. It's not hard to read, but contains so much information that you can't digest it all at once. It's a book to go back to many times.

But the best thing about this book is that, without delivering all the final answers, it makes you think about the frequent use of coercion and punishment in the human society and if there are better ways.

Another book much in the same spirit is Karen Pryors "Don't shoot the dog", also highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: More science and less conjecture would've been good
Review: This was a fairly enjoyable and insightful read; it succeeded in stirring up my thoughts to behavioral control at all levels of society. While Sidman covers a lot of ground, touching on a lot of topics, his broad coverage left him somewhat over-exposed and really highlighted his anti-religous, anti-Capitalist perspective. In regards to politics, religion, business, and the military, he waxes very critical, heaping up a large dose of conjecture about individual and collective motives, which I found pretty mentalistic. As behavior analysts we can't have it both ways, insisting on one hand that we are empirically-driven (and being critical of other branches of psychology for being less-so) and then creating as many unsubtantiated claims of insidious behavior from faceless entities as Sidman does in this text. His strength of analysis was definitely when he kept things in the behavioral realm.

At some points I almost forgot that I was reading a treatise on coercion and thought Sidman was in reality a military insider, providing a blustery expose of the depravities of the defense establishment. He returned again and again to the subject of nuclear weapons, bitterly intoning, like he'd stepped out of the Carter-era, that mankind is assured of destruction. He impugns the U.S. military, stating that "A more immediate threat is the military's appetite for our natural, economic, and human resources." Wow. Perhaps most egregious of all was his discussion of Christian martyrs under a section titled 'Suicide.' Yes, Mr. Sidman actually goes so far as to give a blow-by-blow behavioral explanation of how crucifixion was reinforcing for the individual on the cross. I found it tasteless, insensitive, and not germane to the topic. A final criticism I had was how anachronistic Sidman was at times. He called to task psychologists and psychiatrists for treating feminists and homosexuals as abnormal, when anyone even remotely associated with those fields knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. In conclusion, the book has merits in its analysis of behavior but falters majorly when Sidman tries to squeeze in diatribes about his pet political topics.