Motivation

 day, I hear one person talk about another person whom they want to change in some way. No one will change until it becomes advantageous for them to do so. You can bitch all you want, but if they do not have sufficient motivation, they will not change.

“People change” “People won’t change” When you need someone to change their behavior, you have to make sure of a few things.

If you get a reward for an activity, you will do it more. If you do not get a reward for an activity you will do it less. When you are punished for an activity you evaluate the risk and either move to another activity or adapt to the situation and become better at getting the reward for the existing activity. Notice, the existing activity is not taken off the list of possibilities.

Guarantee getting caught, every time. If you can pull this off, you are almost done. In experiments, humans do not worry about harsh punishments nearly as often as getting caught. Even if you only undo everything that someone did in a given, they will stop the behavior if they get caught every single time. The behavior is not doing them any good if they cannot reap the reward at all.

In the case of jail, by locking up half the criminals, you motivate the other half of the criminal population  to commit more crimes because there is less competition. Thus, the reward becomes higher per crime.

We think of reward and punishment as two sides of the same coin. They are two different methods of assessing a situation and making the decision on what activity to do in the future.

If someone is a car thief for thirty years. They get caught in the first month of year thirty one. When they get out of jail, and have no other opportunities, do you suppose they will stop being a car thief?Every