Dr. Stuart Ablon
speaker
223 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dr. Stuart Ablon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You know, as kids, you can spot these kids because they're the kids who, if everything goes according to the rules, the routine, the structure, the template they had in their head, life is good. Yes. But any change, any unpredictability, ambiguity, uncertainty, entering a situation they don't know what it's going to look like, they don't have the template for, and sort of winging it.
So this is the thing. Kids' brains are very malleable. Yes. So you, you know, changeable. You can help them learn skills more easily. But sometimes people think that like once you're an adult, you know, you can't develop these skills. That's nonsense. You can change the adult brain. But as you're saying, it takes repetition and practice, but you can become a more flexible thinker.
Just like you can become better at regulating, controlling, managing your emotions. You can become better at using your language and communication skills. And this is the power of thinking skill, not will. Because if it's about skill, not will, skills can be built. And I have to say, I have never seen anyone at any age with any level of skill where they couldn't improve that skill incrementally.
So I'm talking about the most severe cases. There's always opportunity to improve our skills. Always.
The fifth is a big category, social thinking skills. And what does that mean? So it means all the types of skills that go into managing social interactions, like basic ones, like how do you start a conversation with somebody? How do you join a group of people who are doing something smoothly without sort of butting in or upsetting things?
To more subtle, complicated skills, like knowing how you come across, how your behavior impacts other people. I call it your feedback loop. which we are all so reliant on in the world. Basically, we do stuff and say stuff and look around and say like, how's it coming across? And we adjust our behavior if all's going well.
But some folks don't have a feedback loop or keep it open for a very short amount of time or misjudge the feedback. So, you know, those are more complicated skills and probably empathy. And perspective taking is one of the most complicated of all social thinking skills, you know, which is in essence, can you try to understand where somebody else is coming from?
And all these skills can be interrelated too. So these five we talked about, they're not mutually exclusive. It's not, I have a hard time with this and nothing else. Because you can imagine, you know, if you're a very concrete, literal thinker, it might be hard for you to step into somebody else's shoes and empathize. Right.
Or if you tend to think in a very black and white way, your emotions may spiral pretty quickly if you start to catastrophize, as you said a moment ago. Right.
Yep.
Well, the way it happens is because you struggle with these skills, you have a hard time meeting people's expectations. You end up doing things that people don't like, that they don't want you to do, and not doing things people want you to do. People get frustrated with you. Yep. And then people default to assuming this is a lack of will. Yep.
And they try to motivate you through incentives, rewards, consequences to try to behave better. And that doesn't work because you're already trying hard. You're trying harder than anybody else to behave well. I mean, this is one of the secrets. People think sometimes people who struggle with their behavior aren't trying hard to behave well. No, you know who's not trying hard to behave well?
Well-behaved people, because it comes naturally. The people who are really working hard are the folks for whom it doesn't come naturally. And then I got to say what gets really dangerous is not only are rewards and consequences, incentives, things like that, not effective, right? But they can cause real harm. And if I can talk about two ways they cause harm.
By the way, that word discipline is an interesting one because people somehow have equated discipline with punishment. Yes. Where actually the origins of the word don't involve punishment at all. The origins of the word discipline revolve around teaching, really means to teach. And punishment is a very poor way to... to teach.
Now, if you think skill, not will, now you're in the business of teaching because you know what you're teaching, which is skills. But to go back to the harm, two ways, okay, that I think classic discipline, rewards, consequences, things like that cause harm.
One is that when you try to motivate somebody with some external motivator, some like tangible thing that you'll get this if you do this, or you won't get this if you don't. There have been thousands of studies that have shown, not just with kids, but with adults too, that when you use external motivators,
to try to get kids to do stuff or people to do stuff, it actually decreases their internal drive to do what you want them to do. They do become more motivated, but what do they become more motivated? To get the thing. Get the stuff. They actually become less motivated to achieve the goal you want them to achieve, which is ironic. So not only is it not work, it makes matters worse.
And this smell is not a small correlation. This is a strong, what we call in research, negative correlation. The more you use external reinforcers, the less internal drive develops. And it actually can cause even more problems because what ends up happening is people end up behaving in unethical ways also because they're just trying to get the stuff.
I want to talk about the second way that I think rewards and punishments can really be harmful because not only do they decrease internal motivation, okay, intrinsic motivation, but for kids and adults, they can do real damage to self-esteem because here's the thing. If we're constantly using rewards and consequences, we're sending the not-so-subtle message that
That we think at least part of the problem here is you're not trying hard enough. Or why would we smart adults be trying to motivate you? And my grandfather, who I was incredibly close to, and he lived till he was 106. Wow. Yeah, my grandmother just celebrated her 107th birthday.
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