Hello. My free name is Mark Laissez and I signed up for the Free State Project a couple years ago. Although I've unwittingly been on the path towards the ideas of liberty for a lot of different reasons, my main steppingstone in that direction was my training in Behaviorism which stressed the primacy of individually valued rewards and the inefficacy of coercion. So when I first started listening to Free Talk Live back in 2007, the individualistic and anti-coercive planks of the show helped everything click within a couple weeks. Not sure when I'll make the move with the personal obligations I currently have, but it is a goal that's never far from my mind.
[quote author=Laissez link=topic=3384.msg37109#msg37109 date=1277787412]
Hello. My free name is Mark Laissez and I signed up for the Free State Project a couple years ago. Although I've unwittingly been on the path towards the ideas of liberty for a lot of different reasons, my main steppingstone in that direction was my training in Behaviorism which stressed the primacy of individually valued rewards and the inefficacy of coercion. So when I first started listening to Free Talk Live back in 2007, the individualistic and anti-coercive planks of the show helped everything click within a couple weeks. Not sure when I'll make the move with the personal obligations I currently have, but it is a goal that's never far from my mind.
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Welcome! 
I'm actually working on a thesis with a learning theory component, and a section on behaviorism. If you feel like it, perhaps you could give me a pointer regarding any examples you know of research into advanced (academic) human learning from a behaviorist perspective. While reward/punishment may be a motivation, it seems to me that something further is needed to model structured academic knowledge/reasoning.
There's an experiment that Skinner references in one of his works (could have sworn it was in Technology of Teaching, but I can't find the citation for the moment) involving a rat acquiring a sort of "black market" avoidance behavior when put under aversive control. It was first taught a lever-pressing response with reinforcement. Its rate of responding was recorded. Then a new factor was added to the experiment: Whenever a certain light in the chamber was on, lever presses were additionally punished with an electric shock from the floor. What they found was that when the light was off (which signals the absence of punishment for lever presses) the rat would be taking the opportunity to press the lever at an even higher rate than before. The total number of lever presses was actually no different under aversive control than it was without it. That means that punishment did not teach the rat to reduce the likelihood of the targetted behavior. It merely drove the targetted behavior "underground."
Skinner goes into some depth about the problems inherent to coercion in chapter 12 of his book Science and Human Behavior which the BF Skinner Foundation offers as a free pdf here. In this same book he also happens to share his disdain for coercive government (he makes the error of speaking positively about government subsidies to promote behavior, but I have read elsewhere in which he comes close to acknowledging the coercive nature of the taxation needed for such subsidies and of welfarism in general as harmful to the recipient). He was very much of the voluntarist bent so I think the economic errors he made in some of his literature is something that can be forgiven him.
The basic gist of his analysis is that the use of coercion produces the by-products of avoidance, escape and countercontrol. Moreover, the efficacy of coercion is an illusion created by the preference for short-term outcomes. Coercion "works" in the sense that it has an immediate effect on a person's behavior in the here and now, but it does not have a long-term effect on the behavior itself. As a general rule, behaving organisms prefer to engage in actions whose favorable outcomes are more immediate (what Austrian School economists would call "high time preference"). It's only with the experience of working for more delayed long-term rewards, or "stretching the ratio" as behaviorists would call it, that the low time preference needed of the individual to engage in more peaceful and more sophisticated economic activities can be realized.
Welcome to the forum.
Welcome and come on up!