All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests
that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the
things we want them truly to believe in. Such pressures will probably
produce temporary compliance with our wishes. However, if we want
more than just that, if we want the children to believe in the correctness
of what they have done, if we want them to continue to perform the
desired behavior when we are not present to apply those outside pres-
sures, then we must somehow arrange for them to accept inner respons-
ibility for the actions we want them to take. An experiment by Jonathan
Freedman gives us some hints about what to do and what not to do in
this regard.
Freedman wanted to see if he could prevent second- to fourth-grade
boys from playing with a fascinating toy, just because he had said that
it was wrong to do so some six weeks earlier. Anyone familiar with
seven-to-nine-year-old boys must realize the enormity of the task. But
Freedman had a plan. If he could first get the boys to convince them-
selves that it was wrong to play with the forbidden toy, perhaps that
belief would keep them from playing with it thereafter. The difficult
thing was making the boys believe that it was wrong to amuse them-
selves with the toy—an extremely expensive, battery-controlled robot.
Freedman knew it would be easy enough to have a boy obey tempo-
rarily. All he had to do was threaten the boy with severe consequences
should he be caught playing with the toy. As long as he was nearby to
deal out stiff punishment, Freedman figured that few boys would risk
operating the robot. He was right. After showing a boy an array of five
toys and warning him, “It is wrong to play with the robot. If you play
with the robot, I’ll be very angry and will have to do something about
it,” Freedman left the room for a few minutes. During that time, the
boy was observed secretly through a one-way mirror. Freedman tried
this threat procedure on twenty-two different boys, and twenty-one of
them never touched the robot while he was gone.
So a strong threat was successful while the boys thought they might
be caught and punished. But Freedman had already guessed that. He
was really interested in the effectiveness of the threat in guiding the
boys’ behavior later on, when he was no longer around. To find out
what would happen then, he sent a young woman back to the boys’
school about six weeks after he had been there. She took the boys out
of the class one at a time to participate in an experiment. Without ever
mentioning any connection with Freedman, she escorted each boy back
to the room with the five toys and gave him a drawing test. While she
was scoring the test, she told the boy that he was free to play with any
toy in the room. Of course, almost all the boys played with a toy. The
interesting result was that, of the boys playing with a toy, 77 percent
72 / Influence