Berlin Weekend

This past weekend, I went to Berlin with some of the other students on our study abroad trip. Having never been to Germany let alone Berlin, I wasn't really sure what to expect when we got there. One of the things the left the biggest impression on me was the number of memorials around the city for the Holocaust and WW2. They felt like they were literally around every corner; one of the most interesting ones that we visited was entitled Topography of Terror, and it was located where the headquarters of the secret police and other Nazi organizations were headquartered. One of the things that we encountered in this exhibit were the ways in which people who were abused by the Nazis adapted. For example, although the conditions in the ghettos were awful, the people in the ghettos attempted to better their living situation by establishing a school for their children and a newspaper, but the more that they tried to do this, the worse the Nazi's made the living conditions. In their minds, this was a form of rebellion (and in a way it was). In class this week we spent a long time discussing positive/negative reinforcement and presentation/removal punishment, and I couldn't help but think about what sort of punishment strategy the Nazi's were thinking about. It seems the me that they were attempting to use presentation punishment by humiliating people in public, worsening the living conditions, etc, but their attempts at punishment were unsuccessful and these sort of rebellious behaviors continued to happen. Therefore, what they were doing was actually reinforcement because it was resulting in an increase in the behavior. During class we identified 10 consequences and attempted to figure out their reinforcement/punishment category, and this difference between punishment and negative reinforcement seemed to be difficult to grasp at first but much more clear now.