Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault, and this time with
Speaker 1: us in the dark is the ultimate wintertime bad boy,
Speaker 1: the greatest goat of all time. I guess the greatest
Speaker 1: goatman of all time. Dear Crumpus. That's right. This worked
Speaker 1: out perfectly because we put this episode out last year
Speaker 1: on Crumpus Knocked, and now we have a slot for
Speaker 1: a vault episode on Crompus Knocked, so we're we're unleashing
Speaker 1: the be Steel Hordes once again. Now when did this
Speaker 1: episode originally come out? Originally published twelve five nineteen, and uh,
Speaker 1: if the calendar speaks true, today is twelve five, So
Speaker 1: it's perfect. Let's get in the basket. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. A production of I Heart Radios
Speaker 1: has to work. Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And it's Crampus Night, isn't it. That's right?
Speaker 1: Today is so or tonight? Rather is Crampus Knocked? The
Speaker 1: night during which the Beast of Christmas comes down from
Speaker 1: the mountains and terrorizes alpine towns around the world. Right,
Speaker 1: it's so given that this episode falls on Crampus knocked,
Speaker 1: we realized we had a solemn duty, a solemn holiday duty,
Speaker 1: to explore Crampus in depth. Man, I think Crampus just
Speaker 1: took a walk through our kitchen because I just went
Speaker 1: through there and there was such a reek. There was
Speaker 1: like a waft of aged shrimp all throughout the microwave area.
Speaker 1: Does Crampus smell? You know? I would imagine you could
Speaker 1: smell somewhat of sulfur and rot, Yeah, one would think,
Speaker 1: or or certainly the hides would have a daintness to them. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: But but the smell is often overlooked because generally it's
Speaker 1: more it's it's generally thought of as more visual spectacle. Uh.
Speaker 1: Certainly for those of us far away from the Alpine
Speaker 1: regions that that either have to make do with some
Speaker 1: facsimile of Crampus rights in our own cities or simply
Speaker 1: have to make do with with footage and uh images
Speaker 1: and illustrations of what these rights consist of. Now, Crampus
Speaker 1: was really having a moment like a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago I think like the suddenly interest in this creature surged, uh,
Speaker 1: and I feel like it's it's calmed down enough now
Speaker 1: that we that we can properly tackle it. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I think the good news is that I think it
Speaker 1: has calmed down to like a steady infection of of
Speaker 1: Western civilization beyond the alpine regions, say, certainly here in
Speaker 1: the United States, like crampus has you know, surged infected
Speaker 1: the holiday host And now I think we can say
Speaker 1: Crampus is part of our our holiday traditions here in
Speaker 1: the United States. Now, another thing is you said you
Speaker 1: were going to be leaning into the holidays this year,
Speaker 1: and man, you have been what we we do promise
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be all Christmas stuff the rest of
Speaker 1: the year. It was just that you saw that it
Speaker 1: was coming out on Crampus knocked and we we couldn't
Speaker 1: do but go to the horns exactly. So let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about Crampus, because some of you
Speaker 1: may not actually be familiar with crampas or you might
Speaker 1: not have, you know, as a robust and understandings as
Speaker 1: other folks out there. So the short version, of course
Speaker 1: is that Crampus is an Alpine holiday monster used as
Speaker 1: negative reinforcement, a threat of punishment for bad behavior against children.
Speaker 1: He has the bad cop to St. Nicholas's good cop.
Speaker 1: He is uh the stick, whereas St. Nicholas is the carrot,
Speaker 1: though much more directly so than St. Nicholas being the carrot,
Speaker 1: because the child doesn't actually want to see St. Nicholas
Speaker 1: in their house that would perhaps be traumatic. You want
Speaker 1: the treats and the goodies and the presence that St.
Speaker 1: Nicholas brings, So the St. Nicholas is like an indirect
Speaker 1: giver of the carrot. Crampus is himself quite the stick,
Speaker 1: right and and butt. He is something you wish to avoid.
Speaker 1: And that's the general idea. The Crampus is what happens
Speaker 1: to the bad children. You young women are not one
Speaker 1: of the bad children, are you? Uh wait, so what
Speaker 1: exactly does Crampus do to the bad children? Well? Uh
Speaker 1: so so it it very I mean, the basic idea
Speaker 1: is that Crampus is going to come and cramplog and
Speaker 1: describe Crampus for everyone. Though again this is a situation
Speaker 1: where the exact incarnation of Crampus is going to drift
Speaker 1: a little bit, and we're going to discuss the wise
Speaker 1: of that in a bit a little bit baffa metti. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a goat like beast man, kind of a satyr, kind
Speaker 1: of a pan figure, kind of a demon, like a furry,
Speaker 1: shaggy alpine demon from the cold mountain wilderness comes down.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, it's covered in bells, has a basket
Speaker 1: on it on his back as switches may bring coal
Speaker 1: as well. Sometimes it's shown to have like a big
Speaker 1: lolling uh you know, giraffe like tongue, and basically he's
Speaker 1: going to come in scare the bad children with the
Speaker 1: bad children with his switches, and if you're particularly bad,
Speaker 1: throw you into his basket and take you with him
Speaker 1: back to the wilderness to either eat you out there
Speaker 1: maybe or maybe take you to hell. Is is that
Speaker 1: sometimes part of it? Uh? Yeah, I think again, the
Speaker 1: exact exact details are going to vary. Sometimes. I wonder
Speaker 1: if it's like, because clearly Crampus has coal, perhaps he
Speaker 1: needs the children to work in the coal mine. Okay,
Speaker 1: but that's just me. That's my my possible twist on it.
Speaker 1: Now you're probably wondering, you know, where does this idea
Speaker 1: come from? We know that it it definitely seems to
Speaker 1: originate in the Alpine regions of Europe, but it's unsure
Speaker 1: if it's truly a pre Christian pagan tradition. Um. Some
Speaker 1: people say that it is, though it undoubtedly invokes pre
Speaker 1: Christian pagan ideas and images, um, you know, regardless of
Speaker 1: where it's actually or when it's actually emerging. But at
Speaker 1: hard he's a he's just a general bogey, right, the
Speaker 1: embodied event of negative reinforcement of cultural norms in children,
Speaker 1: and perhaps going back to our discussion of Jenny Green teeth, uh,
Speaker 1: the bogey that is used to warn children away from
Speaker 1: from still waters that are dangerous, perhaps crampus is an
Speaker 1: embodiment of, you know, the general message that bad things
Speaker 1: will happen to you if you do not take seriously
Speaker 1: the rules and advice that your parents and your elders
Speaker 1: present you with. So, while yes, misbehaving will not actually
Speaker 1: result in foul beastmen venturing down from the mountains and
Speaker 1: dragging you away to some horrific fate, but misbehaving could
Speaker 1: result in bodily harm, and certainly the potential for violent
Speaker 1: mistreatment by others is you know, is possible in certain circumstances.
Speaker 1: Either way, Crampus is an embodiment of fear in a
Speaker 1: holiday that is often reduced to just a notion of
Speaker 1: pure joy, right, especially in the United States traditionally. But
Speaker 1: his spirit is is certainly of the winter from which
Speaker 1: our holiday traditions emerge. Uh. You know, he is the
Speaker 1: the darkness of the holidays that is ultimately essential to
Speaker 1: to winter um rights and winter belief systems that you
Speaker 1: find in cultures around the world. Now, one thing that
Speaker 1: I think is an interesting difference is that, like whether
Speaker 1: or not there's really a St. Nicholas to bring you presents,
Speaker 1: children will often end up with presents on Christmas Morning
Speaker 1: with the implication that they have come from St. Nicholas,
Speaker 1: But nobody ever actually gets carried off by Crampus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you'll He's one of the big things here
Speaker 1: is you have Crampus parades, traditional cramps parades in alpine areas,
Speaker 1: in which people dressed in the crampus costumes will parade
Speaker 1: through the streets and um and scared children. Though certainly
Speaker 1: nowadays they are not They're generally not permitted to touch
Speaker 1: the children or to actually strike the children with sticks,
Speaker 1: much less drag them away. Uh. But in previous decades. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I imagine they perhaps had a little more leeway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess so either way. Yes, the idea is that
Speaker 1: Crampus is a a performance. It is a is a
Speaker 1: folk festival performance and which people dress up as the monster,
Speaker 1: and then the monsters parade through the streets. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in this, you know, it touches on so many other
Speaker 1: different folk traditions. There's something about Crampus that seems to
Speaker 1: embody just like it just checks off so many boxes
Speaker 1: for folk traditions uh that you find throughout Europe but
Speaker 1: also and around the world, you know, like the making
Speaker 1: of bread totems that resemble Crampus, Crampus wearing the bells,
Speaker 1: bells being objects that are typically used in folk decisions,
Speaker 1: worn off evil spirits, uh. Crampus as being a kind
Speaker 1: of horned god as another thing that is often brought up,
Speaker 1: you know, and of course there are many versions of
Speaker 1: horned gods and horned beings and various religions and myth
Speaker 1: cycles uh, you know, tied you know, particularly with the
Speaker 1: horned god to the unpredictable nature of the hunt. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he he really you know stands uh, you know,
Speaker 1: on this kind of nexus of so many different ideas,
Speaker 1: Like it's easy to just go nuts chasing cramps through
Speaker 1: the you know, through the centuries of of of human
Speaker 1: fulk history. Well, he's also just a classic hybrid monster. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that at heart, he is kind of part
Speaker 1: part man, part goat. I guess you'd say, part sheep,
Speaker 1: maybe part you know, part beast. And in that like
Speaker 1: he ties into some of our our oldest you know,
Speaker 1: magical ideas. A hybridity is key to monstrosity. And what
Speaker 1: he's thought to be the first monster in the human
Speaker 1: imagination is none other than the uh what the the
Speaker 1: Lowan ninch figuring from about thirty five to forty thousand
Speaker 1: years ago. Well, the first that we have physical episode,
Speaker 1: because yeah, as we talked about in our episode about
Speaker 1: the first monster, you can't know what the first monster was,
Speaker 1: but this seems to be like the earliest one where
Speaker 1: there's a physical record of the monster. Yeah, and we
Speaker 1: did a whole episode on that talking about like, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, certainly how this example was found and what
Speaker 1: experts have thought about it, and how it ties into
Speaker 1: just how how our minds work, like bringing two uh
Speaker 1: different ideas together into a new idea, and what this
Speaker 1: new idea encompasses totally. So what happens on Crampus Knocked, Well, uh,
Speaker 1: Crampus Knocked is the eve of the Feast of St. Nicholas.
Speaker 1: It occurs every December five, and so Crampus descends from
Speaker 1: the mountain, terrorizes the children, drags the worst of them
Speaker 1: away in that foul wicker basket covered in bells. Sometimes
Speaker 1: he he hands out coal or root and bundles of sticks,
Speaker 1: which is interesting. The bundles of sticks are sometimes also
Speaker 1: musical instruments, of course, because they're can be used to
Speaker 1: it with a percussion instrument. Um. But you know, this
Speaker 1: is the overall just a parade in which there is
Speaker 1: this threat of greater beatings or abduction if you do
Speaker 1: not behave yourselves and um. And this is another thing
Speaker 1: like the Crampus parade through the streets also has this
Speaker 1: kind of unruly atmosphere to it that ties in with
Speaker 1: a lot of parade traditions that involve masks and you know,
Speaker 1: be steel guys is that people take on and this
Speaker 1: you know, so again it runs parallel to so many
Speaker 1: different things in human culture. Well, it's one of the
Speaker 1: great ironies in the belief in demons and devils that
Speaker 1: have haunted us throughout the centuries, which is that they
Speaker 1: are often used precisely to enforce order, like orderly behavior
Speaker 1: among children, and yet they are themselves figures of chaos.
Speaker 1: It's like this unruly, unpredictable, wild kind of thing will
Speaker 1: be there to punish you if you break the rules.
Speaker 1: Why is that? I don't know that. That's interesting to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll certainly get into the psychology of this more in
Speaker 1: the later portion of the episode. I asked for the
Speaker 1: name Crampus comes from crumping, which means claw in German,
Speaker 1: so which has a you know, a nice nasty connotation
Speaker 1: to it, like this is the claw the claw man
Speaker 1: um let's see. Goodness, where do you even even go
Speaker 1: from there? So we talked about crampas come, Crampas comes
Speaker 1: to town, Crampus parades through the streets, or the crampus,
Speaker 1: the cramp I you know, multiple cramp Crampus is some
Speaker 1: of these, especially these these modern h crampus parades. You're
Speaker 1: talking like four hundred crampuses parading through the streets. They're
Speaker 1: quite a festival. Sometimes there's fire, uh, you know, sometimes
Speaker 1: the costumes are a little more modern, but other times
Speaker 1: they put a strong emphasis on maintaining traditional originality wooden masks,
Speaker 1: actual um um, you know, goat and sheep skins, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. So the basic ideas that, okay, Crampus
Speaker 1: either incorporates pagan ideas or emerges from pagan ideas, or
Speaker 1: even is ultimately rooted in pre Christian pagan traditions. But
Speaker 1: then St. Nicholas does come along around Uh. This is
Speaker 1: the solemn Catholic precursor to the sort of jolly modern
Speaker 1: Santa Claus that most of us grew up with. And St.
Speaker 1: Nick gain pop already among German speaking people during the
Speaker 1: eleventh century. Now, the story of St. Nicholas is itself
Speaker 1: full of fascinating diversions, Like there's a great story where St. Nicholas,
Speaker 1: I believe he comes across a place where an evil
Speaker 1: innkeeper or somebody like that has murdered some young boys.
Speaker 1: And then then St. Nicholas murdered them, chopped them up
Speaker 1: and pickled them. And then St. Nicholas resurrects the chopped
Speaker 1: up pickled boys. Uh. And I guess the innkeepers somehow punished, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and and St. Nicholas is this the rather different
Speaker 1: figure from from modern Santa Claus. To him that he is.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's essentially like a former bishop of of
Speaker 1: what is now Turkey. I think, so, yeah, he's and
Speaker 1: he's this dour individual. So he's not really jolly. I
Speaker 1: guess he's jolly in comparison to the beast man Crampus,
Speaker 1: but he's not quite Santa Claus, that's for sure. He's
Speaker 1: more like a Christmas saw rouman kind of. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think he's yeah, yeah, I guess he has kind
Speaker 1: of kind Yeah. Anyway, in the centuries to follow, Crampus
Speaker 1: becomes an essential part of these traditions. You have Crampus,
Speaker 1: and you have sat Nick uh certainly you have Crampus
Speaker 1: knocked ahead of the coming of St. Nicholas and uh,
Speaker 1: and this just becomes, you know, just a popular part
Speaker 1: of the holiday, and at times it actually gets a
Speaker 1: little too popular for some people. So Crampus has always
Speaker 1: been just as Crampus as this this darkness to the light, uh,
Speaker 1: compared to the light of St. Nicholas. You know, Crampus
Speaker 1: even today is I think sometimes seen as kind of
Speaker 1: an enemy of craft Christmas. Well, you know, the same
Speaker 1: way they say, like, it's hard to make an anti
Speaker 1: war movie because war is inherently thrilling. It might be
Speaker 1: hard to make an anti Satan like demon character because
Speaker 1: demon characters are inherently kind of fun to act out,
Speaker 1: and so like, there's always the risk that people might
Speaker 1: be having a little too much fun acting out their
Speaker 1: Crampus roles unless the Church might need to bring the
Speaker 1: hammer down. That's right. So, you know, the Catholic Church
Speaker 1: attempted to ban these festivals in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries,
Speaker 1: but they weren't able to do so. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: before Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria, Catholic Austro Fascist briefly
Speaker 1: held power, and is reported in a ninety five New
Speaker 1: York Times article titled Crampus Disliked in Fascist Austria. Uh.
Speaker 1: They pointed out that that at the time, the people
Speaker 1: in power saw Crampus as a demonic, unruly and potentially
Speaker 1: communist usurper of Christian traditions. Yeah. So basically the Crampus,
Speaker 1: according to this article, Crampus postcards and candies, you know,
Speaker 1: had always been popular, but but they had they had
Speaker 1: become so popular that Crampus had virtually taken over from
Speaker 1: Sander like he was, he was becoming the gift giver
Speaker 1: as well. Um So, at any rate, there was an
Speaker 1: attempt to uh uh, you know, to to to oust
Speaker 1: cramp us, to to you know, to say it's a communist,
Speaker 1: because ultimately, in some depictions he was reading wearing red
Speaker 1: I guess. But they ordered anyone in a crampas costume
Speaker 1: to be rested on site. Festive crampas dances were outlawed,
Speaker 1: and they even required all Santa clauses as well to
Speaker 1: be licensed by the state and monitored fascist through and everything, yes,
Speaker 1: now um uh. In modern times, of course, there have
Speaker 1: also been concerns about the potential trauma of subjecting children
Speaker 1: to the idea of cramps or certainly the reality of
Speaker 1: frightening um grown people in crampas costumes breaking through the street.
Speaker 1: According to a two thousand six report from Reuter's, concerned
Speaker 1: parents and one child psychologists spoke out against the demons
Speaker 1: violent influence as well as so called childhood crampus trauma,
Speaker 1: of which there are you know, only a few cases,
Speaker 1: but at any rate enough for some individuals to to
Speaker 1: want to sound the alarm. Uh. And you know what
Speaker 1: What made the city wish and particularly interesting was that
Speaker 1: while Santa ended up being banned for visiting kindergartens in
Speaker 1: Vienna at the time, Crampus apparently still had access to
Speaker 1: the children, and so there was a certain amount of
Speaker 1: outrage over that. Well, you know, so I'm of two
Speaker 1: minds about this. Of course, I love Crampus. I love
Speaker 1: the demons and the monsters and all that that that's
Speaker 1: sort of my personal jam. But I also am very
Speaker 1: naturally disposed against terrorizing children with supernatural threats. Uh So,
Speaker 1: I mean I would I would propose making Crampus more
Speaker 1: of a Halloween style thing. What what vampires and goblins
Speaker 1: are to Halloween, Crampus could be to the Christmas season,
Speaker 1: you know, not something that you are taught is literally
Speaker 1: an existent threat that will hurt you, but just kind
Speaker 1: of like a fun trapping of the season. Ah, you
Speaker 1: know this week kind of referring back to our episode
Speaker 1: on cuteness and monsters. Right, Ultimately, if you want to
Speaker 1: declaw the monster, if you want to deflox, declaw the Crampus,
Speaker 1: what you need to do is make him funny and
Speaker 1: or cute, especially cute. The cut Crampus becomes the you know,
Speaker 1: the less terrifying he is. But then how will we
Speaker 1: get the children to behave um and now I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier about how you know, the tradition of of of
Speaker 1: Crampus has spread over the world and uh and as such,
Speaker 1: you'll see some crampas parades where there's more of a
Speaker 1: Hollywood and horror of film culture reflected. Uh. Certainly, if
Speaker 1: you just start looking at Crampus images online, some of
Speaker 1: them are going to look more like demon costumes that
Speaker 1: you might buy at a Halloween superstore. And then you're
Speaker 1: gonna see things that are that are far more traditional looking. Um.
Speaker 1: And I was looking at one particular article. This is
Speaker 1: a New York Times article titled he Sees You when
Speaker 1: You're sleeping and gives you Nightmare My Melissa Eddie. This
Speaker 1: is about the celebration of Crampus in Munich. And in
Speaker 1: this article I point out that that in in this
Speaker 1: particular Munich Crampus parade, they only allow really traditional crampuses.
Speaker 1: So this means wouldn't mask horns, goat and sheep pelts,
Speaker 1: bells and switches. Um and uh. She writes that local
Speaker 1: Crampus clubs there will spend between eighteen hundred and euros
Speaker 1: upwards of three thousand dollars each year on masks and
Speaker 1: costumes made from local materials. How do you join a
Speaker 1: crampus club? Is that very exclusive? Um? I give the
Speaker 1: impression it's kind of like joining a crew with a
Speaker 1: k uh down in New Orleans, you know, for the
Speaker 1: various parades. You know, it's kind of like you have
Speaker 1: clubs that get together and put put together. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: these these particular costumes and performance. It's not like a
Speaker 1: horned beast. Country club is not where crampus is gathered
Speaker 1: to use the pool and place. I don't think so,
Speaker 1: but she points out the master or in this case
Speaker 1: car from lime, Swiss pine or alderwood, and the skins
Speaker 1: are going to be sheep or goats. Quote. Although no
Speaker 1: one turns away a crampus wearing wild board, which is nice,
Speaker 1: and so four hundred crampas is wrong. They take to
Speaker 1: the streets, but there are rules no drinking and again
Speaker 1: no actual hitting the children. Okay, but crampus traditions are
Speaker 1: going to vary as well. Al Right, and our pointed
Speaker 1: out on Atlas Obscure back in that it's it's not
Speaker 1: what crampas looks like so much is what he does
Speaker 1: or threatens to do that matters. For instance, entire all
Speaker 1: the crampas tradition there is the crampus is essentially wearing
Speaker 1: this big suit of straw. So the crampuses look kind
Speaker 1: of like a hay bale with the you know, beast legs,
Speaker 1: arms and head and um and and that's just gonna
Speaker 1: be the way that cramp is depicted in that particular area.
Speaker 1: And then you can you know, travel over. For instance,
Speaker 1: there's a part of Bavaria where they don't even have crampus.
Speaker 1: Instead it's a bouten Munden, which is like a cramps figure.
Speaker 1: So um. The author here that Alice obscure Piece says, quote,
Speaker 1: like the tooth fairy, he had a definite function but
Speaker 1: no definite form. I think it's a nice way of
Speaker 1: putting it. Now, another thing that right and now points
Speaker 1: out is that crampas traditions were ultimately, you know, traditionally
Speaker 1: a thing of the country. They spread slowly and then
Speaker 1: eventually made their way to the cities where illustrators there
Speaker 1: might have never heard of such traditions before, so in
Speaker 1: depicting them, they too might have had to rely on
Speaker 1: other demonic motifs such as devil motifs that were already
Speaker 1: you know, prevalent uh in religious iconography, as well as
Speaker 1: pan and sader motifs from art culture. So this would
Speaker 1: and then I would imagine that this would end up
Speaker 1: influencing through the traditions to some extent as well. So
Speaker 1: again it ultimately the exact appearance of the creature is
Speaker 1: going to vary, but it's the the intent that is
Speaker 1: that is almost pure and its chaotic menace. I wonder
Speaker 1: what exactly it was that caused the sudden international surge
Speaker 1: in Crampus interest a few years ago. Well, there's there's
Speaker 1: one possible answer to that. I was treading an article
Speaker 1: in the Chicago Tribune from from this year by Rick Cogan,
Speaker 1: and he points out that the US explosion of Crampus
Speaker 1: might in part be due to the two thousand four
Speaker 1: publication of The Devil in Design the Cramps Postcards by
Speaker 1: mont Beauchamp, an award winning Chicago art director and graphic designer.
Speaker 1: So the idea here is, like this book came out,
Speaker 1: these images started circulating around um. The images zo ended
Speaker 1: up being licensed in some cases, or at least they
Speaker 1: were licensing request, and this kind of sets off the
Speaker 1: online fascination with Crampus and these Crampus images. You know,
Speaker 1: suddenly here's this this new dark spin on the holidays.
Speaker 1: It starts appearing in television shows. Uh what Venture Brothers
Speaker 1: I think was one of the first things, first shows
Speaker 1: in which I saw a depiction of Crampus, but I
Speaker 1: understand he's shown up on like Supernatural was another one,
Speaker 1: um and eventually had his own horror movie. I think
Speaker 1: that was in the last couple of years. That was that,
Speaker 1: So my dad's a big fan of it. This is
Speaker 1: like that. That was probably the Pete Crampus year I
Speaker 1: think would be like or something. Yeah, and of course,
Speaker 1: you know, Crampus parades can now be found throughout the
Speaker 1: United States, and there's one every year right here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: That's also it's sort of a more of a pub
Speaker 1: crawl if I remember correctly, unless it's changed, uh, then
Speaker 1: like a pure parade, like an actual license parade. But
Speaker 1: then unsurprisingly you'll find parade crews in New Orleans that
Speaker 1: that put on a Crampus parade every year through the
Speaker 1: streets and then they finish up at a German restaurant.
Speaker 1: There in uh, in New Orleans. Okay, you Hollywood development people,
Speaker 1: I've got an idea. I'm gonna pitch it to you
Speaker 1: right now. Okay, It's a Miracle on thirty four Street,
Speaker 1: but with Crampus instead of Santa Claus. Right. So, a
Speaker 1: little girl be friends a goatman who thinks he who
Speaker 1: says he's the real Crampus, And you don't know, the
Speaker 1: whole movie is either real Crampus or is he just
Speaker 1: a regular goat man who thinks he's Crampas. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, that's that's the thing. A Miracle
Speaker 1: on thirty fourth Street is a story about Santa and
Speaker 1: a story about about letters and language, right uh. And
Speaker 1: Crampas is basically unlanguaged, like there are no words with Crampus,
Speaker 1: there are no there are no prayers, there are no
Speaker 1: letters to Crampus. The unspoken implication get in the basket. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he is just just just pure menace. He's like Jason,
Speaker 1: Jason beforehees yeah, it doesn't need to speak you just
Speaker 1: his intentions are clear. Well, it goes back to the
Speaker 1: lion Man. It goes back to the basic hybridity of monsters.
Speaker 1: Monsters don't have to say anything because monsters are the message,
Speaker 1: right their form speaks for them exactly. So yeah, Crampas
Speaker 1: doesn't have to say a thing. Crampus is the message.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, for the rest of the episode, we're
Speaker 1: going to be exploring the biology and the psychology of
Speaker 1: of Crampus knocked. But before we do that, we probably
Speaker 1: need to take a break, right, yes, so we will
Speaker 1: be right back with more. Alright, we're back. So I
Speaker 1: admit that was kind of an extended ramble in the
Speaker 1: first part of the episode, but hopefully we were able
Speaker 1: to get across some of the basic points of the
Speaker 1: Crampus traditions. But it can be kind of difficult because
Speaker 1: again it varies from place to place from time to time.
Speaker 1: Crampus is pure in his intent and his just physical message,
Speaker 1: but everything else is kind of up for grabs. You know.
Speaker 1: I think it's time to play one of our favorite
Speaker 1: games on the show, which is, let's take this monster
Speaker 1: in a biologically literal way. Yes, uh, which is actually
Speaker 1: kind of difficult to again to do with Crampus because
Speaker 1: the actual interpretation of him changes so much. But uh,
Speaker 1: I will start by mentioning like two literary worlds that
Speaker 1: come to mind that provide fun parallels to the Crampus idea.
Speaker 1: So one is a book by Michael Crichton, the book
Speaker 1: Eaters of the Dead. Have you read this? I actually haven't.
Speaker 1: I went through a strong Michael Crichton phase when I
Speaker 1: was younger, but never got to this one. I was
Speaker 1: in all the techno thrillers. This one, Yeah, this one
Speaker 1: is the the odd non techno thriller. But it's really good.
Speaker 1: It's essentially a spin on Bayo Wolf. Instead of Grendel,
Speaker 1: the singular monster, you have the people known as the Windel,
Speaker 1: who are possible Neandertal descendants who periodically descend from the
Speaker 1: mountain to raid Vikings settlements. Uh so um, you know,
Speaker 1: the clear inspiration for this again being Grendel who comes
Speaker 1: down from the wilds and Bayow Wolf to assault the
Speaker 1: mead Hall. Another literary parallel it comes to mind the
Speaker 1: White Walkers and George R. Martin's Song of Lice and
Speaker 1: Fire books, particularly uh, the situation with Craster of Craster's Keep,
Speaker 1: who sacrifices his male children to the White Walkers in
Speaker 1: order to sort of protect himself to maintain like this
Speaker 1: weird alliance with the forces of of wilderness and gold
Speaker 1: and death. Yeah. Yeah, these uh, these demonic entities who
Speaker 1: live out in the in the freezing woods, and they
Speaker 1: they and they represent a threat to human children. Right. So,
Speaker 1: playing with these extrapolations of monsters from the winter wild,
Speaker 1: we might arrive at a view of crampus as a
Speaker 1: as a as a people who come down from the
Speaker 1: mountains to raid the civilizations of man, but who might
Speaker 1: be bought off through an offering of our worst human children,
Speaker 1: which they presumably eat or yeah, or maybe put to
Speaker 1: work in the coal mines. Um. As far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, this would be you know, a pretty unique arrangement, uh,
Speaker 1: in part because outside of our myths and fictions, there
Speaker 1: are no beast menu there are no inhuman others to
Speaker 1: deal with in this manner. Uh though tantalizing lee enough,
Speaker 1: we are dealing with Europe here, a place where humans
Speaker 1: end any and Neanderthals seem to have coexisted for a
Speaker 1: number of years. Um, And I was looking around, I
Speaker 1: was wondering, like, surely somebody has has written about the
Speaker 1: possibility of cramps having something to do with the andrew Tals,
Speaker 1: but but nobody else has made that uh, gone out
Speaker 1: on that pedal limb. That's just me on that limb.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, as we discussed in our recent
Speaker 1: cannibalism episode, there there is clear evidence that both Neanderthals
Speaker 1: and prehistoric humans engaged in cannibalism, but there's nothing solid
Speaker 1: to suggest that they really ate each other. Though child
Speaker 1: sacrifice itself can be found throughout cultures of the ancient
Speaker 1: Near East, pre Columbian America's, pre modern Europe, parts of Africa, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So so, you know, this is just me spitballing here,
Speaker 1: But but I don't don't think there's anything unbelievable about
Speaker 1: the idea of humans offering up their worst children to
Speaker 1: a species of mountain creatures, um as the cold demands
Speaker 1: of winter set in. In fact, you know, when you
Speaker 1: think about one of the predecessors to Christmas was Roman Saturnalia,
Speaker 1: which involved a great deal of public ruckus and sacrifices,
Speaker 1: though apparently not of the human variety, or so we're told. Yes, Now,
Speaker 1: as far as thinking about cramp as creatures biologically, I
Speaker 1: mean we we simply you know, we could imagine them
Speaker 1: as a cold weather adapted to hormaid species. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: what with all the fur, and and again it is
Speaker 1: interesting to think about the fact that Neandertals may have
Speaker 1: been essentially that species adapted to cold, the cold weather
Speaker 1: of the ice ages, though interpretations vary on that as well.
Speaker 1: For instance, there's even one theory that states that Neanderdal's
Speaker 1: might actually have been killed out by a cold dry
Speaker 1: spell spanning centuries during the period of their decline. But
Speaker 1: also when we think about the fur and the horns
Speaker 1: of the crampas, we can interpret that as clothing and
Speaker 1: ritual garb, just like human beings might wear and certainly
Speaker 1: do wear when they dress up as cramp as in
Speaker 1: the streets. But we could also imagine some horned humanoid
Speaker 1: as well. We have countless examples of such creatures and
Speaker 1: beings and global myths and even cases of humans in
Speaker 1: the past with horn like growths, but nothing on the
Speaker 1: level of a horned, biped mammalian species. Now, as for
Speaker 1: that tongue, I'm always intrigued by, especially some of these
Speaker 1: cramp as illustrations, which the tongue is actually wrapping around
Speaker 1: is screaming child. The closest analog you can really find
Speaker 1: in nature is probably the eighteen to twenty centimeter prehensile
Speaker 1: giraffe tongue. That's a good tongue. Yeah, okay, but if
Speaker 1: you have, certainly you've got to see a giraffe at
Speaker 1: the zoo, you've or certainly in the wild, if you've
Speaker 1: been so lucky that hopefully you've you've you've seen the
Speaker 1: way that tongue can wrap itself around vegetation and then
Speaker 1: you know, pull it free. It's like a snake coming
Speaker 1: out of the mouth. Yeah, so that would be a
Speaker 1: possibility for our imagined cramps creature. But then that would
Speaker 1: again come to down to what's the function of this tongue.
Speaker 1: Does that mean that Crampus actually depends, you know, primarily
Speaker 1: on vegetation, and why would he have the tongue and
Speaker 1: hands as well? Like that seems like the physical form
Speaker 1: would be over investing in vegetation manipulation unless he has
Speaker 1: to eat all those leaves while scooping up screaming children,
Speaker 1: in which case I don't know. Oh yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: Or another way you could look at it is what
Speaker 1: if Crampus is not in fact by Peotle? Crampus could
Speaker 1: be a four leg a critter, right, Yeah, perhaps perhaps
Speaker 1: is mostly going about on four legs, but Rhett rises
Speaker 1: up on two legs when when wanting to display a threat,
Speaker 1: right to make himself look bigger, right right? Um. However,
Speaker 1: the I do have to say that the idea of
Speaker 1: Crampus being a vegetarian, of course, that that would play
Speaker 1: in well with what we know of other like bovine creatures,
Speaker 1: and certainly uh giraffe and the and the related creatures
Speaker 1: like these are these are herbivores, so primarily so, so
Speaker 1: you know, those would be the main parallels to some
Speaker 1: sort of a goat man I imagine. But then again,
Speaker 1: if you go back in the fossil record, you'll you'll
Speaker 1: find things like Andrew Sarkas, which some paleontolers interprets a
Speaker 1: cloth and hoofed carnivore. So you know, I think there's
Speaker 1: hope there that you could have. You could you could
Speaker 1: theoretically have some sort of a hoofed goat creature that
Speaker 1: feast sun flesh. Nice, But there's already that stereotype that
Speaker 1: goats will lead anything. Right, you feed him a tin
Speaker 1: can and and the lead. I don't know to what
Speaker 1: extent that's true. I'm sure you shouldn't do yea certainly
Speaker 1: you should not. But but you know, if you're at
Speaker 1: like a petting zoo, certainly goats are curious and they
Speaker 1: will they'll nibble on a lot of different things. Um,
Speaker 1: it could be kind of a squirrel situation here, the
Speaker 1: thing that that primarily eats vegetation, but uh, you know,
Speaker 1: who knows what they'll dip into given the opportunity. So
Speaker 1: to come back to the question, could cramp as exist, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think theoretically, like there's nothing you know, completely unrealistic
Speaker 1: about the idea. So, um, you know you're sort of
Speaker 1: getting into like the plausibility of sasquatch. Yeah, things like
Speaker 1: a large, hairy, bipedal creatures, uh that you know, may
Speaker 1: dwell outside the bounds of human civilization. Now here's an
Speaker 1: interesting question though, which is more real crampus who no
Speaker 1: one is claiming to have seen in the wilds or
Speaker 1: sasquatch in which people do make that claim and and
Speaker 1: do devote their lives to the idea that it really exists.
Speaker 1: Like one is extremely real in the in the imagination,
Speaker 1: in human traditions, and the other is has this cryptozoological
Speaker 1: standing for the most part, with with some creep into
Speaker 1: you know, the cultural area as well. Well. Obviously, I
Speaker 1: mean I'm pretty skeptical of of both. But I mean,
Speaker 1: if you had to rule one is more plausible than
Speaker 1: the other, obviously it would be it would be the Squatch, right,
Speaker 1: because the Squatch is oriented toward plausibility. And not to
Speaker 1: read too much into people's intentions, but you almost get
Speaker 1: the sense that some of the reports are kind of
Speaker 1: crafted in order to make it seem like a more
Speaker 1: biologically plausible thing, right, uh, and not just like a
Speaker 1: fantasy monster and that I saw in the woods. And
Speaker 1: then ultimately, ultimately cramp is a celebration of a fantasy
Speaker 1: monster that is a part of holiday traditions. You know,
Speaker 1: the fantasy monsters are better they carry baskets, since sasquash
Speaker 1: does not. That's right. Yeah, So all this talk of
Speaker 1: Crampus has got me wondering. So you've got to st
Speaker 1: Nicholas on one hand, the big bag full of toys
Speaker 1: for all the good boys and girls, and then you've
Speaker 1: got Crampus, who's got the whip or the switch the
Speaker 1: basket to carry the bad children off somewhere wretched. I
Speaker 1: was wondering which idea is actually more effective at motivating
Speaker 1: good behavior. Uh. And I want to be clear, We're
Speaker 1: certainly not encouraging you to terrorize your children with threats
Speaker 1: of monsters and other supernatural punishments. But I am curious
Speaker 1: just in the abstract, which is more motivating to two
Speaker 1: people in general and to children the promise of rewards
Speaker 1: like toys or the threat of punishment. Is it toys
Speaker 1: or horns? Yeah, this is This is one of those
Speaker 1: big questions that I think every parent struggles with, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to figure out, you know, to what
Speaker 1: extent should we keep it positive positive reinforcement, uh, than
Speaker 1: to what extent you actually dip into the negative. And
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately you generally don't want to dip into
Speaker 1: the negative reinforcement. You don't we certainly don't want to
Speaker 1: invent imaginary horrors uh to scare children. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it comes back to the reality of the
Speaker 1: Jenny Green teeth that there are real, pressing threats to
Speaker 1: a child's life in their immediate vicinity, and you want
Speaker 1: to get the message across. UH. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to think about, uh, your child getting hit by
Speaker 1: a car, for instance, by wandering into the street, but
Speaker 1: you you want to you want to drive home the
Speaker 1: message that this could happen and so you should certainly
Speaker 1: not do this thing, right. I mean, it's totally different question,
Speaker 1: I think once you get into the area of like
Speaker 1: clear life threatening types of things. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: the things people deal with on a more often day
Speaker 1: to day basis, or just like, how do you regulate behavior?
Speaker 1: How do you get the child to to not, you know,
Speaker 1: behave in a like obnoxious selfish way toward other children,
Speaker 1: in toward teachers and parents and all that. So I'm
Speaker 1: asking the question in a general way here. We'll try
Speaker 1: to give a general answer if I can, But obviously
Speaker 1: this is going to depend on a lot of individual circumstances,
Speaker 1: both of the people being motivated, the situation they're in,
Speaker 1: the types of rewards and punishments on offer. And given
Speaker 1: that reality, you probably won't be surprised to find that
Speaker 1: the evidence here is somewhat mixed and confusing about whether
Speaker 1: rewards or punishments are more effective. It depends a lot,
Speaker 1: but I'll try to flesh it out a little bit.
Speaker 1: So one thing that's important to remember is the difference
Speaker 1: between positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment, which are three
Speaker 1: distinct categories in psychology. Though the terms of negative reinforcement
Speaker 1: and punishment are sometimes used interchangeably, they do have subtle differences. So,
Speaker 1: positive reinforcement is when an action is encouraged with a reward.
Speaker 1: So imagine you're designing a car that encourages people to
Speaker 1: wear their seat belts. For positive reinforcement, every time you
Speaker 1: put on your seat belt, maybe the car gives you
Speaker 1: a candy, or it displays a little thing that says
Speaker 1: good job. For negative reinforcement, you have to imagine that
Speaker 1: the car does what many cars actually already do. It
Speaker 1: makes an annoying sound or keeps beeping until you put
Speaker 1: your seat belt on. So for negative reinforcement, what this
Speaker 1: actually means is there's an existing negative stimulus, which is
Speaker 1: the sound of the negative reinforcer, and you can only
Speaker 1: make the negative reinforcer go away by doing the desired
Speaker 1: action of putting on the seat belt. Punishment is similar
Speaker 1: but slightly different. Instead of presenting a bad effect and
Speaker 1: then removing it when you do something good, it threatens
Speaker 1: you with subsequent bad effects if you do something bad,
Speaker 1: So punishment would be more like your car automatically writing
Speaker 1: you a ticket every time you drive somewhere without your
Speaker 1: seat belt. Uh, And so negative reinforcement is something that's
Speaker 1: already painful or unwanted and you have to do something
Speaker 1: right to make it stop. Punishment is something bad that
Speaker 1: will happen to you if you do something wrong. And
Speaker 1: then even within that, I think technically there's both like
Speaker 1: positive punishment and negative punishment. Positive punishment would be doing
Speaker 1: something you don't like, like the car shocking you after
Speaker 1: you drive somewhere with without a seat belt. Negative punishment
Speaker 1: would involve like taking away a benefit as a punishment,
Speaker 1: so like if the car automatically disabled its air conditioning
Speaker 1: after you drove without your seat belt. So which one
Speaker 1: of these is cramp us? Uh? Crampus kind of shows
Speaker 1: the way that some of the categories do have some overlap,
Speaker 1: they kind of bleed together. I suppose it is in
Speaker 1: one sense a threat of positive punishment, like this monster
Speaker 1: will be coming to possibly whip you, But it's also
Speaker 1: a bit of negative reinforcement, maybe because like maybe helping
Speaker 1: mom and dad do the chores could do something to
Speaker 1: alleviate the negative reinforcer, which is the nagging fear of
Speaker 1: crampus that haunts your mind. Yeah, I think that's that's fair. Again,
Speaker 1: there there's a an amorphous aspect to crampus, so it
Speaker 1: would be it would be too much to expect him
Speaker 1: to fit firmly in any kind of category. Well, but
Speaker 1: it's not just crampus. Also, it's like tons of things,
Speaker 1: Like it's difficult to know exactly like where they fit
Speaker 1: on the SKIP because you can frame them in different ways,
Speaker 1: Like you can frame doing the exact same thing as
Speaker 1: like an inhibition or a positive behavior, like are you
Speaker 1: remembering to turn the lights off when you leave the
Speaker 1: room a positive behavior? Or are you not leaving the
Speaker 1: lights on when you leave the room? I mean, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like hard to tell which is which in
Speaker 1: some cases. Um, but so so to look at some studies,
Speaker 1: there was one study from the nineteen seventies that came
Speaker 1: across by Arthur F. Constantini and Kenneth the Hoving called
Speaker 1: the Effectiveness of Reward and punishment contingencies on Response inhibition,
Speaker 1: and this was in the Journal of Child Psychology ninety three,
Speaker 1: and so this looked at the relative strength of rewards
Speaker 1: and punishments in in motivating behavior. It involved training two
Speaker 1: groups of forty kindergarteners and forty second graders in something
Speaker 1: called response inhibition training. This is training that teaches children
Speaker 1: to suppress actions that are inappropriate for the context. Their
Speaker 1: quote from the paper is, this is uh the tendency
Speaker 1: to inhibit irrelevant acts and to select appropriate ones, So
Speaker 1: basically it's self control, like in a laboratory context. This
Speaker 1: kind of training might take the form of anything from
Speaker 1: the Marshmallow test, like getting kids to resist eating a
Speaker 1: treat on the promise that a better treat is coming later,
Speaker 1: to something called the Stroop test, which involves showing people
Speaker 1: the name of a color printed in a different color,
Speaker 1: and then they have to say the color that the
Speaker 1: word is printed in. So, for example, you'd see the
Speaker 1: word red printed in green, and you would have to
Speaker 1: say green instead of red. And this is taken as
Speaker 1: a suppressing activity, but because it requires the suppression of
Speaker 1: the dominant response behavior, which is to simply read the
Speaker 1: word you're seeing. But there are all kinds of analogies
Speaker 1: for response inhibition training in the behavioral education of children.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to train a child not to grab
Speaker 1: things out of other people's hands or not to whine
Speaker 1: when they want something, that's a form of response inhibition training. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the short version is that this study found that for
Speaker 1: this particular type of training, children at both age groups
Speaker 1: learned the response inhibition on the given task more efficiently
Speaker 1: when they were threatened with punishment than when they were
Speaker 1: promised rewards. Though I should know because it's probably relevant
Speaker 1: what the punishments and rewards consisted of. Basically, children were
Speaker 1: shown an assortment of toys and told that their performance
Speaker 1: on these training tasks would determine a payout of marbles,
Speaker 1: which they could then use to purchase the toys that
Speaker 1: they had been shown. So, in the reward condition, good
Speaker 1: performance on the task was rewarded with the accumulation of marbles.
Speaker 1: You do good, and you get more marbles. In the
Speaker 1: punishment condition, you had some marbles, and bad performance on
Speaker 1: the task was punished with the removal of marbles awarded
Speaker 1: at the beginning. So basically, the rewards and the punishments
Speaker 1: here both had to do with toy buying power. Granted,
Speaker 1: toy buying power is an immensely powerful force, and in
Speaker 1: the child mind, oh, I remember it, I remember that power. Uh,
Speaker 1: And and so the author's right quote the motivational effect
Speaker 1: of losing marbles is apparently greater than receiving them, even
Speaker 1: when the actual number retained by or given to the
Speaker 1: subjects is the same under both conditions. Uh. Now, note
Speaker 1: here that the punishment, even though it is incredibly motivating
Speaker 1: to have toy buying power, the punishment here is not
Speaker 1: an intrinsically painful effect, but rather the withdrawal of previously
Speaker 1: awarded positive reinforcers. And this probably has very important differences
Speaker 1: from a demon with a whip. Yeah, this, this would
Speaker 1: have more just in common with sort of the crampst
Speaker 1: free idea that Santa will either bring you the toys
Speaker 1: you want, less toys or no toys, based on your
Speaker 1: behavior exactly. So this is just one study from the seventies,
Speaker 1: and I was reading more recent opinions of scholars and
Speaker 1: child psychologists, and the picture continues to get more complicated
Speaker 1: from there. So another thing I was looking at was
Speaker 1: a column in Psychology Today by a pretty well known
Speaker 1: American child psychologist named j. Belski, who had actually been
Speaker 1: the subject of some kind of controversy after he published
Speaker 1: research that seemed to show some mildly negative behavioral outcomes
Speaker 1: for children who had spent a lot of time in daycare.
Speaker 1: I don't know enough about him or his research to
Speaker 1: have an opinion on that issue, but I thought I
Speaker 1: should flag it since I saw something about it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: Bellski argues here that rewards are generally more effective than
Speaker 1: punishment at teaching good behavior, especially for young children. Uh
Speaker 1: and specifically he gives the example of rewarding good behavior
Speaker 1: but simply ignoring bad behavior. He writes that, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of rents are are kind of intuitively averse
Speaker 1: to this, like they would think, you know, why would
Speaker 1: ignoring bad behavior be better than meeting out punishment when
Speaker 1: a child does wrong? And Beilski calls attention to the
Speaker 1: work of a group of Dutch neuroscientists who study the
Speaker 1: effects of simple rewards and punishments, and these are about
Speaker 1: as mild as you can get for rewards and punishments. Basically,
Speaker 1: it was children ages eight to nine and children ages
Speaker 1: eleven to twelve, and they were trained to do a
Speaker 1: computer task in which they had to discover and follow
Speaker 1: some rules, and the inferring and following of the rules
Speaker 1: could be reinforced either by rewards, which would consist of
Speaker 1: a check mark when they got the right answer, or
Speaker 1: punishments a big X when they got the wrong answer,
Speaker 1: and the study found that the younger children improved more
Speaker 1: when the feedback was positive, whereas the older children improved
Speaker 1: more when the feedback was negative. Young adults eighteen to
Speaker 1: twenty five also responded more to negative feedback in a
Speaker 1: similar test. And the near scientists who carried out this
Speaker 1: research had the children undergo brain scans while while learning
Speaker 1: through these tasks, and the brain imaging work showed differences
Speaker 1: between the brains of the younger children and the older
Speaker 1: children while doing the computer task. The areas of the
Speaker 1: cerebral cortex associated with cognitive control, which is related to
Speaker 1: the self control and the response inhibition we were just
Speaker 1: talking about. In these areas, older children showed stronger activation
Speaker 1: in response to negative feedback and younger children showed stronger
Speaker 1: activation in response to positive feedback. So what could fully
Speaker 1: account for the difference here, like why would younger children
Speaker 1: learn faster from minor rewards and older children and young
Speaker 1: adults learn faster from minor punishments. Belski offers an explanation
Speaker 1: that's in line with the authors of the study. Quote information,
Speaker 1: which stipulates that you did something wrong is more complicated
Speaker 1: than information stipulating that you did something well, so younger
Speaker 1: children may simply have an easier time processing simpler, positive
Speaker 1: rewarding information than negative feedback. As the authors noted, learning
Speaker 1: from mistakes is more complex than carrying on in the
Speaker 1: same way as before. You have to ask yourself precisely
Speaker 1: what went wrong and how it was possible. That is,
Speaker 1: it takes more analysis to figure out that what was
Speaker 1: done is mistaken than that it is correct. So, if
Speaker 1: you think about it, I think that makes sense. Positive
Speaker 1: reinforcements and rewards are actually often so simple as to
Speaker 1: be nearly mechanical, like whatever you just did that was good,
Speaker 1: keep doing that, do more of it. Punishments let you
Speaker 1: know that you're screwing up, but they don't necessarily tell
Speaker 1: you what you should be doing. Instead, they don't necessarily
Speaker 1: model a positive behavior, so they can be confusing, frustrating,
Speaker 1: de motivating. Uh. And so it seems that for pre
Speaker 1: adolescent children, modeling and rewarding positive behavior is probably more
Speaker 1: effective than punishing bad behavior, since it's easier for them
Speaker 1: to understand and and repeat. So, of course, an an
Speaker 1: important note of difference here the difference between the effects
Speaker 1: of like simple mild rewards and punishments that you get
Speaker 1: in real time during an experiment, versus the effects of
Speaker 1: the promise of rewards and the threat of like terrifying
Speaker 1: punishments extended far into the future. Like obviously, it's one
Speaker 1: thing to test the difference between more toys and less
Speaker 1: toys right now, or checks and x's right now versus
Speaker 1: the you know, the difference between awesome toys and monstrous
Speaker 1: doom many months down the road. And I I wasn't
Speaker 1: able to come across anything that was able to really
Speaker 1: model like the threats of punishment and promises of rewards
Speaker 1: exactly as they're presented to children around these kind of
Speaker 1: Christmas ideas. But I have to imagine the like time
Speaker 1: delay plays a big role there, Right, You've got to
Speaker 1: get very different effects when you're talking about rewards and
Speaker 1: punishments that are long off in the future versus immediately apparent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially when you're talking about Christmas, because we
Speaker 1: all have I think we've all had that experience. When
Speaker 1: you're when you're an adult, December just flies by like
Speaker 1: any month. But when you're when you're a child, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the holiday time passes an entirely different way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the span of time between between December one
Speaker 1: and December it seems immense um and uh and it
Speaker 1: certain and yet at the same time, like are you
Speaker 1: gonna invoke Santa Claus in April or in July? You know,
Speaker 1: like that's it's so far away that it seems like
Speaker 1: it would lose its impact, you know. Yeah, well that's
Speaker 1: a good question. What time of year does Santa Claus
Speaker 1: start to matter? Yeah? Or or for instance, the elf
Speaker 1: on the shelf. You know, another sort of aspect of this, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, penopticon, notion of of Santa watching you at
Speaker 1: all times, or possibly watching you at all times. You
Speaker 1: don't know, you don't know what's going on in the
Speaker 1: eye of the panopticon, the penopticon for anyone who's nothing
Speaker 1: Maybe with that term like this refers back to a
Speaker 1: basic design for a prison in which you have a
Speaker 1: large settilance cylindrical space with the cells of the prison
Speaker 1: lining the inside walls, and at the center of this
Speaker 1: vast cylinder there's a single guard tower and there's really
Speaker 1: only like you know, one or two guards in there,
Speaker 1: but you can't see where they're looking. They could be
Speaker 1: looking into your cell. All cells are visible to the
Speaker 1: panopticons to central tower. Um, you just don't know who
Speaker 1: they're looking at right now, and in may well be you.
Speaker 1: I mean I I certainly I bristle at the idea
Speaker 1: of of enforcing the panopticons, especially supernaturally, on children. But
Speaker 1: then at the same time, I think, well, that's not
Speaker 1: unusual historically, right, I mean, it just it seems to
Speaker 1: be the norm that children are generally taught about Santa
Speaker 1: Claus or ELpH on the shell for about, you know,
Speaker 1: just supernatural deities or anything like that that's always watching
Speaker 1: what they do. Uh. So, not not to suggest that
Speaker 1: because it's been normal historically, it's okay, but yeah, that's
Speaker 1: got to be. Like I mean, I was like that
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. I remember thinking that, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're seeing everything. Yeah, and if you believe at all
Speaker 1: this a crowded room full of folks watching everything you do,
Speaker 1: every every vile deed you've perpetrated as a child. Uh,
Speaker 1: Santa Claus is their crampus and elf um, God Jesus,
Speaker 1: you're the spirits of your elders. They're all They're just
Speaker 1: waiting for you to slip up. Yeah, anyway, coming back
Speaker 1: to the research I was just talking about. So we
Speaker 1: were talking about the possible reasons why rewards could be
Speaker 1: more salient for young children, and it's because in some
Speaker 1: cases it's a reward is an easier type of reinforcement
Speaker 1: to process mentally and understand that punishments can be confusing.
Speaker 1: It's harder to establish exactly the link between what you
Speaker 1: did wrong, the punishment, and what you should be doing instead.
Speaker 1: But the other question would be the other side of
Speaker 1: the coin, what's going on in adults that appears to,
Speaker 1: at least in many cases, make punishments more powerful than
Speaker 1: rewards for them. Uh, this doesn't really explain it, but
Speaker 1: it does seem in keeping with a widely observed principle
Speaker 1: in cognitive psychology known as loss aversion, which is this
Speaker 1: bias where simply put, on average, people are much more
Speaker 1: strongly motivated to avoid losses than they are to acquire
Speaker 1: equivalent gains. So what this means is that you've got
Speaker 1: a bunch of experiments showing people would work harder, would
Speaker 1: do more to avoid losing ten dollars they already have,
Speaker 1: than they would to acquire ten dollars they don't have yet.
Speaker 1: So monetarily the loss in the road, it's exactly equivalent,
Speaker 1: But it's just the question of like it feels so
Speaker 1: much worse to lose something you have than to not
Speaker 1: get something you could get. It's kind of I've become
Speaker 1: accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and it's there in all
Speaker 1: kinds of fiction, right, you know, Like why is why
Speaker 1: are the tragedies always about kings and stuff about people
Speaker 1: in in great exalted places of power. It's like there's
Speaker 1: this idea that being reduced from a from a high
Speaker 1: starting point is so much more awful and tragic than
Speaker 1: having things happened to you if you were already suffering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean and so certainly for a child, you know,
Speaker 1: when when you get into them, like the material possession
Speaker 1: of toys, like to to take the toy away is
Speaker 1: it's like almost a violent act. You know, you've you've
Speaker 1: taken away, um, you know, part of their body almost. Um.
Speaker 1: There was there was recently a time where my wife
Speaker 1: took our son to like a thrift store and there
Speaker 1: was a stuffed animal he really wanted and he m
Speaker 1: he remarked to my life, he said, he said, this,
Speaker 1: h my my whole body wants this toy, you know,
Speaker 1: which that was great because that really does sum out
Speaker 1: just how um important uh, these these physical toys are
Speaker 1: to us as children, like our whole body wants them,
Speaker 1: and we will be incomplete if we do not have it.
Speaker 1: And likewise, if it is taken away from us, you
Speaker 1: were taking away a part of them. I don't know
Speaker 1: this is the case, but I would suspect it's a
Speaker 1: lot harder to deny a toy to a child once
Speaker 1: the child has already had it in their hands. Like
Speaker 1: it's there's gonna be way more grief about, Like you
Speaker 1: can't have a toy that they've already picked up in
Speaker 1: a handle. This is one that's still on the shelves.
Speaker 1: And it's always the worst when you're in like a
Speaker 1: Barnes and Noble or something, you know, and then you
Speaker 1: see that your child is carrying something from with them
Speaker 1: now from another aisle, like they've already like the toy
Speaker 1: has imprinted on them. It's gonna be that much harder
Speaker 1: and that much more tragic to extract from the store
Speaker 1: without a purchase. It's the pain, I feel it, all right,
Speaker 1: We need to take a quick break, but we'll be
Speaker 1: right back. Alright, we're back. So a couple more studies
Speaker 1: I was reading about rewards and punishment and the and
Speaker 1: their variable effect uh so. One was published in Cognition
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen by Jan Kubanick, Lawrence Snyder, and Richard Abrams,
Speaker 1: and I was reading a write up of this uh
Speaker 1: in the wash You School of Medicine news site. Um So,
Speaker 1: this was study dealing with the relative effects of rewards
Speaker 1: versus punishments on a difficult task where subjects had to
Speaker 1: count numbers of like binaral clicks that they were hearing
Speaker 1: and headphones, or count numbers of localized flashes of light
Speaker 1: they saw, and it was a difficult test. And then
Speaker 1: they were given randomized payouts of different value tokens between
Speaker 1: five and twenty five cents, and the tokens were awarded
Speaker 1: for correct answers or taken away for incorrect answers. And
Speaker 1: so subjects who were rewarded tended to repeat their previous answer.
Speaker 1: That's not surprising because, like you know, when you get
Speaker 1: a reward, you the simplest thing to do is just
Speaker 1: do what you did before. Meanwhile, subjects who were punished
Speaker 1: strongly avoided repeating their previous answers, and the me magnitude
Speaker 1: of these effects were asymmetrical. This is what they found.
Speaker 1: They found that losses had two to three times more
Speaker 1: motivating power than equivalent gains did, but also effects for
Speaker 1: the punishment factor were strong no matter no matter the
Speaker 1: magnitude of the punishment, even very small punishments. Deducting five cents,
Speaker 1: we're strongly motivating to produce changes in behavior, and so
Speaker 1: one of the author's Jan Kubanick said to this news
Speaker 1: site quote regarding teaching strategies, our studies suggest that negative
Speaker 1: feedback may be more effective than positive feedback at modifying behavior.
Speaker 1: Our study showed that such feedback does not have to
Speaker 1: be harsh, since it appears that we tend to react
Speaker 1: in the same manner to any amount of negative feedback.
Speaker 1: From an evolutionary perspective, people tend to avoid punishments or
Speaker 1: dangerous situations. Rewards, on the other hand, have less of
Speaker 1: a life threatening impact. Uh So, okay, so that's one
Speaker 1: thing here, But then a little bit on the other hand.
Speaker 1: I was reading article in the Harvard Business Review by
Speaker 1: a cognitive neuroscientist at the University College London named Tally
Speaker 1: Shiro and contrary to what we were just learning about
Speaker 1: punishments being more motivating than rewards and adults. Shiro begins
Speaker 1: the article by drawing attention to a two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: study carried out at New York at a New York
Speaker 1: State hospital published in the journal Clinical and Infectious Diseases
Speaker 1: by Donna Armelino at All and the basic gist is
Speaker 1: like this. So you've got healthcare workers and they are
Speaker 1: supposed to sanitize their hands whenever they enter and exit
Speaker 1: a patient's room. Healthcare workers are constantly reminded of this
Speaker 1: fact and of how important the practice is for stopping
Speaker 1: the spread of potentially deadly infectious disease. And yet when
Speaker 1: this hospital installed cameras at hand hygiene stations to monitor
Speaker 1: the healthcare worker behaviors, they discovered a dismal compliance rate.
Speaker 1: Only about ten percent of medical staff sanitize their hands
Speaker 1: upon entering and exiting patient room, even though they knew
Speaker 1: the cameras were present. Then the hospital introduced a feedback
Speaker 1: mechanism to see if this would improve the hygiene. It
Speaker 1: was a simple electronic board on the wall which gave
Speaker 1: positive messages like good job to workers who fully sanitize
Speaker 1: their hands when they were supposed to, and the rates
Speaker 1: of hand sanitization rocketed up from about ten percent to
Speaker 1: about nine percent. And then these results were replicated at
Speaker 1: another hospital. So the question is why, like, why would
Speaker 1: this simple trivial reward be more powerful as a motivator
Speaker 1: than the threat of potentially spreading infectious disease which could
Speaker 1: literally kill people, and hire has got a very interesting
Speaker 1: answer here. The suggestion is that this is actually consistent
Speaker 1: with a large body of research in psychology and neuroscience
Speaker 1: that shows that there's a difference based on whether you're
Speaker 1: trying to get people to do something to perform an action,
Speaker 1: or trying to vent them from performing an action, and
Speaker 1: Shiro says that the evidence indicates the threats of punishment
Speaker 1: are more effective when trying to keep people from doing
Speaker 1: bad things. Meanwhile, rewards, even minor positive reinforcements, are more
Speaker 1: effective if you're trying to get people to actively do something,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to motivate an action rather than prohibit it.
Speaker 1: So by this token, the threat of spreading infectious disease
Speaker 1: might be more effective at keeping people out of a
Speaker 1: restricted pathology lab. So you know the threat motivates you
Speaker 1: to stay out, whereas the smiley face and the good
Speaker 1: job message are more effective at motivating people to perform
Speaker 1: a simple positive action over and over, like using the
Speaker 1: hand sanitizer and Uh, this was interesting. Shiro thinks this
Speaker 1: is consistent with the evolutionary context in which motivation and
Speaker 1: inhibition arose. So like, normally, if you think about for
Speaker 1: an animal to get a reward, usually it needs to
Speaker 1: do something to go foraging, for to put in the
Speaker 1: effort to wu a made or whatever. But in order
Speaker 1: to avoid danger, most of the time it needs to
Speaker 1: not to do something like don't go in the deep water,
Speaker 1: don't go off on your own, don't eat this plant,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And the author gives the example
Speaker 1: that this is why one of the most primal reactions
Speaker 1: animals have to a threatening stimulus is to freeze. When
Speaker 1: there's a threat and you don't fully understand it yet
Speaker 1: you're still processing what the threat is, the instinctual reaction
Speaker 1: is don't do anything, just freeze. And I think that's
Speaker 1: an interesting explanation for what might be going on there. Uh,
Speaker 1: But they also write that this might be part of
Speaker 1: the explanation is probably not the full story because they're
Speaker 1: probably also social incentives for things like, you know, showing
Speaker 1: something on a board in a hospital where everybody can
Speaker 1: see it. Right. But Shiro and colleagues who also conducted
Speaker 1: research showing a similar dynamic, where the short version is
Speaker 1: volunteers were faster to press a button when they would
Speaker 1: get a dollar than they were to press a button
Speaker 1: to avoid losing a dollar, so the reward motivates the action,
Speaker 1: but they were better at refraining from pressing a button
Speaker 1: when doing so would prevent them from losing a dollar
Speaker 1: than it would result in them gaining a dollar, so
Speaker 1: the threat of punishment motivated inhibition. Uh. And another interesting
Speaker 1: finding was the right that people often interpret positive information
Speaker 1: like the promise of rewards as relevant to them personally,
Speaker 1: while interpreting negative information like the threat of punishments as
Speaker 1: not applying to them personally, as being you know, maybe
Speaker 1: just something about other people that have the cramp has
Speaker 1: happens to bad kids, right exactly. But Sharrow concludes by saying,
Speaker 1: it's not very effective to try to scare people into
Speaker 1: action to make people actively do good things as opposed
Speaker 1: to refraining from bad things. Rewards, even small rewards, are
Speaker 1: usually more powerful than threats of punishment. And yet our
Speaker 1: basic Santa story is totally screwed up because the hell
Speaker 1: thing is san is watching and there are all these
Speaker 1: things you better not do in order to get the reward.
Speaker 1: It's not, it's not. The positive reward is not attached
Speaker 1: to any kind of positive action usually, well, I mean
Speaker 1: for I think for a lot of kids. And maybe
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, you do your chores, you help
Speaker 1: out around the house, you share or you do that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Right, Yeah, I guess so. But it
Speaker 1: seems like the like the basic Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge
Speaker 1: kind of messaging towards adults that the holidays at a
Speaker 1: time when you should make, you should act, you should
Speaker 1: do things to help give to charity. Yeah, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Like that's more about the adults of Christmas
Speaker 1: messaging as opposed to the childhood Christmas messaging, which is
Speaker 1: more like just don't be bad. Just kind of a
Speaker 1: low threshold to set, right, Um, maybe it should be
Speaker 1: more along the lines of go out and do good things. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, ask about ask about helping out in the
Speaker 1: house more, ask your your parents about doing things in
Speaker 1: your community. That sort of thing. Well, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think one thing that comes up here is that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of the way that rewards and punishments work,
Speaker 1: or even not even rewards and punishments, maybe things more
Speaker 1: just like motivation work for child behavior can it can
Speaker 1: be sensitive to how you frame the issue for the child, right,
Speaker 1: just like putting the exact same behavior in a different context.
Speaker 1: It seems like it could sometimes have a pretty strong
Speaker 1: effect on how that behavior is regulated. Right Like, instead
Speaker 1: of when a child is being selfish or something and
Speaker 1: won't share their toy, like you could yell at them
Speaker 1: and say they're being bad and you know, they need
Speaker 1: to learn how to share, or you could say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, let's let's practice modeling sharing behavior or something,
Speaker 1: and and ultimately you're getting at the same activity but
Speaker 1: framing it in a very different way. I guess one
Speaker 1: of the big things too, is that certainly you may
Speaker 1: employ negative or positive reinforcement in a given scenario like that, um,
Speaker 1: you know, depending on the situation, in your exact parenting style, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But how many people really use the Christmas mythology and
Speaker 1: Christmas ritual as negative or positive feedback? I don't know
Speaker 1: how many do that. I don't know, Like I mean,
Speaker 1: in my experience as a former child and current parent,
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like like gifts are obtained, like
Speaker 1: everything is set in motion pretty early on, and it
Speaker 1: would have to be some really bad, like crampus worthy
Speaker 1: behavior to make they actually say, Okay, we're scaling back
Speaker 1: on the gifts. Now, this one's going back to the store.
Speaker 1: They've been too bad. I mean, it seems like more
Speaker 1: a situation where the holiday is set in motion and
Speaker 1: then you say, oh, by the way, just be a
Speaker 1: good child right now, because they've got a lot on
Speaker 1: our play just making it through December. Well yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's so you're you're talking about the reality there
Speaker 1: that like often even when a child is maybe like
Speaker 1: threatened with rewards or punishments, can learning Christmas a lot
Speaker 1: of times there's not necessarily a lot of real causality
Speaker 1: taking place. But I mean, I mean, it could be
Speaker 1: a situation to where the ritual has lost its potency
Speaker 1: in modern time. Certainly, that would that would be in
Speaker 1: keeping with what our holidays have become totally, and you
Speaker 1: know that there there are other things too that you
Speaker 1: know might make you think twice even about the even
Speaker 1: if you're saying, okay, well, I'm not going the punishment route.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't threaten child with with with crampus or whatever,
Speaker 1: which is okay, good on you, But that might make
Speaker 1: you think twice even with the reward framing, because I
Speaker 1: was reading an article in The New York Times from
Speaker 1: by a therapist named Heather Turgeon who pointed out some
Speaker 1: things I've never read about before. She just mentioned some
Speaker 1: possible downsides of rewards in addition to punishments for controlling
Speaker 1: child behavior, which are For example, some studies find um
Speaker 1: that the introduction of a reward structure can sometimes decrease
Speaker 1: intrinsic motivation for for like, good behaviors, so like. And
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how consistently this holds up, but at
Speaker 1: least in a few experiments, like if a kid likes
Speaker 1: to draw and then you start paying them to draw,
Speaker 1: they will naturally start to draw less. The same for sharing, right,
Speaker 1: introduce a payout scheme for sharing, and sharing decreases under
Speaker 1: naturalistic conditions. Uh And the author here writes quote, this
Speaker 1: is what psychologists called the over justification effect. The external
Speaker 1: reward overshadows the child's internal motivation, which I mean that
Speaker 1: sounds like a really tragic effect if you actually were
Speaker 1: to bring something like that about, right, I mean, you're
Speaker 1: you should your your desire to do something should not
Speaker 1: be destroyed by rewards for doing that thing, not until
Speaker 1: you enter the workforce. And exactly isn't that I mean,
Speaker 1: like that's one of the dangers about you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, it's great to be able to do
Speaker 1: what you love for a living, but there's a dark
Speaker 1: side to it do right, you know, if you do
Speaker 1: what you love for a living, it kind of has
Speaker 1: it has some power to corrupt what you love. It
Speaker 1: makes it about money, It makes it like this is
Speaker 1: what I have to do. Yeah, now I get to
Speaker 1: stress out about the thing that used to be my hobby. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, I would say in the end, rewards and punishments, uh,
Speaker 1: their effects on us, I think are very complicated. I
Speaker 1: hope you have learned something for that from this, even
Speaker 1: though I can't clearly say it's just one way or
Speaker 1: the other. Rewards are better, punishments are better. But I
Speaker 1: will say, do not punish your children with threats of demons,
Speaker 1: no matter what I think that is across the board
Speaker 1: going to be bad. So, as with any crampus ritual,
Speaker 1: you may well have learned nothing, but hopefully it was
Speaker 1: at least a spectacle. That's uh. At least it hopefully
Speaker 1: entertains you. I hope your your tongue is lolling violently
Speaker 1: thirty inches out of your mouth. Now, obviously, we would
Speaker 1: love to hear from folks out there, because I know
Speaker 1: we have we have listeners around the world, certainly we
Speaker 1: we have. We probably have some listeners in the United
Speaker 1: States that have participated in some of the newer crampus
Speaker 1: traditions here, and then hopefully we have some listeners who
Speaker 1: have witnessed or participated in some of the more traditional
Speaker 1: rights of these Alpine regions that we mentioned. And of
Speaker 1: course in general, I think we all have something to
Speaker 1: do no matter what. If you celebrate anything like uh,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, Christmas or holiday traditions, or even
Speaker 1: if you don't, you probably have something to say about
Speaker 1: negative and positive reinforcement as a child or a or
Speaker 1: a parent. Uh, And we'd love to hear from you
Speaker 1: about that. In the meantime, if you want to check
Speaker 1: out other episodes of stuff to blow your mind, I
Speaker 1: don't know, over the stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's where you'll find them. Uh, let's see what else. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a merg store up there if you want to
Speaker 1: check out our merch you know, they're all sorts of
Speaker 1: year end sales going on at the moment. Good place
Speaker 1: to get Christmas gifts. Yeah. And then in terms of
Speaker 1: other shows, uh, there's the second oil Age for horror
Speaker 1: and science fiction. All those episodes are out and you
Speaker 1: can binge them. And then Invention our other podcasts, the
Speaker 1: podcast about human techno History, we've been doing some pisodes
Speaker 1: on toys, classic toys and where they came from, who
Speaker 1: invented them, because certainly even something like a slinky uh
Speaker 1: that had to be created, that had to emerge from
Speaker 1: the human mind and and uh and be brought to
Speaker 1: life through technology and the story of how that comes
Speaker 1: together is fascinating. So I hope you check that show
Speaker 1: out as well. And whichever show you're listening to, just
Speaker 1: make sure that you have subscribed and that you were
Speaker 1: rating and reviewing it, because that is a great way
Speaker 1: to help these shows out in and ensure that they
Speaker 1: have more life. Absolutely huge things. As always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
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