People need units of recognition from others, and will provoke negative attention when positive attention is unavailable.
Berne's claim that any recognition beats none supplies a motive for behaviour that otherwise looks self-defeating: the person disrupting the meeting is not miscalculating. The concept earns its place by making a class of behaviour predictable, and it has not been tested in the form Berne gave it.
In practice
- A team member ignored for a quarter becomes difficult, and difficulty is answered immediately.
- A child who cannot get attention for doing well obtains it reliably by doing badly.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is that recognition is a need rather than a preference, so any attention is preferred to none, which makes otherwise self-defeating behaviour intelligible.
- In its favour
- Related findings on social exclusion are strong: exclusion is painful, registers in the same systems as physical pain, and reliably produces attention-seeking and aggressive responses.
- Against it
- The specific prediction that negative attention is preferred to none is thinly evidenced as stated, and the currency of strokes is not measurable, so the theory describes the behaviour it was built from.
- Standing
- The prediction that negative attention is preferred to none is plausible and thinly evidenced as stated. Related findings on social exclusion and on attention-seeking exist under other names.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop