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Because punishment tends to immediately terminate the punished behavior, while not preventing it in the long run, punishment reinforces the punisher. The person doing the punishment is an agent under conditioning as well, but most folks fail to notice this.
Upvoted for the insight.
I don't agree with this, but rewarding is clearly better, of course. It's easy to get tunnel vision when thinking about punishment, many of us have memories of injustice done in its name.
What do you mean by this? Rewarding everyone who fails to exhibit bad behavior? This has two problems:
1) Since most people behave well most of the time, this gets expensive quickly.
2) Human psychology is such that if there is a regularly given reward, people will simply readjust their baseline and thus will perceive being deprived of it as a punishment anyway.
I think you could have done the steelmanning yourself, but here you go:
1) Rewards can be social, in other words virtually free. You don't have to reward all good behaviour, in fact that probably makes it less effective. (like you already said yourself?)
2) Here's how I would do it: Always reward exceptionally good behaviour, sparingly reward ordinarily good behaviour.
This doesn't mean punishment should be never used, but it's difficult to build a positive relationship with someone you're punishing constantly.
Of course, that means that unless you also punish bad behavior, it won't stand out from the ordinary good behavior.
It's also difficult to build a positive relationship with someone who is constantly engaging in bad behavior.
This is actually the biggest problem with torture, in my opinion.