All I could think about while reading this article is dog training. I use these same techniques in training a series of foster dogs as well as my own. Often the dogs are very poorly behaved, and I pride myself on using only positive reinforcement to modify existing behavior. While the scenarios are sometimes analogous to human behavior, and while I often joke about using these techniques on my fiance to get him to pick up his socks, actually believing and employing this type of behavioral modification on a grown adult strikes me as a bit insulting, at best.
As an aside, exchanging certain favors for sock cleanup certainly does work, but sometimes it's far easier to just pick up the damned socks.
