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At some point, students ask for real life, more tangible examples of consequences. The very fact that they needed to ask implied that they generally felt a limited if any real sense of actual consequences of our actions as opposed to punishment.
We settled on one conduct which affects most of us every day: bad, aggressive, and angry driving. "What is the consequence of such behavior?" we asked. Inevitably, the spontaneous answer from almost everyone announced, "You can get a ticket."
When we looked at that, we found that a ticket does not come as a consequence but as a punishment which is context bound and generally quite arbitrary. If there is no police officer to see our conduct and write that ticket, the punishment never happens. As we previously discussed, a true consequence happens as automatically as sure as a dropped object will fall. It just happens. Consequences happen without observance. Actions need to be seen to provoke punishment. Even if seen, the negative driving behavior may not provoke a ticket. Like all punishment, tickets show an arbitrary nature. If stopped, an officer may decide to give us a warning. If the officer knows the one stopped, a ticket may not happen. The driver may hold some attraction for the officer, and the ticket goes away. The officer may decide the conduct doesn't deserve her/his attention that day, just not going fast enough to bother chasing down. Alternatively, the month may be ending, and the officer looks at all infractions very intently to write a few more tickets, and the same conduct will get a ticket. Tickets show all the qualities of punishment and none of those of consequence.
We continued to look for the real consequences of bad driving. Someone generally offered that bad driving could cause an accident. That possibility does always exist. An accident can happen even if the bad driver is not involved directly. Still, that it might happen seemed a weaker form of consequence than they originally asked for. Reckless driving can cause wrecks as a potential but not an actual consequence.
An actual consequence that happens directly from aggressive and reckless driving comes in how every other driver affected by that driving feels when impacted by such driving. All the anger that can happen (and the violent language that may arise from that anger), the fear that almost always happens, the wasted energy, and the general insecurity on the road, all that happens and more to the individuals affected by that negative driving. The police don't have to see. No ticket need be written. It just happens.
Another set of consequences that arise from negative conduct in a car happen to the driver and that car. Drivers who drive aggressively and thus badly do so under stresses they inflict on themselves by their conduct, a consequence of conduct. They teeter on the brink, if not fall off most of the time, of road rage against other drivers, stop lights, even themselves. When they drive aggressively, they transfer high levels of stress onto the vehicle they drive and its tires. They wear brakes and tires down, jackrabbit and stop frequently which will lower gas mileage, and put extra strain on the transmission. No matter the awareness of the driver, these consequences happen. Indeed, the lack of awareness may stem from an original confusion about punishment, which can be avoided if not caught, and consequence, which follows actions logically and inevitably. The arbitrary nature of punishment makes an awareness of consequence difficult to attain because of the confusion between the two. The dominator model redefines punishments as consequences, so it’s easy for us to get confused.
Punishment happens so arbitrarily sometimes, it serves as the only response to an action which actually has no or very limited real consequence. Nothing happened except in the variable eye of the beholder. That makes for an even higher level of child and adult confusion in this regard.