If it's the whole premise for a game I'd like to know if it's made up or not.
TLDR: It has a rough basis in science, but with no real world test confirming or denying the results when it comes to later teens or adults.
Ok, so first off I have very limited experience with actual psychology. While I have a wide array of curiosities, including psychology and government experiments involving it, I do not have a degree or personal experience with this.
The basis for this idea can be summed up in Sigmund Freud's philosophy "
that people make choices to avoid or decrease pain or make choices that create or increase pleasure. The pain pleasure principle is the core of all the decisions we make. Beliefs, values, actions and decisions are built upon this principle."
This is now called "
psychological hedonism", "in philosophical psychology, the view that all human action is ultimately motivated by desires for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. "
That being said, a lot of psychologists and governments have done experiments with this in the past. The problem is no matter how effective (Or ineffective) it is, modern first world governments consider it immoral. That being said, government uses for such a thing would be a bit more... extreme. (see experiments where they gave LSD to soldiers to see if it could make them more loyal and increase pain tolerance...) There were some CIA experiments done in the 60's concerning this idea. They basically were trying to purposefully induce Stockholm syndrome, where the subject would be artificially driven to "love" the doctor or captor. These tests ultimately ended in failure for wartime/military uses.
A good quick read on the topic when linked to spanking can be found here:
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I think the largest difference between most studies done on spanking specifically is that it is usually targeted towards children. There has been a large amount of research done on that, and I would strongly discourage using spanking in any serious way with children. The findings showed that spanked children exhibited greater brain response in a bad way, and suggests that spanking can alter children’s brain function in similar ways to severe forms of maltreatment. Extreme forms of anxiety and depression, and life long trust issues follow in more sever cases. Simply seeing some facial expressions tend to trigger a subconscious fight or flight response that the subject might not even be aware of.
However, on the other end, almost zero research has been done with spankings on later teenagers and adults who are better mentally equipped to understand what is going on and why.
A more recent movement that you may find interesting is "Domestic Discipline". Where a fully consenting spouse accepts physical discipline when they violate a preset agreed set of rules. This is a very mutual agreement though, both the rules and following punishments are discussed and agreed upon in advance, very different that the discipline found in this game. Though the movement has its roots from "Catholic Domestic Discipline" that often had a patriarchal abuse element...