The Law of Effect proposes that the harshness of punishment impacts whether or not a behavior will be repeated.
Edward Thorndike was a famous psychologist in the 1800s that worked on the learning theory that resulted in the operant conditioning. The law of effect that he developed states that all the responses in a determinate situation that are positive have more probability to occur again in a similar situation. Just like negative responses in a determinate situation will be less likely to occur in the same situation. Thorndike performed his experiments on cats to understand the responses.
