How I Got Interested in the Power of Positive Reinforcement to Influence Behavior

“I wouldn’t call myself an expert on positive reinforcement to influence behavior” is what I’m expected to say here.

Well, bollocks. I am.

I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of hours reading and learning what drives behavior. How to influence it. How to change it. How to shape it.

I’ve used myself, my pets, and <blush> yes, my family, friends, and colleagues as guinea pigs for practicing positive reinforcement of desired behavior.

Here’s How I First Got Interested in Changing Behavior Through Positive Reinforcement

BeeJay was my first dog. Like Nina (my fourth), she was a black Labrador lady. Using the prevalent dog training techniques at the time — what I now call the pull and jerk adversarial method based largely in behaviorism, I succeeded in turning a happy go lucky puppy into a depressed adult.

Jessy was my second black Lab lady. Two years younger than BeeJay and her half-sister. Her dad’s genes obviously exerted tremendous influence, because instead of withdrawing into depression, she voted with her feet whenever I used, what I later learned, were positive or negative corrections. I.e. the pulling and jerking.

I was often told to “give her a correction” when Jessy walked farther from me than “ideal” in the trainer’s eyes. The result? Jessy moved away even further. It was like she was telling me: “Don’t jerk me around!”

I grew very unhappy with the trainers’ inability to come up with different ways of getting Jessy to do what she was supposed to do in the obedience classes.

So I began researching other training methods. (I still can’t believe that it took me that long before no longer accepting the adversarial method. I didn’t know any better and was still prone to defer to “experts.”)

One thing led to another and before long found myself training to become a behavior therapist for dogs. Not that I wanted to take that up, but because it was the only really comprehensive education on dog behavior I could find at the time.

It’s where I first learned about the four strategies to influence behavior: positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative corrections. Note that positive and negative aren’t value judgments in this, but say whether you’re adding or removing something from the interaction.

From that — and all the reading and learning I did about psychology, I concluded that if you take verbal language out of the equation, influencing behavior in humans, in any living creature with the capacity to learn from their experience, always boils down to using these four strategies.

The big takeaway?

If you want more than cooperation and compliance don’t use corrections. And that includes not telling others “don’t do X” (it’s a correction and it leaves too many options).

So My Goal Has Been and Still Is:

To increase the use of positive reinforcement and saying what you do want (instead of reactively calling out what you don’t want) by advocating their power and efficacy. In working with humans and other animals alike.