19 FebEpisode 120 | News flash: Positive reinforcement isn’t about being kind!
After attending two webinars where people extolled the virtues of positive reinforcement, Annie was left wondering why the term seems to be so misunderstood-- or maybe she is the one misunderstanding it? While she tries to train using positive reinforcement and she believes the world would be a nicer place if people were able to identify positive reinforcement and use it more effectively, she doesn't see it as some kind of sugar-coated panacea. Positive reinforcement can be very mundane! It is why you look at your phone. It's why you put one foot in front of the other when you walk, and why you push the gas pedal to make your car move forward. If a behavior has been encouraged, it has been reinforced. If it has been encouraged because of the addition of something, rather than the subtraction of something, it has been positively reinforced. So why has the term "positive reinforcement" gotten so mixed up with the idea of kindness? Yelling "No!" can positively reinforce a dog for jumping, and hugging a person might do the opposite of positively reinforcing a given behavior.
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Annie recorded this episode on Clubhouse and was joined by podcast listener Leeyah (@leeyahiredale) and Dallas-based trainer Beth (@rehabyourrescue).
If you're on Clubhouse, join Annie on Thursday February 25 at 3PM ET for a discussion with SFTD apprentice Anna Heyward about her article, “Bad Dog,” published in this week's New Yorker.
If you need an invite to join Clubhouse (currently available on iOS devices only), text 917-414-2625
Transcript:
Annie:
Hey there. So I did something a little bit different for today's episode. I recorded it using the app Clubhouse where you can invite other people to talk to you once you start a room. I like it. It's a little less formal than like having a zoom call. And it's easy for people who are interested in similar things as you, who might not know you, to pop in and join a conversation.
It was very impromptu, but I did have two other people join in the room. One being podcast, listener, Leeyah, who you can find on Instagram doing very adorable things with her dog, George, @Leeyahiredale. That's at L E E Y a H I R E D a L E. And was also joined by a trainer I'd never met before whose name is Beth Burkobian, who is on Instagram and on Clubhouse @rehabyourrescue. She is a trainer based in Dallas. And it was nice to have them pop in and chat with me a little bit so that it wasn't such a one sided rant.
Next Thursday, the 25th, I am going to host — again, kind of an experiment. I'm going to host a reading group on Clubhouse with Anna Heyward. Anna Heyward has been on the podcast before, she is a School for the Dogs apprentice, and she wrote an incredibly touching personal essay that is in this week's edition of the New Yorker. It's called “Bad Dog.” It's about her experience fostering a very difficult dog.
I will post the conversation on the podcast, but if you would like to join live, if you've read the article and have any questions, please hop on to Clubhouse Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. If you're not already on it and you need an invite, you can text me at (917) 414-2625. And I will try to send you one. They only give you a handful periodically, but I think I have enough to invite you, dear listener, hould you want to join us on Thursday.
If you can't make it, but you have a question you would like to ask Anna about the article, feel free to email me, annie@schoolforthedogs.com. And I will share that question with her.
[Intro and music]
Annie:
I was an attendee in two different webinars earlier this month. One was hosted by the BF Skinner foundation, and the other one was also by a dog training group. But they were both CEU earning webinars, pretty legit. Both were hosted by PhDs.
One was not specifically about dog training. It was about I think the title was something like “how kindness helped me navigate the world of applied behavior analysis.” There was something about kindness. And the other one was about race and dog training.
So I am a dog trainer and a big behavior nerd and very interested in kind of different takes on behavior, sort of tangential to dog training. So was interested in both of these presentations. But I ended up walking away — well, they were right after the other, one was one day, one was the next day.
And I ended up feeling kind of frustrated with both of them and tried to try to chat to the moderators while it was happening. But there were a lot of people in the room, and I couldn't seem to ask a question or say something in a way that made sense. But the takeaway from both of them was sort of like rah, rah, rah, isn't positive reinforcement a wonderful thing?
And in the one about race, it was interesting. It was this black dog trainer who I think is, I think she's a psychologist and she was interviewing kids in, I guess she lives in like Ohio, Midwest in a very white area. And she was basically interviewing children about about her, and like working with her, and what it means to work with someone who is black, or person of color was the term that was used.
And it was interesting to hear the kids' responses. My favorite part was she asked one of the little girls, like, are you a person of color? And a little girl said, yes, I'm a person of color, I'm peach. Which I thought was great. And I really remember thinking that as a kid, like, why do we call people black and people white, when I'm not white, and people who are black are not usually actually black, still kind of confusing.
Anyway, part of it, she asked the kids basically what positive reinforcement is, or how they use it in their lives. And I just jotted down some of the answers, which I'll read off here:
“It means being more positive.”
“It's about confidence rather than putting people down for what they can't do.”
“It's about bringing them up for what they can do.”
“It's about not yelling and not saying bad dog but thinking about what you can do better.”
“It's about not giving up, but continuing trying, “It's about rewarding behavior you want and using support and encouragement.”
“Giving someone something positive to look forward to and encouraging them.”
“It's about being the bigger person. If someone is being mean to you, you have the option to be mean back, which isn't helpful, maybe in the short run, but not in the long run.”
“I'm a helpful person. If someone is down and can't do something, they can come to me. And instead of putting them down and saying, they can't do it, I can try and help them. I try to say, no, you can do it. And I try and be calm and nice and positive.”
“If someone cuts me in line rather than getting mad, I'm like, guys, we're all coming from the same place here. To me, that's positive reinforcement.”
The other webinar, the takeaway was kind of like people in any kind of realm of business or academics should basically be nice to each other. And the comments in that group were like: “I wish we could bring positive reinforcement to the world, and positive reinforcement could save the world. And if only everybody understood positive reinforcement..”
And after both of these sessions, I felt like, hold on. Positive reinforcement isn't about being nice. And it's bothered me for a long time that the word positive gets thrown around the way it does. Because positive reinforcement is why we look at our phones all the time. Positive reinforcement is why you push down on the pedal in your car to go forward. Positive reinforcement is the reason why we do things if we're not doing it because of negative reinforcement.
Either you're doing something because you're going to get something out of it, or you're doing something because you’re avoiding something. Those are the two reasons why we do things, those are the two kinds of reinforcement. Of course, then there are three reasons we don't do things: positive punishment, negative punishment, and extinction. The other side of things.
But yeah, I just felt frustrated by this sort of what I see as like a misunderstanding of positive reinforcement and the way in which people conflate positive reinforcement with goodness and niceness. As if it's something we need to teach people when in fact it's happening all around us all the time.
And what's more like, colloquially, we kind of talk about “using” positive reinforcement, but really, positive reinforcement, it's determined by the subject. You know, if I yell “no” to a dog and that actually ends up encouraging the dog's behavior because the saying no is perhaps actually rewarding to that dog. I wasn't intending maybe to use positive reinforcement, but their behavior was positively reinforced.
Anyway, but then I kind of doubted myself because I felt like everything I know about behavior I have learned through dog training a hundred percent. Sure I've done a lot of reading and I've studied on my own, but I'm not an academic. And how is it that like, this is my understanding. And here I am in these rooms with these people who are doctors, and I feel like they're saying something different.
So I don't know. I'm in this Clubhouse room with two other people now, I don't know if you have any thoughts on the subject. And if it's okay with you, I'd love to include this on the podcast. But I was just curious if, I don't know, if others see it differently and could explain to me why [laughing], why I'm wrong? Because I felt like after watching these two webinars, am I a nut here?
Clubhouse attendee:
I think I'm going to have a hard time because I agree with you completely. And I don't think you're wrong.
Annie:
How do you understand — or, I mean, before you got into dog training, do you think you understood positive reinforcement the way that you do now?
Beth:
Oh, no, definitely not. I think there was like this podcast episode where you said something about how the government uses, I think it's negative reinforcement? So, you speed, you get a ticket. And how much different the world would be if we could use positive reinforcement. And yeah, that was kind of what made it click for me because like real life situations. Everybody, that's how we live is negative reinforcement in the world. So it's so much of what we do. So I think it would be really helpful if more people had a better understanding of what it really is.
Annie:
You know, it's interesting. I had a conversation with Susan Friedman who’s a professor in Utah. She works a lot with parrots and all kinds of animals. And unfortunately, the conversation was saved on the laptop on which I spilled a bottle of seltzer the day I found out my dog was dying [laughs]. And so I, I literally washed away the conversation when I had to replace the hard drive.
But I said something to her, don't you get frustrated as someone who has such a keen understanding of behavior, like when you get pulled over for speeding, for example? Or when you have to pay taxes or do all these things that are, where our behavior is being controlled by coercion and force. And she kind of was like, no, that's not my area. And she's like, yeah. I mean, sure. I could think of better ways to do something, do those things, but it's not my area. 4
And it made me think like, again, I don't think about like what my area is or isn't. It's just, I have this general overarching point of view that, like I said, has been completely informed by dog training and certainly is not a panacea, but it makes me see things in a very specific way.
And I think the people who think about this stuff actually, it's like the people who do ABA work, applied behavior analysis. And then I think like economists, you know? Economists seem to me like the most keen understanders, the people who understand behavior perhaps the most keenly. And I actually think that Obama in his administration had a team of behavioral economists, who were doing the kind of work to try and figure out how to mold behavior in less coercive ways.
Anyway, that's my little rant, positive reinforcement is something that everybody knows about. If you have a phone that you look at all day, every day. If you put one foot in front of another, the behavior of putting one foot in front of another has been positively reinforced if your intention was to move forward.
So I guess to sum up my rant, it's that rather than this idea of, we need to teach the world about positive reinforcement, maybe it's more just like we need to help people recognize positive reinforcement and use it better and think about how it's being used to control their behavior better. And how also negative reinforcement is impacting their behavior as well, and how they use negative reinforcement to impact others as well.
Beth:
People often forget that positive, negative, all of that affects people just the same as it does dogs, but they look at it in a different lens when it's applied to people than it is dogs. So when you look at other reinforcement towards people, they're like, Oh, we're going to be positive, and we're not necessarily going to try to shape anything. We're just going to be super happy. And we're going to try to help this person be happy and positive.
Whereas with dogs we're using more than just the positive reinforcement, right? We're like looking at the emotions, we're looking at so many things, whereas it's not so black and white that people think negative reinforcement is bad, other punishment is [inaudible]? Is that it's so many different layers that people don't get as bogged down in it to people as they do with dogs.
Annie:
Hm. People don't get so bogged down with it with people. Well, I think it's just clearer to see with dogs, but then again, sometimes it's not because with people we can say, actually, I know you gave me that hug because you were glad that I did X, Y or Z, but actually I don't like being touched. So that hug actually was not not something that is going to reinforce the behavior I just did. I mean, that's sort of a clumsy clumsy example. With dogs all we can do is see whether or not the behavior that we attempted to positively reinforce happened more or less.
But of course, people I think are just certainly endlessly more complicated than dogs, largely because like we have language. And also like there's so many inputs in each of our lives, whereas a dog, like I know where my dog spent all day yesterday and pretty much what she did. And it just, it makes it easier to, you know, because I'm the one controlling her environment it's easier for me to control her behavior if I want to specifically control her behavior using positive reinforcement, or, you know, where I choose to use punishment or negative reinforcement.
But, but also her behaviors are being positively reinforced in ways all the time that have nothing to do with me at all. Which is, I think another reason why I got frustrated about these two talks, it's that the idea that positive reinforcement is something that we use as opposed to it's actually a way where we're controlled in some ways by the environment that provides consequences to our behavior in order to shape us to be better adapted to the world that we live in.
Anyway, thanks for joining me, Beth, where, where are you joining from? And are you a dog trainer?
Beth:
I am joining from Dallas, Texas. I am a behavioral consultant. I have a master's in animal behavior and a certification in separation anxiety. And I specialize in the aggressive, reactive and dogs with separation related behaviors.
Annie:
Oh, interesting. Where did you get your master's in animal behavior?
Beth:
University of Wisconsin Madison.
Annie:
So cool. And are you finding a lot of separation issues coming up because of pandemic puppies?
Beth:
I think we are seeing more separated related behaviors simply because people are home and they're noticing them. I think they were always there, it’s just more intense now than it was previously and people are more keen on it. And they're like, Oh, this never happened before. And then when we dig in, it actually was happening before, they just didn't care about it. And now, because it's in their face, it's more intense for them.
But yeah, I mean, I'm raising my own puppy right now, so I'm trying to see, is it really the pandemic, or is it people aren't taking the opportunity to go out and socialize their dogs and using pandemic as the excuse? So it's like, Oh, we have all these pandemic puppies. Do we, or do we have people that just aren't socializing and using the pandemic as an excuse?
Annie:
Hmm. That's really interesting. It's interesting, like the pandemic as excuse for many things,
Beth:
For sure.
Annie:
All right. Thank you for being here. You guys, and yeah. Nice to meet you, Beth.
Bye bye.
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