04 JunEpisode 154 | Negative reinforcement is why we are wearing masks & getting people vaccinated, but what if the government used positive reinforcement instead?
Is masking wearing an example of human behavior being motivated by negative reinforcement? What if the government made better use of positive reinforcement to motivate people to get vaccinated? Annie looks at the current state of our COVID-impacted lives from the point of view of a reward-based, science-based dog trainer.
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Transcript:
[music and intro]
Annie:
Hi. So I just wanted to share some dog training point of view type thoughts I've been having about the current state of our COVID/quarantining/social distancing world, which I think is, overall, I think we're coming out of the most difficult part of this period. At least I hope so. And it raises some interesting behavioral, I dunno, problems, questions, I guess, that I've been thinking about in terms of dog training.
Firstly, I've been thinking about masks and why people are still wearing masks. I actually was listening to an episode of All of It with Alison Stewart which I listened to pretty frequently on WNYC on this topic. And I almost called in, and then I hesitated because I always… I always wonder if people might roll their eyes, if I say, Hey, I'm a dog trainer, and this is what I think in dog training terms.
But if you're tuning into my podcast, I guess you do want to hear a dog trainer thinks about this situation in terms of human behavior! Anyway, in the segment with Alison people were saying some things that I hadn't even thought of about why they continue wearing masks.
Some were saying that it's helped with their allergies. It's helped them not get sick in general. Some have said that they enjoy the kind of anonymity it gives them on the street. Overall, I think most people are wearing masks if they are still wearing masks, because sort of like better safe than sorry. Easier to wear a mask than to deal with being potentially fatally sick because you did not wear a mask. And it's relatively easy thing to do.
It's not a behavior that requires a massive amount of effort to engage in and it can keep others from harassing you on the street. Although, of course, that can go both ways. Some people are annoyed when people are around them wearing masks, and some people are annoyed when they're not wearing masks.
Overall. However, I think it's a really good example of negative reinforcement at work. Negative reinforcement is negative not because it's bad, but because it involves the removal of something. And a reinforcement is when a behavior is encouraged.
Negative reinforcement with dogs is sometimes seen, particularly gun dog trainers will train a Drop it, a retrieve or drop it by pinching a dog's ear until the dog drops the bird or whatever. And the behavior is reinforced because it makes the painful thing go away.
Some people who train with E-collars or shock callers will continuously shock a dog through the collar until the dog sits or engages in whatever other behavior. The engaging in the behavior makes the painful thing go away. Another example of negative reinforcement at work.
And of course, negative reinforcement drives lots of human behaviors. My favorite example is, it's why you put your seatbelt on, in the car to make the annoying beeping sound go away. But it's also why you pay your taxes because you want to avoid all the possible bad stuff that could happen, that could be taken away from you, your money, your liberty, et cetera, should you choose to not engage in the behavior of paying your taxes.
But what's interesting about negative reinforcement or one of the interesting things, is that it tends to produce behaviors that are kind of like just good enough. I have a young cousin who, when he was in high school, had an app where he figured out what he needed to get on every test at a minimum in order to get a passing grade in every class.
And I remember thinking, well, I guess that's negative reinforcement at work. He's doing just the bare minimum. He needs to keep away the pain of failure. And actually, I remember he explained to me that his older sister had been a straight A student and then didn't get into any of the colleges she wanted to get into. So he felt like, what was the point of striving really hard for some kind of reward? For him school was more about just basically doing what he needed to do to keep bad things from happening.
Anyway, when people are wearing masks, they are essentially engaging in the behavior of putting this thing on their face to keep bad things from happening. And you know, like I was saying about the show with Alison Stewart, I learned it's not just about keeping from getting sick, which is sort of a distal consequence, not something that is necessarily immediately tied to the behavior. You're not going to necessarily not wear a mask and then right away get sick and pin that one consequence to having not worn a mask.
But there are even more immediate consequences of for instance keeping people from looking at you or talking to you on the street, if that is something that you enjoy avoiding. It might be keeping you from getting kicked out of stores, or it might be keeping you from getting yelled at by your neighbors.
Like I said, there are certainly people out there who are yelling at people who are wearing masks, and for some mask wearers that might be enough to make them want to not wear a mask. Social shaming could certainly be enough to punish the behavior, but I think by and large in America, we are pretty big believers in individual freedom and liberty to do, say, wear what we want.
And I don't know, at least for me living in New York City, I feel like if I want to walk around town with a beach ball over my head I don't expect to pay much attention to anyone who tells me I shouldn't do that or that it's a bad idea because we should be able to wear what we want. And, you know, we've all become so habituated to wearing masks.
Although an interesting factor of behaviors that are negatively reinforced is that they do tend to get weaker and weaker these behaviors, which makes me think there probably will be some kind of dying off of mask wearing that's just going to happen over time as fewer and fewer people are getting sick.
Although for the reasons that we went over before, probably some people will continue wearing masks because the fact that they're not getting allergies, and, you know, there are consequences that are rather immediate like that in play will probably encourage that behavior for those people for some time to come.
The other thing I've been thinking about is the vaccine rollout especially as it relates to our ideas about freedom and liberty and consequences, and the consequences that our government inflicts, or chooses not to inflict.
What's interesting to me is that there have been all of these different government subsidies. So many of us have gotten money from the government in the last year for one reason or another. And well, there are certainly lots of good things you could say about our government supporting people in these unprecedented times.
But I also think it's kind of interesting that in most cases, the money's being given out without any kind of requirement for a specific behavior. For instance, the money could be attached to the vaccine. The government seems to want everyone to get vaccinated, but in very, very few places in this country, has there been any kind of lottery system put in place where have people been offered, you know, actual cash for getting that the vaccine.
There's the desired behavior and there's the money, but the two haven't really been linked, and I think people would be offended at that idea. We seem to feel that people should get the vaccine, that it's just the right thing to do, but I think paying people to do it would offend people's idea of personal freedom. It would be considered manipulative.
And on the one hand, I get that. On the other hand, you know, we let the government dole out consequences when the consequences are punishment, right? Like we don't just expect people to drive the speed limit or not kill people. We go out and give fines and put people in jail when they engaged in these behaviors that we don't want people to do.
So I guess it's just interesting to me that we are okay with the government controlling our behavior using punishment, but I think there is a societal resistance to being controlled in any way using reinforcement, or at least positive reinforcement.
It's kind of like free feeding a dog. You know, there are plenty of trainers who will say, I'm just gonna put the bowl of food down for the dog. And their meal is not going to be at all involved during training. The dog should be doing training because it enjoys doing training and it wants to please me and food should be totally separate from that.
Where as a reward based trainer, I think your dog is learning all the time. Your dog is learning when your dog is eating. So why not make use of that bowl of food rather than thinking of what you're paying your dog at meal time, let's say, and what you're doing when you're trying to teach your dog new behaviors as completely unrelated things.
I mean, with the government money that so many of us has gotten, it's hard to think of that in terms of a reward or any kind of thing that is reinforcing a behavior, because for many of us, that money was really a bailout made necessary things possible that hadn't been possible before, but behaviors happening all the time and money is certainly a hugely positively reinforcing thing for everyone I know.
So it's sort of interesting to think about what behaviors have perhaps inadvertently been reinforced by these cash infusions so many individuals and businesses have gotten. And what kind of behaviors could or could have been encouraged if those same dollars were given with slightly different timing, with an eye on encouraging certain behaviors, like for example, encouraging people to get vaccinated.
Anyway, this is not a podcast episode with answers, just some observations and questions that I'm pretty sure would never have popped into my mind before I started training dogs, and before I started to see how we are kind of a government to our dogs, and working with dogs sometimes to me feels like working in a doll house version of human society. Our world is so much more complicated. We have a lot more choices to make, a lot more inputs, many more antecedents, more possible consequences.
Language certainly makes things far more complex as far as the way we communicate, et cetera, et cetera. It's not a one-to-one relationship, dog training and human behavior, but it all does fall under the heading of animal behavior and the laws of learning and the science of behavior are not species specific.
So I don't plan to start a career in public policy anytime soon, but I appreciate how dog training has given me a more critical eye for looking at human behavior, and also thinking about freedom and what that really means. I think freedom is what happens when we do things because we want to do them because we are being positively reinforced, and yet so much behavior in the world we live in is affected by negative reinforcement and punishment.
Anyway, perhaps a good moment to mention that we are still requiring masks at School for the Dogs, if you come and shop in our store on east seventh street in Manhattan, or if you are there to attend classes. We are letting more people in at a time now. Two people can now attend class with a dog where we had kept it at one for a long time, and we are allowing more students into classes now, but we have decided to continue asking people to wear masks for the moment because of, you know, negative reinforcement.
