13 MarEpisode 44 | Are you talking to your socks? Marie Kondo, Cesar Millan & training humans with snake oil

The sprightly Japanese organizing guru Marie Kondo has gained worldwide acclaim for essentially being an excellent trainer of humans. Specifically, she trains people to "tidy up" their homes. While she might be adept at using positive reinforcement (mostly in the form of her sheer enthusiasm about junk drawers) and other methods that dovetail with Good Dog Training, her approach also encourages people to attach their actions to part in certain "superstitious" behaviors, like verbally "thanking" pieces of clothing and "waking up" sleeping books by tapping them. In this episode, Annie, who believes that behavior-changing techniques should appeal less to common sense rather than to magical thinking, talks about how Kondo and famous dog trainers like Barbara Woodhouse and Cesar Millan douse snake oil over their proposed solutions in order to suggest that clutter is caused by sleeping books, dogs love the letter T, and nice leash walking can only happen if you channel amorphous invisible powers.

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Transcript:

[Intro]

Annie:
Hey there, humans. So today I want to talk about someone who has been making the rounds on talk shows, and just generally in the news a lot, her name is Marie Kondo. And if you live under a rock and you don't know who I'm talking about, she is an expert on tidying up. In fact, her new Netflix series is called “Tidying Up” but years before this Netflix show, she was already quite well known for her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Now, I know you're listening to this and you're saying to yourself, hold on, this is a dog training podcast. Why are we talking about this young Asian woman who helps people clean out their closets?  Well, it actually has to do with superstition or what dog trainers call superstitious behaviors.

Now you might be surprised that dogs are superstitious as are people, of course.  And I'll talk a little bit more in a minute about what dog superstition looks like. I think you probably already know about human superstitions, like wearing a certain pair of socks so that your favorite baseball team wins or not walking under a ladder or crossing a black cat, but the kind of superstition that made me want to talk about Marie Kondo today relates in like this way that people who have authority, people who are deemed experts can often cause or encourage their followers to do things that are, I would say largely based on superstition. And this kind of drives me crazy.

So I need to admit that when I first was thinking about recording this podcast, I was sort of thinking of it in terms of a rant about how much Marie Kondo annoys me in the way that I think she encourages people to do sort of silly superstitious things.  And that relates to a lot of bad dog training.  But then I thought about it and I thought that there are actually a lot of great things that she does that are worth mentioning in that she really is essentially a human trainer and are really a lot of things that she does in her practice, things that she does in this Netflix show. And I should admit, I've watched a few episodes of the show.  I've skimmed her books. I haven't fully read them, but that's the full disclosure. So if I'm completely off base about her, please let me know. But she definitely seems to advocate certain things that I think are very smart. As far as training humans goes, I mean, just the whole notion of helping people manage their environments, relates to helping people change their behavior.

If you've listened to this podcast before you might have heard me refer to what I call the dog training triad.  In fact, there are three episodes, devoted to the dog training triad that I posted a few months ago, but the triad is Management, Rewards and Timing.  Management is basically everything we can do from the outside in order to control the environment, in order to up the chances that our dogs are going to do the things we want them to do, and that our dogs are not going to have a chance to do the things we don't want them to do. It's basically all the ways that we can affect change in our dog's behavior by literally manipulating the environment. This is why we use crates. This is why we use pens. This is why we use work to eat toys and why we make sure that there aren't shoes and cords around for dogs to chew by being thoughtful about the space in which our dogs live.

We can kind of keep certain behaviors from ever entering their vocabulary of possible behaviors. And of course, we do this with each other all the time with people, right? Like if you have a toddler, you're going to make sure that there aren't drawers, that they can open up that they shouldn't. And that there aren't things on the coffee table that are breakable. If they're walking around and that the sockets are plugged up so that they don't stick their fingers in them, or that there's a fence around the pool, right? We would rather be smart about keeping the toddler from falling into the pool to begin with, than deal with the consequences of a toddler who’s already fallen into the pool and then trying to communicate to the toddler to never do that again.  To an extreme extent, this is what prison is all about.  If you put someone in a small box, they simply are not gonna have the opportunities to engage in lots of the behaviors you do not want the person to engage in.

Anyway, you could say that Marie Kondo's whole shtick is helping people manage their environments to help them engage in behaviors that will make them happier. For instance, in one episode of the Netflix series tidying up, there's a young family where the mother is frustrated because her kids are constantly calling her because they can't find their stuff. And she is the only one who knows where all their stuff is. So by making things easier to find, Marie Kondo literally helps them change what's an annoying behavior, because it takes away the reason that they're calling their mom all the time. And in pretty much every case, she's trying to help people be more organized in order to help them be less frustrated because they're not able to find stuff, or they're overwhelmed with stuff, et cetera, et cetera.  And when these people are less frustrated, we can guess that they're happier.

She's also trying to manage space in such a way that makes it just really easier for people to do all the things they need in their lives faster and more efficiently. So that's a way that she is helping people change their behavior also, and she's encouraging the behavior of being organized by breaking the process of organizing up into small parts, which is what dog trainers refer to as shaping, rather than looking at your entire closet and feeling overwhelmed about what you're going to do with it. Her approach is to take each item out one by one, address each item at a time, and to sort of systematically go through your home and look at things in categories and then divide those categories into manageable bits. And certainly that's something dog trainers suggest.  The opposite of that is what's called “chunking,” which is when you try and conquer a new step of a behavior too quickly, and you have set your criteria too hard, too fast.  So she definitely helps people avoid chunking by splitting things into very manageable little bits that can be taken care of.

And once that little bit is taken care of, it feels good to have an accomplishment, which brings us to the other two parts of the dog training triad that she considers I think, which is timing and rewards, or reinforcers. I think she's very good at rewarding people for their accomplishments with excellent timing.  Really, she's right on the ball right away. In fact, even like the moment that people open their door to her, she is enthusiastically like literally jumping up and down and clapping and hugging the people, which is her way of reinforcing the very first step of tidying up, which is asking for help basically. And having someone come into to offer that help.

In fact, she's so good at splitting things up into little bits and then rewarding the people for taking those steps in tiny steps that it's almost ridiculous. Like, I think there are multiple points in the series where someone presents her with like a junk drawer. And she goes into ecstasy about how excited she is to be shown their junk drawer, which again seems sort of silly. But the first step to organizing your junk drawer is to open your junk drawer and to show it to someone who's going to help you organize it. So it seems like the smallest increment, she is able to recognize that it's a step in the right direction. And then with her sheer enthusiasm, she is able to reinforce the person for taking that little step.

Now, another thing she does that I think has some tentacles that relate to dog training is she has this whole thing about encouraging the people she works with to ask themselves whether or not the objects that surround them, “spark joy” in them.  “Spark joy” is the term that she uses over and over. And when I think it's interesting about this is, remember, there are two kinds of reinforcement. Now, anytime we engage in a behavior, anytime our dog engages in a behavior, it's because the behavior is being reinforced in some way, or has been reinforced in some way, that's encouraging the likelihood for it to happen again. But it's a little bit more complicated than that because there are really two kinds of reinforcement. There's positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement reinforcement, again, means encouraging the likelihood something's going to happen again. But if it's positive reinforcement, it means that we're doing something because it's adding something to the equation, that's encouraging the likelihood, that thing is going to happen again. So, you know, going to work and getting your paycheck is positively reinforcing because it's adding something to your bank account that's going to make it more likely for you to show up on Monday.  Or in dog world: a dog sits.  You give the dog a treat. You are positively reinforcing the dog for sitting, encouraging the likelihood that next time he sees an opportunity. He's going to sit again, because it's added the treat into this kind of mathematical equation. The word positive is being used in, in its mathematical sense. Negative reinforcement is negative because it's taking something out of the equation in order to encourage the likelihood the behavior is going to happen again.

In human world, a good example of negative reinforcement is when you don't have your seatbelt on and you hear the annoying beeping sound in your car that continues until you put your seatbelt on.  The behavior of putting your seat belt on makes the annoying beeping sound stop. And the behavior of snapping your seatbelt has therefore been negatively reinforced. Chances are you will do it again in the future because it has taken away the annoying sound.  That's the negative part. An example of negative reinforcement in dogs would be the training style of using a shock collar and having the shock continue on the dog's neck until the dog does whatever it is you want the dog to do. People often use this to teach, “drop it,” unfortunately. So they shock the dog continually until the dog drops, whatever the object is. And then they stop the shock from happening. And the behavior of dropping something has therefore been negatively reinforced.

Anyway, as I see it, Marie Kondo is kind of helping people think about why they are keeping things. Are they doing it because the behavior of keeping that thing is positively reinforcing? Are they doing it because it adds something to their life or are they doing it because the behavior is being negatively reinforced? Like, am I hanging on to this dress I never wear because keeping it staves off the feelings of guilt I have of having bought this expensive thing that I don't wear? Or keeping something, because you're afraid that some future version of yourself will be the annoying sound of the beeping in the car, annoyed at you for throwing the thing out. So you're quieting the future yelling version of yourself by keeping the thing.  I've gone through that when cleaning out my makeup in particular where, I've had to say to myself, okay, I'm actually going to keep the things that I wear and that I enjoy wearing and throw out the things that I don't wear. And I'm going to trust that my future self isn't going to chastise me for not having any, purple sparkly eyeshadow on hand. So yeah, I'm into all of these aspects of what Marie Kondo is doing.  My issue with her relates to all the unnecessary things she has people do that I would call encouraging certain superstitions.

Now, like I said, dogs have superstitions, like people have superstitions, and it's not really that kind of superstition that I'm talking about here. But I do think it is kind of interesting to consider that dogs often make the wrong associations which lead to them having these superstitious behaviors that dog trainers refer to. For instance, one time I gave my dog a new kind of dog food and it made him sick. And after that, he wouldn't eat out of the food bowl that I had put that food in, which is very much like the kinds of superstitions people have all the time. Actually, when I was 11, my babysitter died and I loved her very much. And the night she died, my mom and I had gone to a Japanese restaurant across the street from where we lived.  And I never went back to that restaurant again.  That's kind of like the human version of having a spooky food bowl.

But the kind of superstition, or let's call it like misguided or misaligned association that Marie Kondo encourages, in my opinion, it's not really nefarious. I don't think she's harming anyone. It just annoys me. It reminds me of like the televangelists who used to, or maybe they still do say, you know, if you hold up your hand to this TV screen and touch my hand, then God will give you good fortune. It's sort of like a minor equivalent of that. And people do these things when someone who labels themselves an expert tells them to, even though it betrays your, your common sense. And in my opinion, whenever you're working, trying to help people change their behavior, you really should be starting from a place of common sense because most of behavior is observable. So let's work at changing behaviors by starting from what we can observe and understand rather than beginning in a kind of a realm of a spooky superstition and snake oil.

Anyway, I love watching late night TV, and I admit I was frustrated and a little disappointed to see two of my favorite late night hosts totally fall for her Hocus Pocus.

[Late night talk show excerpt]

Jimmy Kimmel:

You guys know the name, Marie Kondo? She's a.. [applause] Yeah alright. Have you been cleaning out your closets because of her?

Annie:
So first she was on Jimmy Kimmel. And if you're totally unfamiliar with Marie Kondo, I should have said earlier, she's Japanese and she doesn't speak English really. So she has a translator with her, and Jimmy and Marie Kondo and the translator all goes to clean up his office.

[talk show excerpt]
Marie Kondo’s Translator:
And what we'll be doing here today is checking everything that you own sparks joy or not.

Jimmy:
If it sparks joy, we keep it.

Translator:
Yes.

Jimmy:
If it doesn't, it goes.

Translator:
Exactly.

Jimmy:
Okay. Let's tidy up

Annie:
So then they end up in his dressing room and they start going through some of his drawers.

Jimmy:
I have a lot of blacks [laughs]

Translator:
But they spark joy for you? I assume.

Jimmy:
No, I just have to wear them for the show.

Translator:
Let's take this opportunity to express your gratitude for them.

Jimmy:
Express my gratitude to the socks?

[audience laughs]

[Marie Kondo speaks Japanese]

Jimmy:

Thanks, socks for always being there in the drawer.  For, you know, protecting my feet and keeping them warm and um, for all the other great things you do.

Marie Kondo/Translator:
Perfect.

Annie:
So yeah, this is part of Marie Kondo's thing is that she has people not only asking themselves whether or not something sparks joy, but if something does spark joy, you're supposed to thank it. Actually, even if something doesn't spark joy, you're still supposed to thank it for its service to you before you give it away. No, I'm not saying it's a bad idea to consider whether or not you want to keep certain socks or not for whatever reason, but I think you can do that without actually talking to your socks yet because she's been labeled an expert. She's managed to convince this educated 50 some odd year old man to thank his socks on national TV. And he is not alone. Here is a Marie Kondo on the late show with Stephen Colbert a few days later.

[Late Show excerpt]
Stephen Colbert:
Hey everybody, hello.  Folks. My next guest is the Japanese organizing expert and bestselling author who now stars in Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Please welcome Marie Kondo.

Annie:
So after a little bit of chit chat, she leads Steven to the front of the stage and then instructs him on exactly how he should sit. And, this is what happens. Oh, and I should say again, she has her translator here speaking for her.

Translator:
Down on our knees with our legs tucked under.  [Marie Kondo speaking in Japanese]. So I usually do this in my heart, but you can verbalize it just for today. Just express the gratitude you have for the studio, what this desk and the studio allows you to do to do this amazing show every night. [audience laughs] You can verbalize what you're feeling inside too.

Stephen Colbert:
Thank you, Ed Sullivan.

[audiene laughter and applause]

Stephen:
I don't understand anything you're saying when you say it, but even if you had no translator, I would have follow you to a cult compound.

Annie:
it's like, you know, nothing that Marie Kondo is suggesting is wrong. It just seems to me really unnecessary and kind of is an assault on people's common sense. And of course there are endless examples of this, of people following gurus of whatever field, to the ends of the earth, so that they can say thank you to their socks. It's just, I think the reason that this rubs me the wrong way is because I see it happen with dog training where it, rather than people sort of trusting their instinct, trusting what they intuitively know about behavior and doing things that make sense. They're willing to accept certain magic words that they're told they should say, or they're willing to do whatever weird rituals are suggested if they're told to do so by an expert.

And I've seen this firsthand with clients.  And I think I've used this example before, in previous episodes, but often I feel like I could tell someone to do something that makes complete sense, something that will work to help their dogs, but I could also tell them that before they do that thing, they need to jump up and down three times on one foot and yell the word raspberry. Now I admit I've never actually done this, but I suspect it would work. And this is because I've seen so many dog trainers offer this kind of snake oil paired or not paired with actual solutions that might work or might not work, but that's not really the point.  It's that it bothers me to see the faith that people put, into these basically superstitious suggestions, because it really only has to work one time, right? You only have to jump up and down on one foot and yell the word strawberry and then cue your dog to come to you and your dog comes. And now you're forever going to be jumping up and down and yelling about fruits every time you want your dog to come to you.

Like another thing Marie Kondo does with Jimmy Kimmel is she has him sort his books. And then she goes around and shows him that he should be tapping the books in order to wake the books up before sorting through figuring out which ones to keep. I suppose. Anyway, sorting books is a good idea. Tapping the books is not necessary. A, I say this using my common sense as a human being books are inanimate objects and they are perfectly sortable whether or not you quote unquote, wake them up.  But I wonder how many people out there are sorting their books because of her, having a good experience, and now think that they need to tap books to wake them up every time they're trying to clean out their bookshelf.

I think there are a lot of examples of this in what I would call bad dog training.  Certainly Cesar Milan, AKA “The Dog Whisperer,” tells people that there's a lot of mumbo jumbo they need to say or think or believe or whatever in order to get their dogs to behave. And he often pairs this with effective strategies. They're not strategies that I would recommend. And the result is, often it seems that people believe it's his self professed assertive energy. That's the cause of the success rather than plain old punishment. And I think this tends to really confuse people, but because they're seeing him succeed as he puts his methods into practice, they believe they too can only succeed if they think and feel and believe they are in some way different than they are.  That they should be more calm, assertive together people than they are. Whereas my belief is you could have your shit together or not. And that's about as relevant to you being able to walk a dog on a loose leash as is jumping up and down on one foot while yelling the word raspberry.

[Dog Whisperer clip]
Cesar Millan:
So here, come, come, next to me.  It's steps. It's all steps. So everything that I do, I inject energy before I do it.

Cesar’s client, Natalie:
And is it like that forever or is it just like that during the rehabilitation phase? Like, do I need to project that sort of energy for her on an, every–

Cesar:
Every time you want a dog to behave? Yes. Are you going to be this way as a mom?  Absolutely, you gotta be this confident, assertive, this is what it is for forever. Yeah. It's just what it is.

Natalie:
And then when it's time for the loving and the energy, that's when you as a, the human can relax is that..?

Cesar:
Ehh?  I'm relaxed right now. I'm calm and assertive. I mean, this is love to me. I mean, there’ is a love component in what I'm doing.

Cesar voiceover:
I have to say, I’m concerned, because I'm not sure if Natalie can change. And if she doesn't, this dog is not compatible to this family.

Annie:

So yeah. Do you understand that Natalie's supposed to change? [laughs] Because I have no idea. And I trust that whatever Cesar Milan is doing in that moment might be working to change that dog's behavior, but the magic potion of what she needs to do in order to get to that point, according to him, in order to… it seems like it involves changing her entire person. And it's a cocktail that has ingredients that sure aren't clear to me, but he's saying unless, unless she can make that cocktail, no luck, no dice, which is ridiculous! Like, do you just keep bringing Cesar Milan back until he deems that you are calm and assertive enough?

Another example of this kind of onslaught on common sense when it comes to dog training? Although perhaps a less nefarious example is from Barbara Woodhouse, who was a very famous trainer in the early 1980s.  She had a show on the BBC.  And gosh, there's so many weird things about this woman, in my opinion, that I almost couldn't pick one. Although one of my favorite strange things about her is that the way she suggested that you train a dog to not chase a car, was to have someone in the passenger seat of your car, while you're driving, have someone in the passenger seat, throw a book out the window at your dog. And she specifically said the book you should use was the AA handbook.  And people take this kind of crazy advice as we know. So God only knows how many people are still, how many decades later actually throwing the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook out the window at their dogs.

But she also had this peculiar way of saying the word “Sit,” which must have worked for her. Now I can tell you I've taught many dogs how to sit and you can do it with a snap, a hand motion.  You could teach a dog how to sit with a cue that's turning on a light or lifting a finger or winking. Or you could say it in any number of languages.  You could use absolutely any word that you'd like, but I believe it's because people are willing to accept for whatever reason that there is some kind of magic involved in dog training that they cling to, or we're have clung. I hope this is history, but have clung to people like Barbara Woodhouse, who insisted on using her way of saying, sit, if you wanted to get your dog to Sit!

[Barbara Woodhouse program excerpt]

Barbara Woodhouse:
Well, today's lesson, of course, is the Sit. Sit!

Man:
It's not siiiit?  Sit.

Barbara:

To make a dog sit, first of all, you've got to learn the right signal and the right tone of voice. Now, watch. I say, it's in action 2.  SIT!  Right up to the shoulder. Very smartly.

[People practicing “Sit” command]:

Sit!  Sit-tuh.

Barbara:
You don't say to you say, “Tuh,” you say “T.”

[People practicing “Sit” command]:

Sit. SIT.  Siit?  SIT!

Barbara:
No, that's very weak.

[People practicing “Sit” command]:

Sit. Sit.  Sit?  SIT!  Sit!

Annie:
Now what's funny is my dad must have watched a good deal of Barbara Wood house in the early eighties, because this is how he talked to our dog growing up. And I remember him telling me that it was very important to really pronounce that hard T in the word sit. And you know, it's probably because he did it one time and the dog sat.  And little, did he know that he also probably could have, you know, said the word Baba ghanoush and the dog would have sat.  But it's what Barbara Woodhouse said. And she was an expert. So it didn't matter that my dad was an incredibly intelligent man. She had a British accent, and he listened to her.

Fun dog fact of the day.  It's actually kind of a personal anecdote, but I thought I would share it, fun dog fact. Is that the place that you're most likely to lose control of your bladder in your home when you're not in your bathroom is at the kitchen sink.  Okay. To be fair. I don't know if there's any studies that say that's actually the most common place to lose control of your bladder. I'm sure there are a lot of people who pee in their bed too. But, recently, as many of you know, I just had a baby two months ago, and, I think it's pretty common. I mean, I don't think I'm shocking anyone to share that sometimes after you have a baby, it can be hard to control your pee a little bit, but the other day, I was doing the dishes and I started peeing. Like, not just like, you know, when you sneeze new pee a little bit or laugh and pee a little bit. Like I was full on like peeing while I was doing the dishes without any, I mean, normally, you know, you're going to pee. You go to the bathroom.  Like there was no run up to it. I was just peeing myself like full on. It was weird.

And I happen to have a gynecology appointment a few days later, just an annual physical. And I mentioned this to the doctor and she said, “Oh, well it's because you were doing the dishes that happened.”  And I was like, “Excuse me, huh?” She said, “Well, it was the running water. You have an association with that kind of sound. And so your body just immediately started to pee and it's very common.” She said a lot of people pee, actually, when they walk by a fountain, and then she started explaining to me how classical conditioning works, that it's an association. And I said, I know all about classical conditioning. I am a dog trainer. 

But it hadn't occurred to me that, I was wired, thanks to classical conditioning, to associate the sound of running water with peeing to the extent that I was doing it totally reflexively. So,, you know, it's actually kind of great because it's a really good excuse to make my husband do the dishes.

And our Woof Shout Out goes to Hank, the Jack Russell terrier, who belongs to my good friend, Christa in Asheville, North Carolina. Christa came to visit New York recently and told me that she and Hank have been listening to the podcast, and that she enjoyed sort of having a one way conversation with me. And, it was just really sweet to know that my friend in a city far away is kind of staying in touch with me by listening to me go on and on about dog training. Anyway, love you, Krista. Love you, Hank. Hank is an adorable little terrier and I sure do love scruffy.

Thank you so much for listening.  We’ll be back next week with another show.  If you liked this episode, please remember to subscribe, rate, and give us a 5-star review on iTunes.  And of course, tell your friends.  If you have suggestions for future topics or questions about training, please make sure to join our Facebook group.  Facebook.com/groups/schoolforthedogs.  See you next week.