There is a classic scene in western movies where the villain (personified by
Jack Palance in "Shane", a scene reprised in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider and countless other western movies.) commands the lowly sod buster to "dance". Invariably
the means of enforcing this request is with a burst of bullets from a "six-gun" (usually exceeding six shots) aimed at the farmer's feet. The hapless plow-boy then buck-jumps and hops
his way through a grotesque imitation of Fred Astaire. While this is certainly not the way most people would suggest training a human to do anything, that's exactly how most dogs are trained to do
everything. The process of teaching a behavior by getting a critter to avoid something is called aversive control. There are two types of aversive control, punishment and negative
reinforcement. Punishment causes behavior to decrease, while negative reinforcement causes behavior to increase. The more technical scientific definitions of these terms are pretty confusing, but
these simple descriptions are good enough for most situations.
Punishment is something we are all familiar with, but few people really understand how punishment works. For example, imagine
that your dog Fido chews a couch cushion while you are away from home. When you return and see the damage, you shove the cushion in Fido's face (to show him why he is being punished) and swat him with
a rolled up newspaper. The next time you come home, another pillow is damaged, but as soon as you see it, Fido looks "guilty" and ducks under the couch. You drag him out and bop him
again, since his guilty look insures that he "knew he did something wrong. "
If this looks like a good example of punishment, think again. By definition, punishment causes behavior
to decrease. In our example, the swats did not cause Fido to stop ripping up pillows, therefore the swats did not punish the act of ripping up pillows. Fido's owner can escalate the
intensity of the "punishment" until it injures his dog but will not be able to stop the pillow ripping. That is because he is actually using negative reinforcement.
Things which
increase behavior through force, intimidation, fear or avoidance are called negative reinforcers. If you sit on a thumbtack, the pain associated with the tack is a negative reinforcer, which causes you
to do a behavior -- "jumping upward." The key difference between a reinforcer and a punisher is that one increases behavior, while the other one decreases behavior. In the case of
our couch chewing canine, the swats and scolding did not affect the bad behavior at all. What actually happened was Fido's tendency to hide under the couch and look "guilty"
increased because of the harsh treatment. Those behaviors were negatively reinforced - meaning strengthened by something nasty. Unless the human can connect the nastiness with the actual behavior that needs
to be controlled, the guilty looks and escape behaviors are the only ones that will be changed. .
If your forehead is smoking from brain overload, do not despair. While this distinction
between punishment and negative reinforcement is alien to us, it is not all that difficult to understand - but it is important. Unless you understand the difference, you can both physically and
mentally hurt your pet through the misuse of aversive control.
For example, a woman called me recently and told me that her dog had a problem with barking. Each time the dog barked, she would
faithfully go outside and swat the dog with a newspaper. She did this because she assumed that it would "punish" or reduce the behavior. Three years of this process had not changed the amount
of barking. The woman could not understand why the dog didn't stop barking. She said that the dog knew the behavior was wrong, because she would close her eyes and cringe, in anticipation of the
swat. From our new perspective, the answer is simple. The newspaper didn't punish (decrease) barking, it negatively reinforced (increased) cringing behavior.
According to B.F. Skinner, the
great behavioral psychologist, most behavior is controlled by its consequences. If there is an obvious connection between behavior (walking into a brick wall) and a consequence (striking your
nose) you are unlikely to walk into brick walls, in the future. The problem for most pet owners is failing to understand how to make a connection that an animal can easily understand. In
many situations, the connection is only apparent to the pet owner. Rubbing an animal's nose against a couch and then applying a swat with a newspaper is unlikely to punish couch chewing behavior.
The more likely result is to increase behaviors such as escaping or cringing.
While most of our experience with behavioral control relates to punishment, we rarely achieve our goals. If
punishment is applied repeatedly without any change in the behavior, it simply isn't working. If catch yourself using punishment without making sure it is effective, "you should know you have done
wrong." To pay for your error, take a section of the newspaper and roll it into a tight tube. Next, rub your nose in it and swat yourself forcefully – get the message?
