Unveiling the Myth of Reinforcers and Punishers
You have heard about positive and negative reinforcers, positive and negative punishment. You find it difficult to sort one from the other, or to find the right definitions; or you are a bit confused as how and when to use one or the other. It is my purpose to sort it out for you.
Being a biologist and an ethologist, I study and explain these topics independently of political correctness, commercial interests, or fashion trends. You will have, therefore, to forgive me for the occasional politically incorrect statement. Please do bear in mind that I am no politician, just a biologist.
Basically, and it is as simple as that, the behavior of all living creatures changes because of its consequences; and there are only two ways in which behavior can change. It can become either more of it, or less of it. Even what we call new behavior is nothing else than an increase in frequency, intensity and/or duration of components of a behavior in the repertoire of the individual in question. Sometimes, new behavior amounts to the recombination of well-practiced elements. We may alter its frequency, its intensity, its duration and we may associate it with new stimuli, but if that particular behavior element were not present in the behavior repertoire of the animal, it would not show up.
As everybody knows, reinforced behavior tends to increase in frequency, intensity and/or duration and punished behavior tends to do exactly the opposite, i.e. to decrease in frequency, intensity and/or duration.
As everybody also should know, a reinforcer is not a reward, like the paycheck our boss gives us at the end of the year because he earned a lot of money. A reinforcer is everything that somehow increases a certain behavior. It may not increase the behavior of everyone, or every behavior. A reinforcer is thus only a reinforcer in relation to a very specific behavior and a very particular individual. It may also work, as reinforcers often do, in other circumstances than originally envisaged, and on a class of individuals, but this is a bonus, not a requirement.
A punisher tends to decrease the frequency, intensity and/or duration of a behavior. Again, punishers are particular to specific behaviors and individuals, and need not operate on various individuals or behaviors. There is nowadays a tendency to relate punishers with violence, mutilation, etc., but a punisher is only an aversive, i.e. something, one would like to avoid in a specific context, and it does not need by any means to have anything to do with violence or mutilation. I immensely dislike mayo, which implies that any restaurant serving me a sandwich with mayo decreases the frequency of my visits to that specific restaurant. The chef is actually punishing me, even though he doesn’t know it. When I open a window and I am almost blown out because it happens to be one of those windy days, I hasten to shut it again. The natural elements punished me indeed for my opening-the-window-behavior.
In short, reinforcers and punishers are everywhere and they are what we get by living in a world and having to interact with it. If you don’t like either or one of them, I suggest you stop living because there’s no way, while you’re alive, that you can avoid them completely. You can learn how to control them, by controlling your behavior, so that you get more reinforcers and less punishers, if that’s what you want, but even experienced people, wolves, bears, wombats, jellyfish, and of course, dogs, do sometimes display behaviors, which are instantly and duly punished. Behavior punished and behavior reinforced—that is how we all learn and that’s a fact of life whether you like it or not.
The bottom line is that reinforcers and punishers are in principle neither good or bad, not things we like or don’t like, they are just stimuli that either increase or decrease the frequency, intensity and/or duration of a behavior. A reinforcer one day may be a punisher another day and the opposite is also true. A reinforcer for you may be a punisher for me today and the opposite tomorrow.
Consider the following example: your dog is standing in front of you and you hold a treat in your hand in front of his eyes. Now, you look at the dog and you say ‘sit’. The dog doesn’t sit, just looks silly and barks at you. Then, you put on your serious face, emit a grunting sound, and take the treat away. Now, the dog sits and looks as innocent as ever. You hasten to say ‘good’, you remove your serious face and present the dog your most friendly expression of the day, and you give the dog the treat you were holding in front of his eyes, the one you removed while he was silly. This is a situation that I’m sure all dog owners and trainers have experienced countless times. Is there anything wrong with it? Not at all, right? Ok, let’s take a close look at it. You say ‘sit’, the dog doesn’t sit, and you remove the treat and put on your serious face. The technical term for the removal of the treat is negative punishment and the serious face is a positive punisher. Now the dog sits and you remove your serious face and give the dog a ‘good’ and the treat. The removal of your serious face is negative reinforcement and the presentation of ‘good’ and the treat are positive reinforcements. In two seconds you’ve used all four tools (and correctly).
If you don’t like the terms reinforcer and especially punisher, we can change them. Once I suggested we called them increasers and decreasers, positive reinforcers thus being add-on increasers and negative reinforcers turning into take-away increasers. It doesn’t make any difference and however it looks completely different when we come to punishers. What do you think about using add-on decreasers and take-away decreasers? Sounds fancy and doesn’t make anyone’s blood pressure raise, right? You have no objections? Good, because if you’re a good dog-trainer, I’m sure you sometimes use these techniques. If we substitute the terms reinforcer, punisher, positive, and negative with my suggestions, the famous table for the four operant procedures looks like this:
Therefore, life is all about learning how to control the consequences of our behavior—and this suits perfectly our job description as dog trainers. We must help our dogs to learn how to control the consequences of their behavior, which is not at all the same as to avoid them. If we as a rule either only reinforce or only punish everything they do, we are indeed doing a poor job, and we are certainly not preparing them for the real life where both reinforcers and punishers (increasers and decreasers) are a reality depending on circumstances and one’s behavior.You like it—you’re welcome to use it. A warning though: it doesn’t make any difference for the dog what we call the techniques.
Learning is nothing else than changing behavior due of its consequences, and as simple as it may seem, it proves undeniably more complicated than so when we have to manage it all in a practical learning situation. To be a good animal trainer, or a teacher, we need to master the science of learning theory and behavior modification, as well as the art of applying it all at the right time, in the right dosage, for the right reason. We need to be able to exercise our reasoning and to manage our emotions.
Enjoy your training session!
R-
Further readings
Abrantes R A. 1997. Dog Language – An Encyclopedia of Canine Behavior.
Abrantes R A. 2011. Animal Trainers Handbook (not published yet).
Bailey J. S. & Burch M R. 1999. How Dogs Learn.
Catania C.1975. Learning.
Chance P. 1999. Learning and Behavior (4th ed.)
Dickinson A. 1980. Contemporary Animal Learning Theory.
Donaldson J. 1999. The Culture Clash.
Dunbar I. 1998. How to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks.
Holland J G & Skinner B F. 1961. The Analysis of Behavior.
Lindsay S. 2000. Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Learning.
Pryor K. 1999. Don’t Shoot the Dog.
Ramirez K. 1999. Animal training: Successful animal management through positive reinforcement (don’t get fooled by the title, just read the foreword).
Reid P. 1996. Excel-Erated Learning.
McFarland D. 1987. Animal Behaviour.
Wilkes G. 1993. On Target!
Related articles
- Punishment – Psychology Definition of the Week (psychology.about.com)
- Behavior Modification Techniques in the Business Environment (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
- Scientific Understanding is an Important Quality for Dog Trainers (responsibledog.wordpress.com)
- Positive Punishment – Psychology Definition of the Week (psychology.about.com)
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Posted on September 21, 2011, in Dogs and tagged Abrantes, Behavior, Behavior modification, dog, Operant conditioning, Punishment, Reinforcement. Bookmark the permalink. 11 Comments.
Excellent article!
I love your no-nonsense approach to dog-training advice. We need to live and enjoy life and work with our emotions — but if we’re trying to analyze a situation in order to learn, we also have to learn to leave some of our emotions at the door, at least for a while.
That said, I’d also like to point out that, while what we choose to call the punishers and reinforcers may not make a difference to the dog, calling them something different in our minds can make a huge difference to how we feel about ourselves and what we’re doing… and hence make a difference in how we interact with the dog.
Another winning article that I can direct my clients too. It is one thing for me to say these things…and I am a professional trainer/behavior specialist…but it is always better when it comes from someone like you; the Ultimate Expert :~))
Simple and straight to the point! A must read for all: parents, teachers, animal owners and trainers. With all my due respect, I just wanted to point out two little things:
The first is in regard to consequences, and it is surely a problem of the definition of consequences, But in type 1 learning or habituation, not to be confused with the operant definition or desensitiztion, is the waning of a response due to repeated presentation of a stimulus without consequence, negative or positive. We must therefore maybe consider that no consequence is actually in fact a consequence that modifies behaviour even if in the most elemental of forms.
The second is in regard to the contingency quadrant of the 4 operants. A very valuable diagram for explaning and understanding the interelation of operant procedures. However it may be of interest to revert to your article on the spectrum of behaviours’ when dealing with the boundaries between these procedures, a kind of fuzziness, although clearly the delimitations are important.
Once again, thank you Roger for a wonderful article, and yet another opportunity to excercise the mind!
Life is great and Enjoy! Right back at you!
To everyone,
Thanks for your comments. I appreciate your input. Sometimes changing a term makes a difference in how we think about it, particularly if that term has some dire connotations for us. For example, I believe that ‘signal’ instead of ‘command’ helps one to ‘communicate’ rather than ‘issue orders.’ Other times, I think we’d better take the bull by the horns and define and use the term properly and be done with it; not easy and in the end it’s all a question of judgement and temperament, I guess.
Be well, life is great!
R-
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