What is Positive Reinforcement?
What is positive reinforcement dog training? I’m sure that if you are in any way connected to the world of dogs you’ve seen the term ‘positive reinforcement’ with regards to dog training at some point. It’s often used as a marketing term or description of the style of training a particular trainer uses and many pet owners are determined to use only positive methods to train their dogs because of what the current influx of media says they should. So what exactly is it?
The term positive reinforcement comes from operant conditioning, a principle of learning psychology developed by B. F. Skinner. He believed that the earlier work regarding classical conditioning was too simplistic and wanted to study observable behavior rather than speculate what was going on inside the learner’s mind. Some key terms, which will be displayed in a table below, are negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment. We’ll go into more details in the next few paragraphs on what those terms mean for operant conditioning, but essentially these terms apply to the situation the learner is learning in. The learner for our purposes is a dog.
Now, for this particular learning principle, you have to let go of the idea that positive means ‘good’, and negative means ‘bad’. In operant conditioning, positive simply means something has been added to the situation. Negative means that something has been removed from the situation. Reinforcement means that the intention behind adding or removing something from a situation increases the likelihood of a behavior occurring. Punishment means that the intention behind adding or removing something from a situation decreases the likelihood of a behavior occurring. Hopefully I haven’t lost you yet! Next we’ll discuss those terms in more detail and provide some examples.
Positive reinforcement means something has been added to the situation to increase the likelihood of a behavior recurring. This one is the one we all have the most knowledge of: our dog sits (performs a behavior) and we reward it (most likely a food reward). The dog will most likely sit again because it was given a treat the last time it did so, so we have reinforced the sitting behavior by adding a reward to the situation.
Negative reinforcement means you remove something from a situation to increase the likelihood of a behavior recurring. This is one where you might struggle with finding an example of, but we see it happen every day. Someone walks by your fence, your dog barks at the fence, the stranger seemingly goes away because of the barking (in your dog’s mind), your dog is likely to repeat the behavior. The stranger was something the dog preferred to have removed from his territory, and by barking he has removed the person from his territory (negative, taking something away). Therefore he is likely to continue barking at the fence since the behavior worked previously (reinforcement).
Positive punishment: means that we are trying to decrease a behavior by adding something to the situation. More commonly in dog training this is seen by corrective collars such as prong or pinch collars, e collars, or even the ubiquitous gentle leader. The dog pulls on the leash, the trainer/handler delivers a correction which is unpleasant for the dog or the corrective tool makes it unpleasant to pull, the dog discontinues pulling on the leash. The correction or tool is what is being added to the situation (positive) and the behavior decreasing is pulling on the leash (punishment).
Negative punishment: means that we are trying to decrease a behavior by removing something from the situation. Let’s say that your dog jumps all over you when you pick up their leash to go for a walk. To decrease this behavior, you would put the leash back down and walk away until the dog is calm, before returning to pick up the leash again. Ideally after many repetitions the dog will learn that jumping up results in the prospect of a walk being taken away (negative, removing something) and will cease to jump up (punishment, decreasing a behavior).
Positive Adding something to a situation | Negative Removing something from a situation | |
Reinforcement Increases likelihood of behavior repeating | Positive Reinforcement | Negative Reinforcement |
Punishment Decreases likelihood of behavior repeating | Positive Punishment | Negative Punishment |
Now that we’ve covered those terms, hopefully you have a better understanding of where the term ‘positive reinforcement’ comes from. Operant conditioning is a well known learning principle in the dog training community, and while many trainers use all parts of the operant conditioning square (see above diagram), there is a contingent that only uses one square or another to train dogs. In this blog article we’re just talking about those that use positive reinforcement.
Using positive reinforcement methods is one of the best ways to teach new behaviors, and after explaining operant conditioning, I’m sure you can see why! Performing a behavior that results in a desirable or pleasant result such as a food reward certainly is motivating for many dogs. This desirable or pleasant result becomes tied to the behavior and even the teacher (in this case, the owner or handler) and increases the bond between teacher and student more than any of the other methods used in operant conditioning. Additionally, the dog becomes more eager to learn and is more creative with offering behaviors on the chance that they might earn another desirable or pleasant result compared to dogs who were trained using punishment methods. Dogs who were trained with punishment based methods were shown to be less playful and less interactive with their handlers.
Additionally, reinforcement and punishment offer different types of feedback for the learner. Although positive reinforcement does not offer feedback for undesirable behaviors, it does offer guidance through rewards for the desired behavior. Performed correctly, the dog is more likely to perform the desired behavior instead of the undesired behavior, thereby reducing the undesirable behavior. Punishment only offers the feedback that the behavior performed was undesirable and offers no guidance on what is the desired behavior. It is very limiting on what new behaviors the dog can learn, but can be effective for stopping undesirable behavior.
An important thing to note is that what is reinforcing and what is punishing is entirely up to the learner. What one learner may consider is punishing may be reinforcing for another and vice versa. For example, for a friendly dog being patted and touched might be the best thing in the world, whereas for a more nervous dog who was previously abused it might dislike or even fear being touched, therefore behaviors followed by petting may be avoided in the future. For some dogs it may even be dependent on the day or the situation in which they’re learning behavior to determine what is reinforcing. With my own dogs, I know that throwing a frisbee can be far more reinforcing than any food reward if we’re outside playing.
To conclude, positive reinforcement training is from the learning principle of operant conditioning where positive means something is added to a learning situation and reinforcement means the behavior is likely to be repeated. Positive reinforcement training is the best for teaching new behaviors because it has a high success rate and encourages the learner to be more creative and curious about performing new behaviors. This type of training also encourages the bond between teacher and learner and in general results in a more playful and interactive learner. While this type of training provides fantastic feedback on what desirable behaviors the teacher is looking to cultivate, it does have its limits in providing feedback about undesirable behaviors if it is used as the only training method. Additionally, the learner is the one who decides what is reinforcing, not the teacher. Overall, it is an excellent method to use for training your dog if you’re interested in teaching new behaviors and growing your bond with your dog!
Thank you for making this far! I hope that you learned something today about positive reinforcement dog training. Please let us know if you have any questions or blog topic suggestions in the comments on our social media or by reaching out!
For further research:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/operant-conditioning.html
https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2014/02/dog-training-animal-welfare-and-human.html
https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2012/08/part-vi-of-positive-reinforcement-and.html
https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2017/02/what-is-positive-reinforcement-in-dog.html