A year ago and a couple of days ago, we got our dog, Argos!
Around then, I dived pretty deeply into learning about operant and classical conditioning, especially with respect to animal training. I read many books and blogs, attended ClickerExpo, and chatted with the trainers at our puppy socials. And after living with a puppy and a toddler for a year, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to experiment with ways to get behaviors I wanted from them.
My very broad brush summary is that a lot of the technical points actually cache out in just being patient, caring, and creative. And, to me anyway, this is excellent news! I want to get better at those things anyway, and it (usually) feels good to practice them.
The most useful distinction in this area that I hadn’t really been making was between skill building and behavior choices.
I’ll call something a choice if it would respond to Szasz’s “Gun-to-the-Head Test”. My dog wouldn’t eat butter off the counter if he knew it would be really costly, so I’ll count that as a choice. But he can only roll one way (I’ll call it to the left), so teaching him to roll on his back to the right counts as skill building.
I summarized my heuristics for skill building in a Memocracy talk at Ephemerisle, and finally just put the notes from my talk into a blog post of its own because it seems like a separable topic.
Okay, so assuming you aren’t trying to help someone learn something new (like how to walk, talk, or give you a high five). Assume you have strong enough preferences over the behaviors the other person is already offering to try to influence their frequencies.
Plan A: Meet the Underlying Need
My first, best lever is still trying to meet an underlying need (or want?) that will get me the behavior I’m looking for. It actually did help Lydia ignore other kids’ water bottles to buy her a variety and let her play with them at home. It very clearly helps me get Argos to lie around calmly more of the time when I take him on long walks and run around the yard with him. Giving him stuff to chew helps him not chew Lydia’s toys.
In order to meet needs, I have to notice them, and one of the biggest things that help me do this is not blaming the subject OR myself. Either one takes the focus elsewhere. It also takes some experimentation to be pretty confident that you know what the underlying need is.
More than anything else, maybe, meeting needs usually takes an absence of learned helplessness about meeting the need.
A lot of my recent thoughts about how to best meet needs have come from this unschooling website.
I don’t in any way consider myself an expert on figuring out how to meet people’s needs, though I do recommend a meta/intrapersonal approach. (Basically, meet your own needs too. Avoid unfunded behavioral mandates (HT: Mike Blume) by making it the job of the part of you that wants something to happen to figure out a way to meet the needs of parts that are blocking it. Or something kind of like that. I have a post building up in my head about my thoughts in this domain.)
Plan B: Assume New Tank Syndrome
My second lever actually covers quite a lot of the situations that aren’t solved by (straightforwardly) meeting needs, and that is helping the learner become more comfortable with an environment or stimulus. I covered already in this post, but I think it bears repeating and elaborating on. Very frequently, if it seems like Lydia and Argos aren’t processing what I’m saying, they’re are very focused on the environment, and spending lots of cycles processing that.
The Behavior Adjustment Training framework helped me get clear on what to do to help a learner feel more comfortable with a stimulus. She tried a bunch of different approaches that I won’t summarize here, but what seemed to work the best and fastest was letting the animal explore the stressful stimulus at its own pace in an environment with other cool distractions for when it wants a break, only intervening to stop the animal from getting stressfully close to the thing.
In retrospect, this strikes me as being extremely commonsensical, but I think I now have a better model of why and how it works. This model results in greater confidence that, over time, behavior around a specific thing will get more conscious and flexible, with more room for input from other interested parties.
Karen Pryor mentions “new tank syndrome” in Don’t Shoot the Dog:
What is once learned is not forgotten, but under the pressure of assimilating new skill levels, old well- learned behavior sometimes falls apart temporarily. I once saw a conductor, during the first dress rehearsal of an opera, having a tantrum because the singers in the chorus were making one musical mistake after another; they seemed virtually to have forgotten all their hard-learned vocal accomplishment. But they were, for the first time, wearing heavy costumes, standing on ladders, being required to move about as they sang: Getting used to new requirements temporarily interfered with previously learned behavior. By the end of the rehearsal, the musical learning reappeared, without coaching. Dolphin trainers call this the “new tank syndrome.” When you move a dolphin to a new tank, you have to expect that it will “forget” all it knows until the new stimuli are assimilated. It is important to realize that berating yourself or others for mistakes in past- learned behavior under new circumstances is bad training. The mistakes will usually clear up by themselves shortly, but reprimands cause upset and sometimes tend to draw attention to the mistakes so they don’t go away.
Mindy has been in public a lot, but mostly in the suburbs, in shopping areas, in hotels and malls and such buildings. She hadn’t seen the press of a typical urban street during crowded times. So many people, so close together, with so much traffic, was a lot!When one criterion is raised, another drops! so I didn’t worry about leash manners. She pulled, a lot, because she was so busy looking around and taking things in. I wasn’t worried about this; leash manners will come back when she’s able to think about them again. Fussing at her would only have frustrated us both and both kept her from processing all this new scenario and established a bad association with it.
Miscellaneous Other Stuff
If I hadn’t been reading about operant conditioning, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to reward behaviors I was looking for even when they were totally accidental and out of context. Baby signing was the relevant use case. I made a point of getting super excited WHENEVER Lydia made a motion that was kinda like a sign, since then she became conscious of what she just did with her body. She could hook the skill of doing the movement on purpose up to the actual meaning later, and she routinely did.
Similarly, if there’s a particular thing I’m looking for from another person, like being really attentive to what I’m saying, or empathizing, or not being defensive, these days I’m more on the lookout for opportunities to comment appreciatively on the thing even when it’s not happening at the time I feel like I need it. Because then, the person is more aware of the thing as a conscious skill they can choose.
On a slightly different note, Argos is actually pretty great about trying to be careful with his body even when he’s moving very quickly… except that he doesn’t get that his tail is part of his body. I think lots of dogs don’t understand this. My plan is to try to teach him to intentionally knock balls off the table with his tail, in hopes that it will improve his awareness in this area. I don’t have super high hopes for the approach, but I’ll probably report back if it works.
Classical Conditioning
If you consistently do something a few seconds BEFORE something else happens, the learner will connect the dots and start anticipating the second thing after the first thing. This won’t be as reliably true if they happen too close together, simultaneously or in the other order. Knowing this made me more inclined to announce my intentions with Lydia verbally before showing body language that I was going to do the thing. (Saying “Can I pick you up?” before putting my arms out.) I know she would have figured everything out anyway, but verbal communication is a big enough convenience factor for me that I’m willing to invest in optimizing my behavior to help her understand me more quickly.
It’s worth worrying about poisoned cues. Basically, if something good OR bad might happen when you ask someone to do something (you’ll get mad if they don’t do it or do it wrong), then they’ll easily come to dread hearing you ask. Fear is terrible for learning. Avoiding poisoned cues falls under being nice, but I thought I’d mention it specifically.
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