Behaviourism is an area of study usually closely associated with the work of B. F. Skinner, a Harvard psychologist who studied animal behaviour for more than 50 years. While his work was initially considered radical and revolutionary, these days we tend to consider it an essential part of all psychology, including when working with animals. Most training techniques that label themselves 'modern' or 'gentle' or as using 'motivational techniques only' generally rely heavily on the principles of behaviourism.
In reality behaviourism is a part of every day life, and it's not just for dogs. In fact it was originally motivated by a study of human behaviour. Because of the work done over the last century we now have words to describe the theories and a wealth of practical experience to draw on too.
Here are some of the words commonly used by behavioural psychologists when talking about the subject of behaviourism.
Aversive: The technical term for something unpleasant or punishing. An aversive usually makes the animal it's applied to want to avoid having it happen again. An example of an aversive is a squirt in the face with a water pistol.
Behaviourism: An approach to psychology that describes the behaviour of an organism in terms of the link between a stimulus and the organism's response to it. A kind of cause and effect principle. In dog training terms behaviourism is the foundation of 'humane' training methods such as the use of positive reinforcers.
Bribe: A bribe is anything you offer the animal in order to get them to perform the action for the cue you give them. A bribe is different to a reinforcer in that the animal does not know what reinforcement (if any) they will get for doing the action, until they have done it. A bribe allows the animal to decide at that moment whether they would like to comply or not, because they can see the consequences both ways. A bribe is when you wave food at a dog while saying 'Come'. A reinforcer is when you say 'Come' and magically produce food from your pocket to give them when they do. One very important problem with bribes is that they don't help train anything at all. A dog that is 'trained' with bribes, isn't really trained at all, and any cue you're giving them isn't conditioned. Sometimes bribes are accidental, like reaching into a pocket and crinkling the plastic food bag just before you say 'Come'. Many dogs are more attune to the sound of a rustling plastic than they are to their owner's voice. If you give a dog a new cue they don't yet understand, there is not much practical difference between a bribe and an elicitor. Both will prompt the response you want in the dog. Phase out the bribe once the dog understands the cue though.
Conditioned Reinforcer: This is something the animal comes to like through training because it is constantly associated with a primary reinforcer. A dog can learn to love words of praise from humans like they were the air itself, if the words are carefully conditioned using occasional primary reinforcers. Without this conditioning, the dog would see no value in the words by themselves.
Elicitor: Any action you use to prompt an animal do the thing you want. Most puppy owners would recall that to teach an eight week old puppy to site, you guide their nose upwards and over their head using a piece of food as an elicitor. The puppy's bottom naturally plops to the ground as the nose goes up, giving you a perfect sit. The food, along with the action of raising it in an arc over the puppy's head is known as an elicitor. Once an elicitor has been trained (conditioned), it is known as a cue. When using an elicitor, the animal is often unaware of what you're trying to achieve, at least at first.
Extinction: This is where a behaviour disappears because it doesn't get reinforced, and without reinforcement it steadily gets weaker until it extinguishes. Getting up and going to work in the morning would disappear as a behaviour - and quite quickly - if the pay checks never came through. Undesirable behavious such as dogs jumping up on people can often be left to extinguish by themselves if they're never reinforced.
Operant Conditioning: Also, just Conditioning, is the process of training some kind of behaviour to happen when a particular stimulus is given. In more technical terms, conditioning is behaviour modification through the association of a desired behaviour with a previously unrelated stimulus. If your pets sit when you ask them to "Sit", they do so usually because you have conditioned them to understand that if they sit, good things usually happen, and so now they do it willingly, and on cue, in the hope of something good.
Opportunity Training: Sometimes a behaviour occurs naturally, and if it's something we want we can use opportunity training to reinforce it. If a dog is tired it will probably lie down. You can then immediately say 'Down' and give them a food treat to reinforce the action. With a number of repetitions, the cue 'Down' becomes conditioned, even though at no point did you use an elicitor or cue for the action, such as a food treat to guide their nose to the ground or a verbal command. Some actions like sneezing, play bowing, shaking and scratching are best trained using opportunity training.
Primary Reinforcer: This is something the animal likes automatically, without having to train them to like it. Food and freedom are good examples of primary reinforcers for dogs.
Punishment: Something no good dog owner should use. This is a term that is sometimes misused to mean a negative reinforcer. A punishment is different from a reinforcer though, in that it attempts to stop a behaviour, not strengthen it. The problem with a punishment is that in the eyes of the one being punished it is very hard to correctly work out the behaviour it was intended to halt. This is a critically important fact. For a dog, a punishment is when you come out in the morning and bop him on the nose with a rolled up newspaper for digging holes in the garden last night. In the dog's mind, last night's excavation is long forgotten and he could well be forgiven for thinking you just bopped him for coming to greet you with a wagging tail. The dog had no idea you intended it for last night's activities. The most important principle of punishment is that it almost never stops the behaviour it was intended to stop, unless it is both immediate and harsh. No dog should ever have to endure punishment, and particularly not in the name of training.
Reinforcer: A reinforcer is simply any stimulus that strengthens a behaviour. For example in dog training the reinforcer could be a tasty food treat or a quick game of tug of war, whatever it is there is always some increase in the behaviour as a result of the reinforcer. In most cases this is the behaviour we are trying to train!
Response: The reaction of an animal to the conditions (stimuli) around it. A response could be just about anything, from a small change in the animal's emotional state to a sudden, violent physical action. How the animal responds often gives a good insight into the its motivations. The response of one animal is also sometimes quite different to the response of a another similar animal in the same circumstances, usually because of differences in their life experiences up to that point.
Shaping: The process of improving a behaviour, in particular fine tuning a response to a cue by degrees until the desired outcome is achieved. For example, an excitable dog that only sits quietly for a few seconds can gradually be shaped into one that will happily sit calmly for hours, by reinforcing gradual increases in the duration of the sit over a period of a few weeks or months.
Stimulus: A state or action that causes some kind of response in an animal. In practical terms a stimulus is often a signal or cue such as a verbal command or a physical prompt, however it can also be a state, like a hot day - which as we know normally gives rise to the behaviour of keeping oneself cool.
Training: Training is the process of establishing a set of behaviours. The key to training is conditioning where the desired responses are put on cue. In informal dog training, the word has come to be synonymous with tricks such as Sit and Down or Fetch, however other behaviours can also be trained, such as not begging at the dinner table and being calm around other dogs and people.
Reinforcers vs Punishment: In training (and in behaviourism in general) there are four kinds of consequences to actions: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment and negative punishment. In short, good and bad things either start or stop. This is sometimes an area of great confusion, what makes the difference between a negative reinforcer and a positive punishment? To help sort out the differences, here are two behaviours to consider: (A) A dog that regularly mouths children and (B) A dog that regularly barks at night. Suppose we want to change these behaviours by creating some kind of consequences for them, then we can use each of the four types above. As always, if using punishment, unless it's delevered immediately when the behaviour happens it is almost entirely ineffective; you won't be punishing what you intended to.
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