Dogs are Like Piggy Banks
An Illustration of Reinforcement History at Work
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Sometimes I like to think of my dogs as piggy banks.
Hold on, stay with me here.
Each time I mark and reinforce my dog, I’m dropping a dime into the piggy bank for that behavior, let’s say for this discussion that behavior is a sit. Over time, I build up a wonderful savings account in my sit piggy bank, and my dog will start to sit faster, and I can start to fade out using my hand signal. When my savings account gets sufficiently big, I can even drop my reinforcer (say a cookie), and still get my desired behavior. Thinking myself a big fancy dog trainer, I now take my dog out into the world to show off this amazing sit. I suggest to a friend that we go to a street fair, where this friend and any random stranger passing by can ooh and aah over my amazingly well trained dog. We arrive in the parking lot, and I ask my super smart dog for a sit in front of my friend. Unbeknownst to me, this sit requires a deduction from my savings account, say in the amount of $1. So it takes my dog a little longer than at home, and maybe I need to lure with my hand a little more. I’m also unaware that this $1 sit has a hidden transaction fee of $5 if I don’t make my usual deposit. I don’t want my friend to think my dog will only listen to me when I have treats, so I didn’t bring any, and don’t reward my dog on this sit.
My $1 sit has now become a $6 sit.
I now walk with my friend to the street fair, which is crowded, noisy, filled with the awesome smells of hot dogs cooking, and everywhere I look there are children just waiting to pet my dog. This is the perfect location for these children and their parents (and my friend) to see the awesome dog trainer I truly am! So I ask my dog to sit. Once again, I’m not aware that there is a $2 added charge for crowds, a $1 charge for loud noises, a $3 charge for the smell of hot dogs, and a $4 charge for children trying to pet my dog. What was a $1 sit in the parking lot has now become an $11 sit at the street fair. Unfortunately, since each repetition was only depositing dimes in my sit piggy bank, I would have had to have marked and reinforced my sit 160 times to still have enough in my piggy bank to counteract these new charges on top of the withdrawal I already made. Needless to say, my dog does not sit, as my account is now overdrawn. Instead, he repeatedly “ignores” me to lick the faces of the children petting him, steal a hot dog out of their hands, and then spook when the speaker system malfunctions nearby. I am now absolutely distressed. Instead of the world seeing the amazing dog trainer I am, they are seeing me repeatedly fail, and with every failure I get more and more frustrated with my dog. I increasingly try to force my dog to sit, first pretending to have a cookie, then pushing his butt down, yelling sit over and over again louder and louder. I put on my “angry voice” and tell him he is a bad dog as he looks confused…and all the while, each one of these interactions is pulling deductions out of my piggy bank left and right; the imaginary dollar signs are flying!
My friend realizes this is no longer the relaxing outing she expected it to be, and suggests that maybe we should just head home. We walk back to the car, my shoulders slumped and my dog trailing behind me, tail down feeling forlorn. When we get home, I wrack my brain, what could have possibly gone wrong? We can do sits at home. We can do sits in a box….with a fox. We can do them here and there, so why can’t we do them everywhere? I ask for a sit. My dog turns away from me and sniffs the ground. I’m so far in sit debt, that my dog won’t even talk to me, scamming lowlife that he thinks I am. I go get my cookies, and slowly, carefully lure my dog into a sit, and begrudgingly give him a treat. My piggy bank has gone from -$2000 to -$1999.90. We have a long way to go.
This is an illustration of reinforcement history, which is at work any time we interact with our dogs. Each reinforcement builds our behavior bank, and asking for that behavior under various circumstances can either add to our bank, or deplete it. We, and our dogs, are hard wired to remember the negative. Evolutionarily speaking, it is how we have survived. Have a poor experience, remember it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it. This is why each negative experience deducts more from our piggy bank than each positive experience adds. Reinforcement history is at play even when we are not “training” our dogs, as they are constantly learning from their environments (again just like we are). If my dog gets in the car to go for a hike each day, they will begin to learn the car predicts a hike and so have a positive association with the car. If I take them to the vet instead, the residual negative association with the car will likely be much stronger, and so take many many more days of associating the car with a hike to undo.
Just something to keep in mind as you navigate this world with your dog :)