This remark has been hurled at me. How about you?
I certainly don’t call myself “purely positive” or particularly like the term. But here it comes at me, predictable as clockwork, anyway.
The reason this keeps happening is in the “short version” below. I also talk about why I don’t care for the term. But that’s not quite the whole story. The “long version” covers why we might not want to estrange ourselves completely from the goal of positive reinforcement training.
The Short Version
“Purely positive,” or sometimes, “all positive,” are terms most often used as epithets by force trainers to refer to trainers who avoid force and aversives. They are used as a straw men in arguments.
A Straw Man is a misrepresentation of an opponent’s argument that is usually laughably extreme and easy to disprove. That’s its purpose. The person who creates the Straw Man can knock it down and play like they have disproved their opponent’s actual argument.
Here is an example of a Straw Man. Judith runs a landscaping business.
Judith: “The pink petunias withered up and died back early this year. I guess they are more attractive to certain pests or maybe it’s because they came from a different supplier and just weren’t as healthy to start with. Since the pure red ones did so much better I guess I’ll use red next year whenever possible.”
Cindy: “What have you got against pink? If you stop using pink flowers of any kind you’ll lose customers! Whoever heard of a landscaper who doesn’t use pink? That’s ridiculous!”
Cindy recast Judith’s concerns about a problem specific to pink petunias, as a global, irrational objection to all pink flowers. Note that Cindy could have argued logically against Judith’s actual reasons. She could have said, “That didn’t look like a pest-borne problem,” or “But you ordered other plants from that supplier that did just fine,” or “I read that this was an especially bad year for the Pink Petunia Bug but they emerge on a seven year cycle. Pink petunias will probably do fine next year.” These statements would have addressed what Judith actually said and they might have had a good discussion. Instead, Cindy instantly morphed Judith’s statement into something else, then acted as if Judith were being extremely unreasonable.
People generally construct Straw Men when they have a dearth of logical arguments. Once in a while they have an honest misunderstanding. If that happens, the person who built the Straw Man can be gently presented with one’s real point of view and a discussion of its true merits and faults may ensue. But sometimes Straw Men are constructed by people who just want to win at all costs, the truth be damned, or are used consciously by people who know that what they are saying is untrue. When someone does that, it’s generally the case that they are not going to listen to your true point of view or play by the rules of polite conduct in an argument.
The reason that bringing up “purely positive” is a Straw Man is that virtually no one is claiming to be a 100% positive reinforcement trainer.
I’m sure not, but I’ve been reamed up one side and down the other for supposedly claiming to be “all positive.” The person got a real kick out of “proving” that all positive wasn’t possible, when that wasn’t even relevant to our discussion and certainly not to my training.
If someone starts ranting about “Purely Positive Zealots” at this point I will only go one round in a discussion, then quit. I seek to be calm in the face of their misrepresentation. Whatever I write will be done with others who may be reading in mind. Then I’m out. There’s no point in having a discussion with someone who is clinging to irrelevancies, not to mention mocking me.
Nomenclature Problems
As has been pointed out by many trainers, since the operant learning nomenclature uses “positive” in a mathematical sense and it can apply both to reinforcement and punishment, the waters get muddy immediately if one calls oneself (or is called) a “positive trainer.” In operant learning, positive just means you add something as a consequence to a behavior, and it can be a good something or a bad something. So there are both positive reinforcement and positive punishment under the umbrella of positive. Oops! And we’ve left negative punishment, the type that does not involve applying an aversive, by the wayside.
The term “positive trainer” is not even close to accurate.
Even though like most other people I do fall into using the term sometimes as a shorthand, I think calling ourselves “positive” anything is a bad idea. It muddies the waters. It adds a glamour to a term that we need to be un-glamourizing. “Positive” has, and needs to have, a specific, quasi-mathematical meaning.
The Longer Version, Or, What if it Were Possible After All?
However. It’s more complicated than what I wrote above.
The problem with saying, “Hey, ‘purely positive’ is a myth and an insult” and leaving it at that is that it erases it as a beautiful paradigm. It implies that one must use something farther down the Humane Hierarchy than positive reinforcement to train an animal successfully. We don’t want to imply that, do we?
I’ve discussed before that research has shown that animals do not need to make mistakes to learn a behavior. Although this is counterintuitive to us, they do not have to know “what is wrong” to know what is right. Also, punishment (including negative punishment) is not necessary to teach a behavior well, or to “prepare an animal for real life,” or toughen the animal up. I wrote a whole post about that too.
I think that those of us who are aiming for the positive reinforcement paradigm are the ones who are in the best position to know exactly how much success we are having. We are confronted with real life every day with our animals and know when we’re not using positive reinforcement exclusively and are grown up enough to be honest about it. The force avoiding trainers I know are extremely willing to identify and classify every training technique they use. For instance, when they are using negative punishment or extinction, they will say so, and they will define the terms for those who don’t understand.
Then there’s the fact that we live with our dogs. Negative reinforcement is probably a daily occurrence in most households with dogs (think spatial issues; body blocking; momentary leash pressure). My opinion is that a person would have to have godlike foresight to be able to avoid every situation in which it could occur. And believe me, I work to avoid it!
The important thing is that I can’t think of a time when aiming for a method more centered on positive reinforcement (or an intervention even less intrusive) has harmed my training. It has helped numerous times. It helps me and my dogs for me to think about the ways I teach things and get creative about training behaviors without negative punishment or negative reinforcement (or positive punishment of course) when possible. I know for me it is easy to get set in my ways, and something really nice can emerge when I apply myself to thinking about a familiar behavior as if it is the first time I’ve taught it.
Aiming to train without punishment at all (including without negative punishment) and without negative reinforcement is a beautiful goal and I don’t think we need to be apologizing for that.
This post is part of a series:
- But We Don’t Give Our Kids a Cookie Every Time They Tie Their Shoes!
- But It’s Unhealthy to Protect Your Dog From All Stress!
- But Every Dog is Different!
- But What if Your Dog Runs Out Into Traffic?
Coming up:
Sadly, I think it boils down to the fact that their are those who will bulldoze their way through life at anyones expense to get their needs met and then there are those who really try to understand others and their environment so that they can find win, win solutions to meet everyones needs. I don’t think we should ever apologize for being the latter, but just keep doing what we’re doing and maybe someday we’ll be in the majority 🙂
You always say it so succinctly! Right on target, as usual, Marjorie.
Thanks for this blog Eileen. It is very timely for me. The issue of “camps” and “purists” really has no place when the welfare of animals is at stake. I would like to think of us as on a continuum toward excellence, both in training and in the treatment of our animals. That said, what I actually see is quite the opposite. More often than not people are angry, defensive and irrational when it comes to their own actions, even when an animal’s welfare is involved. There is so much I could say on the subject of how angry people get when you choose something that isn’t what they chose, or was unknown to them. I ran across this when my daughters were born, when they were breastfed and when we educated them at home. People were apoplectic about something that seemed to question their long-held beliefs. Dog training does the same thing. Here is the most recent example and I will leave it at that. I was walking my dog and my neighbour’s dog with my treat pouch snapped around my waist as I have done for years. A neighbour and his wife came around a corner with their golden retriever. Immediately, I saw the worried expression on the face of the leash-holder, the wife. She is petite and her dog is a good size and often reactive. To be fair, my dogs have been reactive in the past as well. I immediately steered my two across to the other side of the street, had them sit, and rewarded them from the pouch for their excellent behavior as they watched the other dog walk by. And what does the husband of the couple do? Starts heckling me for giving them treats. “Oh, the treeeeeats…always treats….” yadda, yadda. This isn’t the first time. He does it pretty much every time he sees us walking and we are within earshot. Why? Because his dog went to a puppy class where treats weren’t used? (She did.) Because his dog is perfectly behaved and mine are not? (She isn’t). Because he’s an insecure jerk? I don’t know the reason, but I seem to run into his kind more and more in the dog world and everywhere else actually. It’s a tough world out there when you buck the norm. Good for you Eileen for writing this blog and helping to actually CHANGE the norm, for the sake of the animals at the end of our leashes.
Thank you Carolyn. Gosh, it’s bad enough to get hassled online, you have to get heckled in your own neighborhood as well? So sorry.
I always wonder whether I should be writing these “argumentative” posts at all. But they make me feel better sometimes, just writing it out, and they seem affirming to some folks.
Thanks for your comment and I wish your neighbor would behave better.
He probably watches Cesar Millan and thinks he’s the authority on dog training. Then again I’ve even seen Cesar use treats to desensitise a fearful dog before so even he isn’t averse to using them (much to my surprise).
He’s also probably feeling insecure that you managed to fix your dog’s reactivity and he hasn’t managed to sort out his.
Just ignore him and the other hecklers – you’re the one seeing improvements in your dogs, I bet they aren’t.
Such is the problem with labels. The closest I’ve been able to come to describe what we mean to convey when we say a “positive trainer” is a “coercion free trainer”. Aiming to use as much positive reinforcement as possible is an admirable goal. But like you said, it would be incorrect to claim that it’s all a person ever uses.
Agree. I’ve got one more post coming out on labels, then maybe I’ll quit on that for a while. I think I’m about to wear it out…. Thanks for the comment!
I find the term “positive trainer” confusing as well due to the operant conditioning/learning theory definitions. I usually refer to myself as a reward-based trainer.
That’s a good one! I think it’s better even than “reinforcement-based trainer” since reward isn’t usually associated with negative reinforcement.