(Positive and Negative) Punishment vs. Negative Reinforcement

I just reread Don’t Shoot the Dog, which I recommend extremely highly. Here’s a good summary, but actually just read the whole thing because it’s worth it. There isn’t a kindle version, but if you google for a pdf that will work.

Anyway, I read Don’t Shoot the Dog a while back, then more recently I’ve been reading tons of stuff about modern dog training since we’re getting a dog this coming weekend (!!!). The stuff I’d been reading recently talked about the four quadrants of operant conditioning: positive punishment, negative punishment, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement.

In that context, positive means adding something and negative means taking something away. So, kicking a dog when it did something you didn’t like would be positive punishment. Walking away when the dog did something you didn’t like would be negative punishment. Giving the dog a treat for doing something you liked would be positive reinforcement. Pinching a dog’s ear until it did what you wanted would be negative reinforcement.

And then there’s extinction, which is stopping responding to something that previously worked. That can work too, if the behavior isn’t self-reinforcing. Parents use this when they leave babies to cry themselves to sleep. The baby is crying to attract the parents, so eventually the baby stops crying.

An important message from Don’t Shoot the Dog is that punishment does not reliably work, whether it’s negative or positive punishment. 

(There’s a bit to be said about how to punish effectively, but I won’t go into that here.)

(Extinction works, which is a phenomenon closely related to negative punishment as it is often practiced.)

Negative reinforcement does work. Both punishment and negative reinforcement can cause the animal to shut down, become less happy, and try less hard.

This idea that punishment isn’t just inhumane, it’s ineffective if it’s not also negative reinforcement. I didn’t really get this upon first reading, and it’s an interesting and somewhat subtle idea.

Take social disapproval. If I do something and a friend of mine frowns, that’s punishment. So far, I have learned approximately nothing. If I then stop doing what I’m doing and my friend stops frowning, now the removal of the frown acting as negative reinforcement and I have learned something. I am more likely to stop doing the thing. This seems very important to me in a way that I can tell I haven’t fully internalized.

Punishment is extremely intuitive and reinforcing to the punisher. People like to talk about getting the timing of punishment right. 

But, getting the timing of removing the aversive thing is usually the important factor, as I understand it.

I want to be much more conscious (and strategic) about how I’m using social disapproval. Ideally, I would use it much much less than I do, and I think this shift would happen naturally if I paid better attention. But insofar as i do use it, I want to ensure that I’m timing the removal of my disapproval correctly. I know I’ll sometimes project disapproval for multiple minutes at a time, then leave, which seems obviously inefficient.

(Another note here is that mild social disapproval is both usually a primary punisher and likely to be a conditioned punisher. No one really likes being frowned at, but many people are worried, consciously or not, that a frowning person will mean something far more dramatically bad.)