If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated after spending 3 hours online when you just intended to check your e-mail or after giving up—again—on your promise to get outside, meditate, or eat more healthily, you’re like me. And everyone else I know. What keeps us from turning off the TV, shutting off the computer, or taking [more…]
Positively Tricky
We use the word “positive” to mean many different things—and muddy our waters of understanding as a result. In the behavioral sciences, in the strictest sense, the word positive means “something added in.” In positive reinforcement training, then, “positive” means “treat” or reinforce added within a setting to make a particular behavior more likely to [more…]
Easy to Preach, Tough to Practice
The world’s best animal trainers rely on one simple and profound principle: reward movement towards the behavior you want and ignore the rest. The method works with species from dolphins to goldfish, from tigers to spiders. And, of course, it holds for humans too. Given a functioning nervous system, any learner reinforced for success rather [more…]
Shamu’s Golden Ratio
Marriage researcher John M. Gottman claims that he can predict with 94% accuracy which couples will last happily and which, sadly, will not. Studies seem to prove him right. What’s the magic variable, the crucial key? It’s not height or weight. Neither education nor wealth. Not even shared interests, well-synched sex drives, or similar diets [more…]
Self-Reinforcement
It’s easy to think about the benefits of setting up reinforcement for others’ behaviors. If I want the softball team to help each other stay focused, I offer my catcher praise when she returns to the bench after having taken a minute for a conference with her mentally-rattled pitcher. If a student catches himself using [more…]
