There's a growing trend in this country of moving away from using behavioral science methods in education and child-rearing, and trying a more loving and playful approach.
Popular author and lecturer Alfie Kohn sums up the operant conditioning approach as, "Do this and you'll get that." In a September, 2009 New York Times article, Kohn cites a 2004 study done by two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined by American Edward Deci, which showed that although adult children of parents who used behavioral contingencies in raising them were "somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted ... compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a ‘strong internal pressure' than to ‘a real sense of choice.' Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived and they often felt guilty or ashamed."
Kohn's answer is pretty simple: we should love our children unconditionally.
Evolutionary psychiatrist and professor of veterinary medicine Jaak Panksepp has written a number or papers and done studies showing how play is more important than structured learning. This idea was echoed recently in a piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in which Paul Tough highlighted a stark contrast in two ways of teaching pre-kindergarten kids impulse control. Tough discusses a six-week-long experiment that Angela Lee Duckworth and some of her colleagues at U. Penn conducted with 40 fifth-grade students. '"We did everything right." Duckworth said. She and her colleagues led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not.'
"We got zero effect on everything," Duckworth said.
Tough then described how imaginative play can induce impulse control in young children naturally and automatically. "In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes."
If these two studies are representative of anything (and they may not be), pure play, with no strings attached, is 4 times more powerful than operant conditioning, at least when it comes to teaching impulse control.
Now, I'm no expert in childhood development. I don't even pretend to know everything there is to know about dogs or dog training. What I do know is that dogs are like very young kids in at least two very important ways: they're unencumbered by layers upon layers of thought, and if two or more of them get together, they'll invent some sort of game to pass the time. I also know it's a good idea to question the conventional wisdom about canine behavior, take a hard look at all the myths and folklore from as many angles as possible, and try to come up with explanations that are simpler and more parsimonious.
In her terrific book, Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz says that in order to truly understand dogs, we need to put "our umwelt caps on," meaning we should try to see things from the dog's unique perspective. That's what I try do here, and it's what I encourage my clients and readers to do. I've often said that instead of anthropomorphizing dogs, we need to dogthropomorphize ourselves.
In my most recent article I gave two examples of learning that can't be explained fully through either of the two opposing theories1 on dog training, dominance or learning theory: a) by playing a game where you roll over on your back and act "submissive" toward dogs they become more obedient2, and b) how I taught my own dog Freddie not to scavenge by praising him while he was in the act of doing it3.
In both examples I'm doing things backwards to the way these theories describe how and why dogs learn to obey. And the reason neither theory can explain why my "backwards methods" work is that both theories are thought-centric and, therefore, not quite dogthropomorphic enough.
For instance, one of the prime directives in dominance is that you should never let your dog "think" he's alpha. Even the propositions that dogs somehow know who's alpha and who's not, or that they form dominance hierarchies based on rank and status, require abstract, conceptual, and symbolic thinking. On the other side of the debate, one of the things you hear a lot from positive trainers is that their methods "make a dog think." If dogs can think, what are they thinking? No one seems to be able to answer that question. (And if you ask me, even the simple idea that dogs learn by cause-and-effect is flawed4.)
Meanwhile, when you boil down my examples to their barest essentials, they have nothing to do with a mental thought process going on inside the dog's head. Each simply changes the energetic dynamic taking place between me and the dog. That's why they work.
For example, if a dog's obedience is in any way related to his social instincts, then by rolling over my back I increased each dog's social attraction (which could be rightly called a property of energy), and reduced his social resistance (the opposite energetic polarity). That in turn reduced whatever resistance the dogs might have had to obeying my commands.
In the second case, when my dog was going after sidewalk snacks it wasn't because he was hungry, at least not in the physical sense; no well-fed dog would scavenge for that reason5. He did it because of an internal feeling of pressure, coming from millions of years of evolution, pushing him to try to connect to something in the environment through his prey drive6. (This is the same primordial pressure that motivates dogs to herd our sheep, guard our cattle, fetch our slippers, and sit, and stay, and come when called.) Then, when I praised him while he was scavenging, that need was satisfied by connecting to me emotionally. And since that feeling was, thankfully (and a bit serendipitously), stronger than the feeling he got from scavenging, he gave up the behavior.
Former police dog trainer and natural philosopher Kevin Behan writes, "There are only two ways to interpret the behavior of things ... either we interpret complex behavior in terms of energy or in terms of thoughts." (Behan has actually created a fully-realized energy theory of canine behavior that informs my personal training techniques and philosophy.)
Immanuel Kant said something similar, that the human mind is endowed with the ability to reason, which contains within it categories of judgment, cause and effect, time and space and so on. As a result humans automatically project "reasons" onto things in the natural world, including animate and inanimate objects. (New research shows that there's actually a neurological basis for this tendency, as reported here by Marc Bekoff7).
