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Although I promote the use of positive reinforcement and proper environmental arrangement when managing your animal’s behavior, I do think it’s important to understand what the opposite of reinforcement is.
PUNISHMENT (definition)
- Occurs immediately after behavior.
- Serves to decrease the frequency/strength of behavior in the future.
- There’s two types, positive and negative.
- Positive is when something is added to the environment.
- Negative is when something is removed.
Punishment teaches our animals what not to do. Our aim as animal trainers/behavior managers is to teach our animals what to do. So a really big challenge with using punishing strategies is that our animals learn what not to do but don’t learn what behaviors to do instead. On top of this punishment has some really significant and negative side effects, including;
- Increase aggression.
- Apathy (not doing anything).
- Escape avoidance behavior
- Overgeneralized fear of the environment.
So science can tell us that punishment works and provide us with information about the negative side effects of using it. However, it’s common for punishment to be used with little consideration given to the undesirable side effects. It is sometimes used so commonly in our societies that we don’t question it’s use especially when we might see our role models implementing it. Additionally, on top of all this punishment can be very reinforcing to the person using it. This is because the person using it ends up decreasing the behaviors they don’t want in their animals. Consequently, these individuals choose to use punishment again at high frequencies in the future. Another undesirable side effect that can result from punishment is Apathy and learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is where our animals learn that their behavior has no effect on changing their environmental conditions and consequently can just give up trying. To me learned helplessness is one of the worst situations we can put our animals in and should be avoided at all costs.
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