Operant Conditioning - do you know the difference?

 Most people have heard the terms operant conditioning, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement.  Usually people think that is the whole deal but they are missing two key terms which are positive punishment and negative punishment.  

The reason this topic is on my mind is I recently went to Science Museum of Virginia and watched their "Rat Basketball" show.  It was everything I thought it would be and you could tell the animals were well trained but the educator made the classic mistake of equating negative reinforcement to punishment.  

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I promise you it is not as complicated as people think and that everyone uses all of these in their daily lives without even realizing it.

Let me break the phrases down. 

Positive only means applying a stimulus. Positive doesn't automatically mean it is good.

Negative only means removing a stimlus. Negative doesn't automatically mean it is bad.

Reinforcement means you want a behavior to increase.

Punishment means you want a behavior  to decrease or stop.  

Positive reinforcement means we are applying a stimulus (usually a treat) to increase a desired behavior.  So when you say "sit" and your dog eventually sits you give them a treat so that next time you say "sit" they are more likely to do it (and faster). * I use this at work with some of the smaller livestock and our emu.  It is by far the most common training method and is what all clicker training methods use.  This is also how I trained my dog to jump into a laundry basket.

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Positive punishment means we are applying a stimulus to decrease an undesired behavior.  The general example of this is spankings.  In most animal training settings this has been shown to not be a super effective training method as it tends to create more problems the solutions.   

Negative reinforcement is taking a stimulus away to increase a desired behavior.  So your alarm goes off and you have to get up to hit the snooze to turn off the noise.  Hitting the snooze takes away the annoying stimulus while increasing the likelihood that you will get up faster next time.  *I use this a lot for horses and livestock at work because if you use only treats with large animals it can get pretty dangerous pretty fast.  For horses it works like this:  I want a horse to step to the side so I can get by, so I poke them.  I stop poking them once they move.  Next time I poke them, they will move over sooner because they know as soon as they move, the poking stops.

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Negative punishment is last but not least.  This means we are removing a stimulus to decrease an undesired behavior.  The most common example is being "grounded."  So say you threw a ball in the house but you aren't supposed to.  You are now grounded from tv.  Losing tv sucks so you probably won't throw a ball in the house anymore. 

I hope you at least found this interesting and can start to recognize that you are using it every day!