Today I want to share a book that can help you not just at work, but in your everyday life to build better relationships with your family and friends. It's called Don’t Shoot the Dog: The Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor.
Karen Pryor is a scientist specialized in marine mammal biology and behavioral psychology. She spent many years training dolphins and studying their behavior in oceanariums. Interesting, that her openings are applicable not only to animals but for humans with the same rate of success.
In her book Karen describes principles of training desired behavior with reinforcing:
Usually we are using them [principles] inappropriately. We threaten, we argue, we coerce, we deprive. We pounce on others when things go wrong and pass up the chance to praise them when things go right. We are harsh and impatient with our children, with each other, with ourselves even.
I see this quote as the main problem that author tries to address.
A bit of theory from the book:
A reinforcer is anything that, occurring in conjunction with an act, tends to increase the probability that the act will occur again.
There are 2 types of reinforces: positive and negative. Positive is something that subject wants to get, negative is something subject wants to avoid.
The key idea of the book is that ❗️negative reinforcement doesn't work. Punishments don't work.
I think that’s really important, because our first instinct is usually to use negative reinforcements.
What do we do when a child doesn’t do their homework? Or ignores us when we ask for something? Or when a puppy chews the furniture? Even at school, teachers highlights our mistakes to show we did something wrong.
The book provides a theory of how behavior is formed, how different types of reinforces affect it, how behavior can be trained or untrained to achieve the desired results.
Practices to change undesired behavior are actually one of the most interesting part of the book. I'll talk about that in the next post.
#booknook #softskills #communications