01/09/2026
Food for thought, I talk about operant conditioning too much if i am honest, and most of it doesn't matter.
I'll sit there naming quadrants at people who came to me because their dog pulls, and half of it is outdated language for something far simpler. Dog training is bigger than four boxes.
Take a dog lying in front of a fire.
It's cold, so it moves towards the heat. Warmth gets added and the behaviour gets stronger, so call it positive reinforcement. Or say the cold has been taken away and the behaviour got stronger, so call it negative reinforcement. Same dog, same fire, same second in time, two labels.
Now it gets too hot and moves off. Heat was added and lying there decreased, so call it positive punishment. Or heat gets removed by moving away and moving away increases, so call it negative reinforcement again.
Now let the fire burn out. The warmth is gone, and the dog stops lying there. Something good was taken away and the behaviour dropped, so that's negative punishment. Nobody trained anything. The wood ran out.
The only variable that actually moved is the dog's body temperature, and that's the one thing nobody in that room can control in that moment.
The quadrants describe what an observer sees after the fact. They don't tell you what the dog wants, what state it's in, or what it's going to do next. That's the bit that matters, and it's the bit the terminology skips right over
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