Behavioral Psychology

Too Much Praise

By  | 

If you use any positive reinforcement too much it ceases to be a positive reinforcement and just becomes par for the course. Sure it’s pleasant for the organism, but it won’t have any effect on future behavior. Remember that the point of a reinforcement, positive or negative, is to make the behavior being reinforced more likely to occur in the future.

Like most trainers, I love using praise to shape behaviors, but praise is a positive reinforcement you have to be especially careful with. There is a delightful part of the book ‘Don’t Shoot The Dog’ where Karen Pryor recounts how at a horse camp a recently arrived camper was petting a horse, saying “Good girl.” The kids who had been there for a while all got on her case, yelling “Why are you saying good girl? She hasn’t even done anything yet!”

The thing to keep in mind, whether you are working with people or animals, is that withholding praise is not the same thing as withholding affection. You want to make sure you use praise with surgical precision, and this means not just worrying about where you use it but also how often you use it. Otherwise the organism will grow so accustomed to the situation that he or she will no longer feel a strong desire to receive praise and it will cease to qualify as a positive reinforcement. The simplest way to define a positive reinforcement is as something the organism really wants. We have said that praise is rocket fuel, the crown jewel of training tools, and this is true but only if you use it sparingly. Just like rocket fuel it can take you into the stratosphere but it burns up fast.

There are lots of other ways that you can show affection in order to help an organism feel safe, wanted, and loved without using praise, and you want to make sure that these ways don’t utilize the same word as your praise word. A solution you can take if you, like the camper from our example above and like most other people, can’t seem to stop yourself from saying “good boy” while petting a dog, is to use “well done” as your praise cue instead. The word you pick doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the organism is aware of what this word signifies, which is recognition in the moment for doing a good job.

Related posts:

  1. Positive Reinforcements We will delve into positive reinforcements and start to apply them to real-world training situations. To reiterate, a reinforcer is anything that occurs at or around the time of an act that tends to increase the probability of that act occurring again. Sticking to positive reinforcements will get you better results and make you and […]...
  2. Tell People When They Are Doing a Good Job Almost all of us take on the role of ‘trainer’ in some capacity, whether it’s as a parent, teacher, boss, or coach. Yet most of us are woefully unversed in the rules of behavioral psychology, with no idea of what the actual mechanisms are that we’re using to get results. One of the major mistakes […]...
  3. Dog Training Psychology I watched a scene unfold before me that will be instructive for our conversation about how to use psychology to train your dog. Today outside a grocery store a guy and his rather large canine friend were out on a walk enjoying the sunny afternoon. A second dog was sitting placidly outside the establishment, leashed […]...
  4. Understanding Positive Reinforcements A positive reinforcement is anything that happens at or slightly after the time of a behavior which makes that behavior more likely to occur in the future. So one key to understanding positive reinforcements, especially in the case of human beings, is that having a clear picture of the underlying drives and motivations of the […]...
  5. Level Of Reinforcement Matters Let’s say that you’re training a puppy and you use corporal punishment to try to elicit behaviors. Quite apart from any moral or ethical objections to this training method, what you’re doing is setting the bar very, very high for what the puppy will interpret as an adequate reinforcement to elicit the desired response. A […]...
  6. Training Using Positive Reinforcements And Negative Reinforcements In the most simplistic form of training using behavioral psychology all positive reinforcements are good and all negative reinforcements are bad. This is due to the fact that all positive reinforcements include a reward, something the organism wants to receive, while all negative reinforcements include an aversive, something the organism wants to avoid. This is […]...
  7. Increasing Skills The Right Way Hopefully if you have decided to pursue an endeavor your ultimate goal is to reach mastery in it, which we define as the highest level you are capable of reaching, not the highest level someone else is capable of reaching. If the goal is mastery, there will be many stages you must pass through on […]...
  8. Understanding Behavioral Reinforcements Reinforcements are not the same thing as stimuli, which confuses a lot of students. The common misconception of behavioral psychology is that it centers around the stimulus-response paradigm, like how we startle when we hear a really loud sound, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of behavioral psychology. The essential factor to […]...
  9. Disappointment As A Motivator Disappointment is queued off from getting a worse than hoped for result. That’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is why some people, in the face of disappointment, feel an inexorable pull to rise above and get better results while others lay down and give up. From the behavioral psychology point of view it comes down […]...
  10. Too Many Reinforcements For Behaviors That Are Not Good Enough I observed a couple futilely attempting to train their dog in a public place. He was a friendly guy but was behaving badly. Barking madly, jumping up on people as they walked by, pulling hard on his leash, and other behaviors that were embarrassing for the couple and pretty annoying for everyone else. They were […]...
  11. Exerting Control If you really start to think about the expression ‘you catch more flies with honey’ it becomes clear that when it comes to exerting control over others appearances can be deceptive. When most of us think of control we think of abusive people, people who use fear, doubt, and intimidation to get their way, who […]...
  12. How to Elicit Behavior Negative Reinforcement Versus Positive Reinforcement There are two main ways to elicit behavior from those around us, negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement. Unfortunately most of use negative reinforcement far more often, which does tend to get good results in terms modifying the behavior in question but also invariably brings with it a lot of emotional […]...
  13. The Afterlife From The Behavioral Point Of View From the behavioral point of view heaven is a positive reinforcement and hell is a negative reinforcement. It’s not like the controllers try to make any bones about it. They call heaven the eternal reward and hell the eternal punishment. Rewards and punishments are the engines that drive positive and negative reinforcements. Something that is […]...
  14. Dealing With Rejection From a behavioral point of view when someone rejects you what they are actually rejecting is a constellation of behaviors. Conversely when they accept you what they are accepting is a constellation of behaviors. One of the reasons rejection hurts is because most of us don’t view it that way. Whether someone has known us […]...
  15. Using Extinction To Stop Unwanted Behaviors If you want to elicit a certain behavior you use positive or negative reinforcements, along with shaping, to reach your desired goal. But if you want to make a behavior stop reinforcements are ineffective. You’re left with the choice between punishment and extinction. Punishment is the preferred method, as almost anyone who looks back on […]...
  16. Train Your Dog To Go To The Bathroom Outside If you have a puppy or an untrained dog who has been defecating, urinating, or both inside your house, teaching him to go to the bathroom outside is really easy using behavioral psychology. You just need to understand a few key concepts, put them into practice, and have the patience to keep at it until […]...
  17. Telling Your Kids They Did A Good Job We all want to be told we’re doing a good job, not only because it makes us feel really good but also because with this seal of approval, especially when it comes from authority figures, uncertainty around how we are supposed to behave dissipates. Behind every ‘good job’ is the implicit message ‘do more of […]...
  18. Praise Praise is a Ferrari, it’s rocket fuel, the crown jewel of training tools. When used appropriately, it is the most powerful positive reinforcer for a human being, whose combination of intelligence and emotional sensitivity makes receiving affirmation of a job well done highly motivating. In recent years many psychologists have pushed the idea forward that […]...
  19. Learning To Accept Praise We all know that getting criticized hurts, even when it’s valid, even when it’s meant to help us. Most of us actively work to avoid criticism and to garner praise. We want those around us, especially the authority figures we respect, to see us in a positive light. From the gold star in elementary school […]...
  20. Praise Versus Encouragement We tend to lump praise and encouragement together under the rubric of ‘awesome positive reinforcements’. They share the qualities of making the subject feel really good, and when used in proper doses they make a desired behavior more likely to occur in the future. I started thinking about what makes them different, and the conclusion […]...
Related Items