Bad Behavior

I can’t believe I haven’t put this list in my collection of frameworks.

These are the eight ways to untrain a bad behavior, from Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog.

  1. Shoot the dog
  2. Punishment
  3. Negative reenforcement
  4. Extinction
  5. Train an incompatible behavior
  6. Put the behavior on cue
  7. Shape the absence
  8. Change the motivation

Number 6 is my favorite.  For example if you want to get somebody to stop reading, pay them to read; and then later, stop paying them.  It really works.

4 thoughts on “Bad Behavior

  1. bhyde Post author

    Hard to train very intermittent behaviors, so the first step would be to get all the potential terrorists to engage in substantially more, then we could put that on cue, and finally we could remove the clue. At that point we would be back where we started from.

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