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| How Dogs Learn: The Secrets of Dog Psycholog |
So
you want to start training your dog but don’t know where to start?
Here’s a secret: If you win a dog’s mind, the training is easy. The good
news is you can do it with a basic understanding of dog psychology and
how dogs learn.
Want more good news? Not only does this work with puppies, it works with older dogs with behavior issues.
Whether it’s digging up the yard or keeping you up at night with their barking, you can solve just about any dog problem with a little knowledge of dog psychology.
Ready to learn some doggie psych? Good! Let’s get started.
Dog Psychology 101
Turns out you might be more like your
dog than you think. Sure you both like walks in the park and bacon, but
did you know that behavioral learning theories in human psychology can
help you understand your dog?
Yup, human psychology as applied to dogs can give you some legit insight on teaching your pooch.
There are basic behavioral psychology
theories that could come in handy when you start training your dog and
trying to modify their behaviors. Don’t worry, we’ll keep it fun and
interesting for you.
To prove it, here’s a video of a baby teaching a dog to talk. Bet you never saw that in your Psych class. Now, on to the science-y stuff!
Learning and Conditioning
How to people learn? It’s a process that involves observing, processing, and retaining new information.
How do babies learn how to talk? They
observe the grown-ups do it, they process the observation and make the
connection of what the mouth sounds are for (communicating). Once
they’re able to do it themselves, they retain the basics of the
behavior, how it’s done and what it’s for.
What is Conditioning? No, not the
stuff you use with your shampoo. This conditioning is about about
stimuli and responses and how to use it with behavior.
Conditioning comes with two theories, classical and operant. I think this will really help, so let’s take a look at both.
Classical Conditioning: ‘Ding Ding’ = Drool
The main gist of this theory is that
behaviors are reflexes that act as responses to certain stimuli.
Probably the most famous psychologist that you’ll know with regards to
classical conditioning is Ian Pavlov.
Fun fact, Pavlov’s famous experiment had to do with dogs, so you can see how this relates to dog training and behavior modification.
What Pavlov did was to condition dogs to salivate with just the sound of a bell.
I doubt your dog salivates when he hears a bell. That’s because it’s not something that dogs normally do, right?
Well, Pavlov conditioned the dogs by
ringing a dinner bell just before he served the dogs their food. He did
this for a certain period of time, up to the point where the dogs
started to salivate just by hearing the bell, even without any food
present!
By that point, the salivation was pretty much just a reflex rather than as a direct response to food.
While ringing bells to get your dog
to salivate may not exactly be what you’re looking for to train your dog
with, you can also apply the principle of classical conditioning with
things they are apprehensive of like leashes, nail cutters, and so on.
Simply expose them to the negative item before presenting them with a
good thing like food, treats, or a good walk.
I observed this firsthand with one of
our dogs, who hated her leash the first time we put it on her. But all
it took was one enjoyable day out at the park (she hadn’t enjoyed much
of the outdoors at that point), and now she absolutely loves her leash.
In fact, she goes crazy when she sees it, now associating it with a good
day out.
Operant Conditioning: Good Doggies Get Rewards
Much like its older sibling Classical
Conditioning, Operant Conditioning operates on the idea of stimulus and
response. But this time, it doesn’t view the responses as reflexes but
rather as a result of either positive or negative stimuli.
Think of it as a ‘rewards’ and ‘punishment’ sort of thing.
Basically, when you do something good
and get a reward, chances are you’ll want to do that good behavior
again to get another reward, right? Like when you were a kid and you
got a gold star for doing well in class, you kept on aiming to get more
and more gold stars.
And if you do something bad and get
punished for it (like getting grounded because you took the car out for a
joyride without either of your parents around), you’ll probably never
want to do it again.
The same idea also works with our dogs. They behave to get rewards and avoid punishment, and if they don’t they don’t get rewarded and instead get punished for it.
Rewards can range from treats to
praise, or anything else your dog enjoys. Common punishments include
choke or shock collars, yelling, hitting, etc.
At Good Doggies, we like to emphasize
gentle and humane teaching of your dog. At the very least, the absence
of a reward is punishment enough.
Social Learning Theory: Doggie See, Doggie Do
The idea of this theory is simply
that humans (and dogs) learn behaviors by observing how other humans (or
dogs) behave. It says that behavior is a product of observation and
imitation.
One famous study in relation to this
theory is when Albert Bandura showed some kids a video of how grown-ups
treated a Bobo doll. Prior to this, the children have never seen or
encountered a Bobo doll. The video showed a woman punching and yelling
at the doll.
Afterwards, Bandura led the kids to a
room that had a Bobo doll in it and observed how they treated the doll.
And guess what? Some of the kids did exactly as they saw the grown-up
do in the video.
Poor Bobo.
But when Bandura brought another
group of kids who did not see the video into the room with the doll,
they didn’t react similarly. In fact, none of them punched or yelled at
the doll unlike with the kids in the other group.
Yay for Bobo!
Similarly, the phenomenon described by the Social Learning Theory can be observed in dogs.
But here’s the catch.
We humans can’t use social learning to teach new behaviors to our dogs because they only learn socially by observing other dogs.
So that video of the dog ‘imitating’
the baby’s babble at the beginning of this post? It’s not exactly the
dog copying what the kid is doing. Chances are the dog was ‘responding’
to the babble.
So no, your dog won’t learn to talk
just by observing and imitating you (though we wish they could because
there are times when we’d give all the pennies in the world just to know
what they’re thinking).
And trust me, no matter how much
effort you give into acting like how an alpha dog would, your dog will
likely not respond as you’d want them to.
Dogs are smart enough to see that we
aren’t like them, so we don’t have the social influence it takes for the
Social Learning Theory to be applied with them.
If you have a well-mannered older dog
who knows the tricks you’re trying to teach your younger dog, then you
can try that. But I wouldn’t count on it as in our house it just so
happened that the younger dogs taught the older ones their (bad) habits.
It’s safe to say that you should stick with the two conditioning theories when you train your dog.
Conclusion
While deciding how you can start
training your dog to teach them some new behaviors or just wanting to
modify their present misbehaviors to lose the ‘mis’ part, it can be
tricky to know where to start. Luckily, human behavioral psychology has
the answers on how dogs learn.
The two principles which are most
often used by trainers from all over are derived from Classical and
Operant conditioning, which both have something to do with stimuli and
responses. Meanwhile, Social Learning is another theory that can be
applied to dog training, just not by human trainers.
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