Consequential Impact

The four quadrants of operant conditioning — add or remove, increase or decrease — have organized animal training for more than sixty years. They are technically correct. They are also built from outside the animal.A consequence is what the trainer delivers. An impact is what the animal makes of it. This book recovers the missing half of that transaction: the strategic work of promoting and demoting, and a structural reason reinforcement and punishment are not mirror images. Reinforcement is dihedral. Punishment is anhedral. The four classic side effects of punishment are the architecture's own stability solutions, not mysterious bugs.Not an argument for punishment. Not a manual for using it. An account of why the tool is unstable, how small the territory is in which it is the right one, and why a field that will not examine half its toolbox leaves practitioners to use that half badly.Part Four of Revisiting The Behavior of Organisms — the Applied Evolutionary Ethology Series.