Operant Conditioning in Your Romantic Relationships

Something I've noticed that a number of individuals untrained in relationship management theory tend to engage in is arbitrary (that is, seemingly random) punishment and reward inside of relationships. These sort of variable reward and punishment structures inside relationships generally lead to a host of negative outcomes for the person who's subject to arbitrary treatment, including:

• Emotional dependency
• Addiction and attachment
• Wild mood swings
  
• Submission
• Resentment
• Rebellion

Basically, the opposite of what you'd expect to see in a healthy, rewarding, productive relationship.

It's occurred to me that most of the people who use controlling, coercive, and more or less arbitrary relationship management tactics probably are not very familiar with operant conditioning - the system of punishment and reward established by B.F. Skinner for the purposes of behavior modification.

So today, I want to equip you with a very effective means of communicating your likes and dislikes to a romantic partner without ruffling feathers, being seen as an oppressor, or, conversely, a pushover.

I'm going to show you how to use operant conditioning in your relationships.

In my travels, I once saw a mother - normally a very kind, warm, hospitable person - loudly scold her 4 year-old daughter, who was eating sugar cane, to throw the roots in the trash after she was done chewing them, or she'd take the sugar cane away. The daughter, mostly happy and treated well by her family, in this instance had done nothing wrong, and had already been doing exactly this. In rebellion against this seemingly random order / scolding, she threw the chewed sugar cane roots on the ground, instead of into the trash, and the mother dutifully took all the sugar cane away. The daughter began screaming and crying at the top of her lungs.

I asked a friend what caused the problem, and the mother told my friend the tale from the mother's point of view and my friend translated. I asked why the mother had scolded her daughter thus in the first place; what brought this about?

The mother's reply was that she simply wanted to make sure her daughter was learning to behave the right way. Then - in a sign of insightfulness and openness to learning it's rare to see even in the first world - she asked me (through my friend) if there was anything she should have done differently.

"Yes," I said. "Tell her nicely, instead of scolding her, and you'll give her no reason to rebel."

This probably seems like a simple enough realization, but most people's relationships are rife with problems caused by seemingly easy-to-avoid conditioning mistakes.

Punishment is given for no reason, causing rebellion; rewards are given when they should be withheld, encouraging bad behavior; and rewards are withheld when they should be given, discouraging good new behaviors.

All of this can be avoided, however, with a little education on operant conditioning.

What Is Operant Conditioning?

In 1937, famed psychologist B.F. Skinner first used the term "operant conditioning" to describe the process of modifying an individual's behavior via a system of reward and punishment.

Operant conditioning, according to Wikipedia, is made up of two parts:

1. Positive elements - things that are given following a behavior

2. Negative elements - things that are taken away following a behavior

Note two very, incredibly, unbelievably key points here:

1. In the context of operant conditioning, positive does not mean "good," and neither does negative mean "bad." Positive simply means that something is given, and negative simply means that something is taken away. What's given may be a punishment OR a reward, and what's taken away may be something liked OR something disliked.

2. All forms of conditioning must take place AFTER a behavior has already taken place. You cannot train responses before a behavior takes place - the brain doesn't work that way, and it doesn't make the emotional connection that inspires behavior modification.

That last point is particularly important, and it's what the mother in that example early made her primary mistake in. She tried to punish before a behavior took place - scolding the child for an event that hadn't yet happened in an attempt to scare her off of doing it. We'll look at why you don't want to do this below, but for now, just keep in mind that you can only encourage or discourage behavior after it's manifested in some way or another.

Now, the positive and negative elements of operant conditioning are further broken down into three smaller pieces:

1. Reinforcement - used to increase a behavior's frequency
   

2. Punishment - used to decrease a behavior's frequency
   

3. Extinction - a decrease in behavior caused by a lack of response

Of each of the first two, you can have positive (giving this following a behavior) and negative (removing this following a behavior) variants.

Positive reinforcement (giving an appetitive, or liked, stimulus to someone after a certain behavior) and negative reinforcement (removing a disliked, or aversive, stimulus after a certain behavior) both serve to increase a behavior's frequency.

So positive reinforcement gives something liked, negative reinforcement removes something disliked.

Positive punishment (giving an aversive, or disliked, stimulus or punishment after a certain behavior) and negative punishment (removing an appetitive, or liked, stimulus after a certain behavior) both serve to decrease a behavior's frequency.

So positive punishment gives something disliked, negative punishment removes something liked.

Further, there is an established process for shaping human behavior with operant conditioning, and it's the one we'll be learning, using, and following in this article:

1. State Goal (tell her what you want to have happen and why)

2. Monitor Behavior (pay attention to what she actually does)

3. Reinforce Desired Behavior (reward her for good behavior)

4. Reduce Incentives for Undesired Behavior (remove rewards for bad behavior)

You'll notice, interestingly enough, that giving aversive - disliked - stimuli is not in the list.

It's all about giving something liked, or taking something liked away (giving or removing a reward).

At no point in the process do you give something disliked or have to take it away (giving or removing something unpleasant or uncomfortable).

Personally, I wasn't aware of operant conditioning until later in my seduction career, and I only learned the basic principles of "reward good behavior, punish bad behavior" early on. It took me years of refining to arrive at the conclusion that using aversive stimuli was usually undesirable, and simply giving and removing incentives was far more effective.

But it is, and we'll go into why below.

The Problem with Aversive Stimuli

In "End Relationship Drama with These 2 Rules," I mentioned that one of the reasons women in relationships will sometimes cause drama is to get a negative emotional reaction out of you.

That's right... sometimes women want you to give them something bad for drama.

The reasons why are a little more complex than we want to get into here, but suffice it to say that positive punishment isn't always a negative for people. Just like some children will cause trouble simply to get noticed by their parents and get any kind of attention - even the "bad" kind - so too will women.

This is the problem with "disliked" things  - if getting your attention was what she really needed, then positive punishment often isn't really punishment at all... it's incentive. It's a reward.

Rather than being a bad thing, this form of punishment gets twisted into being a good thing.

And when you punish the girl this way, instead of her being discouraged from pursuing a certain behavior, she ends up encouraged, because now she knows she can get a reaction out of you with it.

This doesn't show up in lab experiments with mice in a cage - a punishment is nothing but bad - there's no additional social attention, no boost, nothing good in it at all, just pure negative affect, through and through.

But in the real world, things aren't so simple, and the aversive stimulus you mean to use as "punishment" can actually provide reward. Things like:

• Attention (even if it's to yell at her)
  
• A response (even a negative one)
  
• Her knowing she can get you to react if she wants to
• Her knowing she has the ability to push your buttons

... all simply serve to reinforce a behavior (unless the punishment is so severe that is thoroughly discourages it - we'll talk about this in a bit).

The problem with positive punishment (giving aversive stimuli... what most people traditionally think of as punishment) is that it just as often reinforces a behavior in real world non-laboratory settings as it dissuades someone from it.

And the problem with negative reinforcement (removing an aversive stimulus) is that unless you can find some way to be constantly punishing a woman in the real world, there's not really all that much aversive stimuli for you to remove.

So if we can't use positive punishing to all that good effect most of the time in our relationships, and negative reinforcement is impractical for our purposes, what can we do?

If using aversive stimuli to punish is out - except in a few select cases which we'll review below - that means we've only got two (2) options for dealing with behavior:

• Rewards (given or taken), and

• Extinction

And aversive stimuli is out, because positive punishment (following up bad behavior with punishment) can actually serve as reinforcement, and because for us to use negative reinforcement (following up good behavior by taking punishment away), we'd need to be punishing our partners in a relationship all the time unless they did what we wanted them to do.

Yeah, that's not practical.

So that cuts us down to three options for affecting behavior, normally:

1. Positive reinforcement (following up good behavior by giving a liked-thing)

2. Negative punishment (following up bad behavior by removing a liked-thing)

3. Extinction (ignoring a behavior and letting it slowly fade away)

We'll take a look at each of these, but before we do, I want to cover one other thing:

Using operant conditioning for shaping human behavior.

Behavior Shaping

Behavior-shaping needs to rely on emotion. Nothing else truly works. However, when you're dealing with humans, you aren't dealing with purely emotional creatures as you are with dogs or rodents. You're dealing with beings that think, that reason, and that understand; and you'll get far more mileage with them if they know why you're doing what you're doing and can throw the force of their minds behind reconditioning their behavior themselves.

One of the big fears of people first hitting this website is that it's all manipulation. There's a scary word. Here, we are manipulating people like puppets on emotional strings... pull them this way and they do this, pull them that way and they do that.

With the operant conditioning process of behavior shaping, you get to wash your hands of any charge of manipulation. You tell the person you're using this with exactly what you're doing, make sure they understand it, and then do it.

Chances are, if you're doing it for the right reasons, they'll even support you on it.

The process goes like this:

1. State Goal (tell her what you want to have happen and why)

2. Monitor Behavior (pay attention to what she actually does)

3. Reinforce Desired Behavior (reward her for good behavior)

4. Reduce Incentives for Undesired Behavior (remove rewards for bad behavior)

So, let's say you have a girlfriend who has the habit of texting while the two of you are out at restaurants, which you go to twice a week because you both enjoy eating outside. You consider it disrespectful that she's texting during your meals and think it looks bad, and ask her to stop. She says she will, but keeps doing it anyway.

Following the above process, you do this:

1. Tell her that you find it rude that she texts during dinner, and you'd like her to stop, and you know she would too, but she keeps forgetting. So you're going to start taking a week off from going to restaurants with her after each restaurant-texting slip up. She protests; you tell her, no, this is the only way we'll change that behavior, so we're going to do it.

2. You keep track of her behavior, and stay aware of when she's reaching for her phone out at dinner with you.

3. When she doesn't text during dinner, you keep going to dinner with her as planned (positive reinforcement; you keep giving her something she likes). When she does, you take the next week off from going to dinner (negative punishment; you remove something she likes).

Here's another one. Say you're dating a girl who's really cool and really cute, except that she keeps using some specific phrase over and over again and can't seem to stop ("Ohmygodzounds!" is the one we'll use for this example). The first 20 times she uses it, it's funny; after that, it's just irritating. You ask her to stop, and she says she will... but doesn't.

So you:

1. Tell her that because you want her to stop using that and you don't think she can on her own, you're going to help her, and any time she says "Ohmygodzounds!" you're going to point out to her that she said it, and then you're not going to speak to her for 20 minutes, and you don't want her speaking to you either.

2. Then, you pay attention to that word.

3. When she doesn't use it, you continue speaking to her as usual. When she does, you point it out to her, tell her you can't speak with her for 20 minutes, and then tell her you'll talk to her again in 20 minutes, and go in another room and shut the door.

You might have to do that 3 or 4 times the first night you start doing it with her, and once or twice the second night, but by the third night she'll be all but cured, and you'll be amazed at how quickly you'll have rid her of something you simply could not rid her of any other way.

That's the power of operant conditioning for you.

How Rewarding Works

Rewards are used to encourage a behavior, or at least not discourage it.

For instance, we can assume that your girlfriend enjoys talking with you. So being able to talk with you normally is a form of positive reinforcement. Taking that away is negative punishment.

There are all kinds of rewards scattered throughout your relationship. Anything that she enjoys, that makes her feel good, and that she values that comes from you is a reward. These include:

• Spending time together
• Talking with one another
• Being seen in public together
• Being physically affectionate
  
• Having sex with one another
• Going on outings together
• Going on trips together

... and any number of other things you can think of that you do together.

You can give her more of these things as rewards for good behavior, and less of them as penalties for bad behavior.

Rather than add something aversive as a response to bad behavior, simply remove something she likes, like going dancing with her.

You must make sure the reinforcement is right for the behavior you're shaping, of course.

If you cancel a vacation with her because she hogged the covers again, that's a little much. And if you seek to reward her making you a 6-course meal when she never cooks by talking to her a little more than usual, she's going to be disappointed and underwhelmed.

Match rewards, or the removal of those rewards, to the behavior being reinforced or punished.

How Extinction Works

Sometimes something will be minor enough that you don't need to use the giving or taking of a reward to deal with it. It's the equivalent of a young child who learns a dirty word and keeps using it because people keep laughing... as soon as the laughter stops happening, the word stops getting used.

Your relationships work exactly like this.

Imagine your girlfriend came up with a nickname for you that you aren't too fond of. Say she decided to start calling you Teddy Ruxpin, because you wore a shirt that kind of looked like the shirt Teddy Ruxpin wears one day. For reasons we won't explore here, you don't like being called by this name.

What do you do?

You don't use positive reinforcement. You don't use negative punishment.

You just ignore it.

So when she shows up at your apartment and says, "How's my Teddy Ruxpin doing today?" you simply don't answer. You just stay engrossed in what you're doing. When she says, "Jerry, you okay?" you look up and say, "Hey babe, how was work today?"

Then, every time she refers to you as Teddy Ruxpin or asks you a question and calls you that, you simply pretend not to hear her.

Eventually, this goes away, and Teddy Ruxpin is extinct.

When to Use Positive Punishment (Aversive Stimuli)

As we discussed in "Women and Drama" and "Fighting in a Relationship: Causes and Cures," there are a few times when you DO want to get angry, fight it out, and outright positively punish a romantic partner for bad behavior.

You'll use this when a girlfriend is:

• Accusing you of something harshly
• Being extremely rude or deliberately hurtful
• Making threats (this is a big one; you must have zero tolerance for threats)

... and anything else in that category of "extreme and petulant."

What kind of aversive stimuli should you use?

Either:

• Righteous anger and indignation,
• Kicking her out / leaving, or
• Breaking up with her.

In that order of extremity. Usually the first is enough for dealing with these, but sometimes a situation calls for more.

I won't go over these again since they're already covered in detail in the two articles just linked to. Do have a look at those if you'd like to know more about them.

If you're wondering why something less strong than these isn't an option, it's because anything weaker falls into the realm of passive aggressive.

If you simply rely on, say, sarcasm, or bitterness, as a response to very bad behavior, that's actually passive aggressiveness, and it comes across as weak. It is, therefore, not effective punishment. Use righteous anger instead.

Is It Really That Simple?

Yes - behavior shaping is really that simple.

Just tell her what you're going to do and what you want the result to be, monitor the behavior, and reinforce it one way or the other.

That's what I told that mother to do with her daughter, and that's all you need to do in your relationships.

There's no need to yell, chastise, or get upset about something that hasn't happened, or something that has (most of the time). Instead, simply:

1. State Goal (tell her what you want to have happen and why)

2. Monitor Behavior (pay attention to what she actually does)

3. Reinforce Desired Behavior (reward her for good behavior)

4. Reduce Incentives for Undesired Behavior (remove rewards for bad behavior)

... and you're golden.

Instant (well, almost) good behavior... and you won't even have a small scale rebellion on your hands, or have to go snatching sugar cane from a baby.

Chase Amante

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CORRECTIONS: I'm much obliged to Slightly Confused for catching the error in terminology throughout the earlier version of this post. I'd mixed up "negative reinforcement" with "negative punishment," and stated repeatedly that you should not use punishment except in extreme scenarios. What I actually meant was you should not use aversive stimuli in extreme scenarios. Slightly Confused called this to my attention, and the article has been corrected. Thanks, SC.