You don’t reward the omission of bad behavior, you reward good behavior. For example you reward your child every time they are good to a sibling. Sure, it is harder to look for good behaviors and to reward that instead of simply punishing the child when they do something bad but punishment doesn’t work well as mentioned earlier and for example often leads to situations where the child decreases the undesired behavior but only when it is being watched.
Also whenever you can you should choose intrinsic or ever extrinsic reinforcements.
Talk about building a system that can be gamed! My big dog does not steal my little dogs food except when he can. And in between they play together pretty amusingly. I don’t think I would gain anything by rewarding them playing together in terms of a lower rate at which the theft of food occurs. The problem being, my big dog (and probably my little dog) don’t think its “wrong” to steal food, they just don’t have that gene.
Given that the food is usually the positive reinforcement when you are conditioning animals and that is one of their goals for which they change their behavior it is indeed quite hard to reinforce them not to eat when presented with the option.
You don’t reward the omission of bad behavior, you reward good behavior. For example you reward your child every time they are good to a sibling. Sure, it is harder to look for good behaviors and to reward that instead of simply punishing the child when they do something bad but punishment doesn’t work well as mentioned earlier and for example often leads to situations where the child decreases the undesired behavior but only when it is being watched. Also whenever you can you should choose intrinsic or ever extrinsic reinforcements.
Talk about building a system that can be gamed! My big dog does not steal my little dogs food except when he can. And in between they play together pretty amusingly. I don’t think I would gain anything by rewarding them playing together in terms of a lower rate at which the theft of food occurs. The problem being, my big dog (and probably my little dog) don’t think its “wrong” to steal food, they just don’t have that gene.
Given that the food is usually the positive reinforcement when you are conditioning animals and that is one of their goals for which they change their behavior it is indeed quite hard to reinforce them not to eat when presented with the option.