‘Come into my office.’ Now there’s an expression to make everyone’s pulse quicken. Even if your boss is a good sort, you are likely to become all defensive. ‘What have I done wrong?’ you ask yourself. In fact the adrenaline in your system has kicked in because you have become conditioned to act that way. It all started in your school days when your principal called you in for that first telling off.
The feeling is the ‘fight or flight response’ to any threat, just like any animal in the wild from a field mouse up to a hippopotamus. The difference is that these instincts are much sharper in wild animals who tend to kick, bite and stomp when invited into offices. Nowadays, the word ‘training’ is considered politically incorrect in the animal community, just as conditioning is politically incorrect in the office. Yet everyday animals are trained to complete various tasks and we are conditioned to behave in certain ways at home and at work. Is it possible that managers can learn from the conditioning techniques deployed by animal trainers?
Amy Sutherland thinks so. As a journalist she spent a year at the Exotic Animal and Training Management (EATM) program at California’s Moorpark Community College, considered the Harvard for exotic animal trainers. There she followed the fortunes of the trainee trainers who were taught, among other things, how to handle a tarantula and take an emu for a walk.
In Kicked, Bitten and Scratched she says: ‘That EATM students can be fractious is ironic, because training and operant conditioning works on humans, too. An EATM staffer tells me: ‘It helps you understand why people do things they do. They are learning such good people skills. I’m sure they thought [the program] was all about animals.’ That lesson is, obviously, often lost on students.’
Having learned operant conditioning techniques employed at EATM, Smith returned home to practise on her husband, who habitually lost control when he lost his car keys. She employed a technique used by dolphin trainers called Least Reinforcing Syndrome. (When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer does nothing for a few moments and returns to work as normal.) Sutherland learnt to ignore her husband’s rages as he chased around the house looking for his keys. Subsequently – just like dolphins – he modified his behaviour.
Dog trainer Karen Pryor also believes that operant conditioning works effectively on humans. Her book Don’t Shoot the Dog: the New Art of Teaching and Training is a must-read in the animal training world, where Pryor is regarded as a pioneer in clicker training and operant conditioning in animals. While she obviously covers dogs, she also discusses how behaviour can be reinforced in humans. One technique she says is ‘the jackpot’, a reward that is much bigger than a normal reinforcer and is often a surprise.
She uses the example of an ad agency in which she worked. The president was in the habit of throwing one or two totally unexpected parties – beyond the usual Christmas one – where everybody stopped work. ‘It contributed vastly, I thought, to the company’s high morale,’ she says.
Pryor’s book is given to all new dolphin trainers at Seaworld on the Gold Coast. Ross Deakin, Seaworld’s marine mammal trainer, believes that humans apply to each other the same techniques that are applied to animals all the time, but without realising it. He says that he has been dolphin training for so long that he can’t but help apply similar techniques to his young children.
At Seaworld each trainer has multiple animals that they look after. ‘The communication factor with these animals on a daily basis is intense,’ Deakin says, adding that the trainers have a debriefing after each training sessional to go over everything that happened with the animal.
The trainers work towards achievable goals and are careful not to set up the animals for failure. ‘Dolphins are never asked to do anything that they couldn’t do,’ Deakin says. ‘We move in gradual steps to a goal with an animal.’
Christine Powell, who runs an agency for animal actors believes the key is not to ask too much of a subject. ‘Never pile more things on than an animal can deal with,’ she says. ‘Teaching a dog to stay in position, you have to take in small [steps].’ For instance, at first a dog would be taught to stay for a few seconds and then rewarded, with food, a smile and patting, as staying time is gradually built up to a minute. One of the misconceptions about reward-based training is that animals must be rewarded for every successful attempt.
‘It is a bit more sophisticated with people,’ she says. ‘If people are continually doing things wrong there should be a number of reasons for that – or often it is because it hasn’t been explained properly.’ She says when you get to the root of what is wrong it is usually because sometimes projects are simply too large for individuals to handle.Â
Seaworld’s Deakin says that rapport and building trust with individuals are the cornerstones of training. The dolphins are conditioned to exhibit the behaviour their keepers want. The keepers start by building a rapport with young dolphins, initially just making contact and establishing a relationship. For dolphins a reward can be a combination of attention, play and food. What the trainers do is use a whistle in conjunction with these rewards so they can pinpoint to the second when the correct behaviour was exhibited. This training is called operant conditioning.
Deakin says: ‘You capture the behaviour then you put it under control. The idea here is to reward [good] behaviour whenever it is exhibited.’ Where humans and animals differ is in the level of emotional complexity. Deakin says it is more difficult dealing with people than animals, as emotions can cloud human actions. But trainers and managers have one thing in common: they have to show, in clear, firm ways, just who is boss.
Showing who’s boss is particularly important with the hippo, easily Africa’s most dangerous animal. Just ask Michael Kidman, who spent two years moving Werribee Open Range Zoo’s hippos to a new grazing paddock. In a way it was a hippo change-management program.
The plan was first to gain the hippos’ trust – not a easy task. Says Kidman, joking: ‘How can a hippo trust you or you trust a hippo?’ While hippos might appear to stand around grazing like cows, they are actually extremely dangerous creatures to be around. They can slice through a human being using razor-sharp tusks that are even harder than an elephant’s.
The project had a single goal: to bring the animals, weighing between 1100 and 2500kg into a transport box. First it was agreed that only the same three keepers would work with the hippos. Change had to happen slowly and almost imperceptibly. Kidman explains: ‘They are basically paranoid animals. You put any minor change into their environment [and they notice] then they would become upset and they wouldn’t return to the yards for two days.’
So the keepers set a base standard that they knew the hippos would return to each time in their conditioning. Sometimes when they introduced them to going into the boxes or opened the new slides [to the box] the hippos would go backwards three months in their training. ‘The longer that we worked with it and the longer we had their trust … they didn’t tend to slip back as far,’ says Kidman.
The hippos were positively reinforced with food. The youngest female liked being patted on the nose. As the keepers learnt to understand the hippos’ body movements and behaviour patterns, the hippos learnt to recognise the keepers.
Kidman says the lesson is: ‘Patience, patience, patience, patience, patience. And when you are sick of saying patience, you say it again. You have got to be patient.’
Don’t try it at home (or in the office)
Operant conditioning evolved from a murky past where both humans and animals have suffered unduly. We’re all familiar with Pavlov’s Dog. The expression derives from physician and psychologist Ivan Pavlov’s 1890s experiments on the gastric function of dogs. He noticed that dogs salivated before any food arrived in their mouths. This is called an unconditional reflex. What he discovered is that dogs could be conditioned to salivate before the food even arrived through some kind of external stimulus such as the dog’s hearing footsteps or the ringing of a bell. This is called a conditional reflex.
Meanwhile, John B. Watson was preying on orphans in experiments that presumably inspired Anthony Burgess, when he was writing A Clockwork Orange. Watson reckoned that he could condition fear in Albert, a 11-month-old baby. That’s right – a baby.
Little Albert was conditioned to be frightened of rats, after Watson first established that Albert wasn’t afraid of rats. He then presented a rat with a loud unpleasant noise seven times over one week. Finally, when the noise was dropped and the rat presented alone, Albert (unsurprisingly) attempted to escape. During 31 days of experiments Albert learnt to fear a rabbit, a fur coat, a dog, and Watson’s grey hair.
Finally, Albert was rescued by adoption but was never reconditioned. Other psychologists continued to build on Watson’s work using electricity and nude models to try and rub out homosexuality.
It was B.F. Skinner who coined the term ‘operant conditioning’ in his 1938 book The Behavior of Organisms. After countless experiments with pigeons he found that behaviour is shaped by its consequences.
Thus a newer, kinder form of conditioning was developed. Edward L. Thorndike also found that positive or negative reinforcement can alter behaviour after he observed cats trying to escape from puzzle boxes. Rats entered the fray, rewarded by food for pressing levers – positive conditioning – in return for food. Negative reinforcement was also used in the form of loud noise, which was switched off when the levers were pressed.

Reference: October 2006, volume 76:09, p. 24-26