Field Guide · Glossary
Positive punishment
Learning scienceAdding something a dog finds unpleasant after a behavior, so that the behavior becomes less likely to happen again.
How it works
It is one of the four quadrants of operant conditioning, and the label describes two things only: something was added, and the behavior went down afterwards. It is not a statement about how severe the thing was, which is why a raised voice and a physical correction sit in the same quadrant. What decides whether something counts is the effect on the behavior, not the intent behind it. If the behavior continues at the same rate, whatever was added was not a punisher, however unpleasant it looked.
What it looks like
A dog jumps at a kitchen counter and a stack of baking trays clatters onto the floor. If the dog goes near the counter less often over the following days, the noise functioned as positive punishment. If they carry on at the same rate, it did not, no matter how dramatic the moment was.
Commonly confused with
- Negative reinforcement
- Negative reinforcement takes something unpleasant away to make a behavior more likely. Positive punishment adds something unpleasant to make it less likely. Positive and negative describe adding and removing here, not good and bad.
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