Clicker Logic

Ethology and Behavior

One of the biggest ongoing conceptual challenges between behavior analysts and animal trainers is about the delineation between ethology and behavior, and the relationship between them. Karen Pryor recently wrote an article for her newsletter about the subject and her philosophy that you can’t have one without the other. I agree. I also think it is important to understand that while both sciences deal with aspects of behavior, they deal with behavior differently.

Behavior analysis is the science that studies behavior change. Behavior analysts adjust behavior by manipulating the environment. Ethologists study behavior without attempting to influence it. Ethology is often defined as the study of animal behavior in natural conditions—although an ethologist can study behavior in cultivated environments as well.

The practice of an ethologist is to learn through observation without attempting to influence the form the behavior of the organism takes. If you have read A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sopolsky, or any of many other books about observing wild animals, you understand that a mandate of such research is to avoid interfering with what the animals do and what happens to them. Dian Fossey was criticized for her intimate interactions with the mountain gorillas she studied. These scientists seek to learn what happens when humans do not intervene in natural animal behavior. This is a valuable scientific practice.

Behavior analysts do something different. The practice of a behavior analyst is all about influencing behavior through adjustments to the environment, and observing the resulting changes. Whether we are doing experimental work with rats in the Skinner box, or applied work with children with autism in schools, or with aggressive dogs in living rooms, we manipulate the environment for the express purpose of producing changes in behavior. In applied work we have been presented with some behavior problem that must be overcome, or with someone for whom learning new behavior will improve the quality of life. It makes sense to turn to an ethologist when one wants to learn what an animal will do in a studied environment without any influence from anyone else, and to turn to a behavior analyst when one finds herself with a reason to change someone’s (including an animal’s) behavior.

Ethologists often look at emotions as uncontrollable instinctive responses. Behavior analysts tend to look at them as responses to stimuli. Neither is eager to examine emotions as learned behavior.

In the aggression work I am conducting with Jesús Rosales-Ruiz, we are seeing evidence—I’ll say it, proof—that emotional behaviors respond to reinforcement. This runs headlong into the counter arguments that aggression is respondent (classical) and that “once-aggressive-always-aggressive” fixed behavior occurs because it’s just how certain animals are made.

There are very few living behavior analysts who are exploring the source and context of emotional behavior, much less its management. More and more ethologists openly discuss animal emotions, risking censure from old-school scientists, even to the point of redefining anthropomorphism. Many ethological scientists are, to their credit, beginning to note that in a uniform world, there is no reason to believe that organisms other than humans are devoid of emotion since many of their observable responses and experiences are the same as those we produce. Why would they not have emotions just as we do? It is probably a greater leap to assume they do not than to assume they do. If the world operates in certain prescribed ways across species, how is it anthropomorphic to identify certain animal behaviors in certain contexts as emotional?

Behavior analysts frequently argue that B.F. Skinner never denied that organisms have emotions. I don’t know of a behavior analyst that would claim that humans and animals do not experience emotions. But most behavior analysts assume that emotions are responses to the environment (classical or respondent behavior) rather than learned behaviors that have a history of reinforcement. They may also agree that the screwing with their reinforcers can produce emotional responses. The whole truth overlaps both concepts, to be completely accurate, but there is a lot more reinforcement at play than most people think.

Aggression is assumed by many to be spewed out of the dog simply because of how its heredity arranged for it to respond to environmental changes. Just today on another list I read the post of a veterinarian who discussed the genetic lineage of a line of aggressive dogs, one of whom was saved from a tragic life overwhelmed by aggressive impulses by removing him from the litter at a young age and providing him with different training opportunities. Yet despite this dog’s fortune at avoiding the aggression label, he was still assumed to have this aggression gene his siblings were afflicted with. Despite the fact that he did not behave aggressively as his siblings did, he was considered an aggression risk.

The fact that the puppy was saved from a life as an aggressive dog illustrates that behavior is malleable, not a fixed force of nature. For some reason many of the dogs in that breeder’s line performed aggressive behaviors that resulted in desirable reinforcers. Dogs bark, growl and sometimes bite. Those are behaviors that come in the doggie package. But what makes some puppies continue to bark, growl and sometimes bite? Something in the environment happened to that litter of puppies that reinforced those behaviors—even if the breeder was conscientious! No matter what their genetic makeup they would not have continued to aggress if reinforcement had not been produced by those genetically possible puppy behaviors. The most usual reinforcer for aggression is escape. That’s a form of negative reinforcement. Puppy growls, giant hand is pulled away. Puppy bites and puppy is placed in his crate. He gets to be separated from something he doesn’t want to be close to in exchange for performing aggressive behaviors. The pup that was separated from the litter at a young age was spared that particular source of reinforcement. His aggressive behaviors weren’t allowed to gain him the reinforcement the aggressive behaviors of his peers earned them.

He was also spared the model of aggression provided by his siblings and perhaps his mother. Animals also learn through observation. So much of what many people consider genetically programmed behavior is in fact imitative behavior that was learned by the parent at some earlier time in her life, modeled to her offspring, and once mimicked, it was reinforced by the environment.

The difference between the aggressive line of dogs and other lines of gentle, agreeable dogs is not the specific aggressive behaviors performed by the aggressive line, but the reinforcers that result from the aggressive behaviors. For some very complex reasons, the things that work to reinforce these dogs’ behaviors have been produced by aggressive behaviors in the animals. I could make a leap and guess that escape is more reinforcing for those dogs than for other dogs. That may be a characteristic of their genetic material.

The form of the behavior an animal is capable of performing is determined by his genetic make up. Dogs can’t fly like parrots because they don’t grow functioning wings and their bones are too heavy. Zebras don’t climb trees like monkeys because hooves are poor appendages for gripping branches. But there are behaviors an animal is capable of doing that he does not perform always. For example, parrots don’t constantly fly. They fly when access to some form of reinforcement is made more accessible by flying. That reinforcer could be any of many things, and it changes with time and circumstances. A bird may fly to escape attack. He may fly to access food. He may fly to a more comfortable perch. But there will be times when he chooses to walk or climb for those very same reasons. Just because an animal is capable of a behavior does not mean he has to do it. This is the same with aggressive dogs. Just because an aggressive dog can growl, bark, snarl and bite, does not mean he is incapable of choosing alternative behaviors.

The things a given animal finds reinforcing are instinctive. Baby ducks like to be close to objects larger than themselves. All animals work to put distance between themselves and aversive stimuli. If performing behaviors that readily occur as a condition of their physical make up works to produce escape, the animal will do those behaviors more often in the future when he wants to put distance between himself and something or someone.

Obviously there are genetic differences between species and breeds, and obviously behavior can’t exist in a vacuum. The physical appearance of the animal and the behaviors she performs are necessarily related. In order to behave, one has to have a package- a body- capable of doing the performance. The design of that body influences the environment causing the production of reinforcers. A seal’s flippers push his body through the water with speed and grace, but on land they serve only well enough to urge his bulk up onto the ice for a few hours of rest. It doesn’t take a seal long to learn that if he needs to escape he would be wise to hit the water. That’s where his flippers will best earn him the reinforcer of escape. But if that same seal were to find himself in waterless environment such as a crate awaiting transport, using those flippers to swim would no longer reinforce his instinctive reinforcer of escape. He would adjust his behavior to suit the current environment. He might bite. He might thrash his body about. The form of the behavior would necessarily change, but the reinforcer would not. He would perform the behavior most likely to produce escape in the current environment until such time as that environment is no longer aversive to him, should that time ever come.

An animal comes equipped with certain genetic material that makes it possible for him to perform certain behaviors. Likewise, he is equipped with certain reinforcer preferences. An otter will perform behaviors that are possible because of his genetic make up in order to order to access reinforcers that are contained inside oyster shells. But the performance of the behavior is not what is genetically programmed. The capacity to perform certain behaviors and the things an organism finds reinforcing are genetically programmed. The behavior itself is either elicited by something in the environment in a reflexive way, or the behavior occurs because it has a history of producing a reinforcer.

By recognizing the actual performance of a behavior as separate from the capacity to perform a behavior, doors and windows can be flung open in terms of coming up with techniques for beneficial behavior change. No longer are we doomed to label our dogs permanently aggressive. Instead we can tease apart environment and behavior and create a program for behavior change that improves the lives of humans and the animals with whom we inhabit this good Earth.