Train Your Spouse, Your Boss Or Anyone Else
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Here’s a novel way to get people to act as you wish – study animal training. In her new book, “What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage,” Amy Sutherland makes a fun and persuasive case that exotic animal training works just as well on the human animal.
Trainers develop a great poker face. Imagine you are a trainer, and a beluga whale fires a mouthful of cold water all over you. Your natural reaction would be to scream or jump. But, as with children and the unconscious brain in adults, the whale likes getting attention (they’re not real good at sorting out positive and negative reactions), and you can count on a mouthful of whale spit every time you appear.
Sutherland found that trainers who teach whales not to spit, dolphins to perform tricks, and monkeys to ride skateboards (we don’t know why you’d want to do that, but they must have a reason) react only to positive behavior, totally ignoring anything negative.
This method, called the “least reinforcing scenario,” (LRS) was developed by trainers at SeaWorld in the 1980s. Sutherland decided to try the techniques on her husband, and they worked. Among other tricks, he learned to pick up his laundry.
An article about her experiment published in the New York Times became the single most viewed and most e-mailed Times article of 2006.
Then along came Dan and Chip Heath, authors of their own book, "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die."
They had the bright idea of applying LSR to bosses. For example, if you race off to take care of something he yelled about (or yell back or cry), guess what he does the next time he wants you to do something? On the other hand, if you just continue the conversation without any reaction to the yelling, he’s less likely to yell the next time. And, of course, you repeat and repeat until the yelling stops.
In using LSR with people, you also need to avoid passive encouragement of negative behavior. For instance, a boss may tell long-winded stories. Sitting through them is a form of encouragement. So you need to act to diminish this habit, such as excusing yourself because you need to work on something, or jumping in to say “You told me about that – it’s a great story!” We’re not sure, however, that you should take their advice to not laugh if your boss tells jokes you don’t think are funny.
The last rule is to reward the behavior you want. Shamu didn’t learn his routines because his trainers smiled at him. They fed him fish. Killer whales eat up to 240 pounds of fish a day, so there’s lots of room for rewards.
People respond to praise and thanks. Notice every positive step in the direction you want, however small. Praise, praise, praise. Thank the person for her or his help or support. As Sutherland found, you’ll get the new behavior you want. Viva, SeaWorld!