Using the wrong signal delays training

There is a belief among many dog trainers (including some clicker trainers) that by telling a dog when it gets something wrong, we can make training even more effective than if we "just" tell it when it gets something right. The logic is that "if telling the dog it's doing the right thing works so well (with the clicker), then it must work twice as well to also tell it when it's NOT getting rewarded (with an error signal)."

The fact is, however, that it is in no way twice as effective – quite the opposite, it actually slows down training considerably. In the article, we can read an excerpt from a conversation the author had with none other than B.F. Skinner himself. And what he says is worth embedding in your spine:

At one point I remember asking him (B. F. Skinner) about how dog trainers might use markers. Specifically I wanted to know if we should be telling an animal when he was doing something wrong and was not about to be rewarded in the same way that we tell him when he was correct and was about to get his reward.

He shook his head and smiled. "Every time you reward an animal for doing the correct thing you strengthen that response and make it more likely that it will occur again. But signalling to an animal that it is wrong makes that very signal a kind of punisher. And the truth is that animals want to avoid anything associated with any situation where they might get punished".

Sometimes we hear advice that we should try to make our error signals as motivating as possible. My very clear view, however, is that error signals rarely contribute anything positive to training. In cases where it seems to work, it's probably more to do with the dog being so keen on the reward and the handler otherwise doing the right things during training, so that this doesn't make the disadvantages of overusing the error signal as big as they would otherwise be.

Good clicker training is about focusing on one thing and one thing only: structure your training so that you make the correct behaviour more and more and more and more likely!

As long as you keep that focus, everything else will usually sort itself out.

[Read the full article here](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201603/should-trainers-tell-dogs-when-their-behavior-is-wrong). It's definitely worth 10 minutes!

PS: Do you sometimes need to stop your dog from doing things it shouldn't in everyday life? Of course. This is called fire-fighting. But using error signals as a fixed ingredient in planned and systematic training is, in my view, of little use.