Operant Conditioning in Your

Romantic Relationships
By Chase Amante

Something I've
noticed that a
number of
individuals
untrained in
relationship
management
theory tend to
engage in is
arbitrary (that is,
seemingly
random) punishment and reward inside of relationships. These sort
of variable reward and punishment structures inside relationships
generally lead to a host of negative outcomes for the person who's
subject to arbitrary treatment, including:

Emotional dependency
Addiction and attachment
Wild mood swings
Submission
Resentment
Rebellion

Basically, the opposite of what you'd expect to see in a healthy,

rewarding, productive relationship.

It's occurred to me that most of the people who use controlling,

coercive, and more or less arbitrary relationship management
tactics probably are not very familiar with operant conditioning -
the system of punishment and reward established by B.F. Skinner
for the purposes of behavior modification.

So today, I want to equip you with a very effective means of

communicating your likes and dislikes to a romantic partner without
ruffling feathers, being seen as an oppressor, or, conversely, a
pushover.

I'm going to show you how to use operant conditioning in your

relationships.

In my travels, I once saw a mother - normally a very kind, warm,

hospitable person - loudly scold her 4 year-old daughter, who was
eating sugar cane, to throw the roots in the trash after she was done
chewing them, or she'd take the sugar cane away. The daughter,
mostly happy and treated well by her family, in this instance had
done nothing wrong, and had already been doing exactly this. In
rebellion against this seemingly random order / scolding, she threw
the chewed sugar cane roots on the ground, instead of into the
trash, and the mother dutifully took all the sugar cane away. The
daughter began screaming and crying at the top of her lungs.

I asked a friend what caused the problem, and the mother told my
friend the tale from the mother's point of view and my friend
translated. I asked why the mother had scolded her daughter thus in
the first place; what brought this about?

The mother's reply was that she simply wanted to make sure her
daughter was learning to behave the right way. Then - in a sign of
insightfulness and openness to learning it's rare to see even in the
first world - she asked me (through my friend) if there was anything
she should have done differently.

"Yes," I said. "Tell her nicely, instead of scolding her, and you'll give
her no reason to rebel."

This probably seems like a simple enough realization, but most

people's relationships are rife with problems caused by
seemingly easy-to-avoid conditioning mistakes.

Punishment is given for no reason, causing rebellion; rewards are

given when they should be withheld, encouraging bad behavior; and
rewards are withheld when they should be given, discouraging good
new behaviors.

All of this can be avoided, however, with a little education on

operant conditioning.

What Is Operant Conditioning?

In 1937, famed psychologist B.F. Skinner first used the term

"operant conditioning" to describe the process of modifying an
individual's behavior via a system of reward and punishment.

Operant conditioning, according to Wikipedia, is made up of two

parts:

1. Positive elements - things that are given following a

behavior
 2. Negative elements - things that are taken away following a
behavior

Note two very, incredibly, unbelievably key points here:

1. In the context of operant conditioning, positive does not mean

"good," and neither does negative mean "bad." Positive simply
means that something is given, and negative simply means that
something is taken away. What's given may be a punishment
OR a reward, and what's taken away may be something liked
OR something disliked.

2. All forms of conditioning must take place AFTER a behavior has

already taken place. You cannot train responses before a
behavior takes place - the brain doesn't work that way, and it
doesn't make the emotional connection that inspires behavior
modification.

That last point is particularly important, and it's what the mother in
that example early made her primary mistake in. She tried to punish
before a behavior took place - scolding the child for an event that
hadn't yet happened in an attempt to scare her off of doing it. We'll
look at why you don't want to do this below, but for now, just keep in
mind that you can only encourage or discourage behavior after it's
manifested in some way or another.

Now, the positive and negative elements of operant conditioning are

further broken down into three smaller pieces:

1. Reinforcement - used to increase a behavior's frequency

2. Punishment - used to decrease a behavior's frequency

3. Extinction - a decrease in behavior caused by a lack of

 response

Of each of the first two, you can have positive (giving this following
a behavior) and negative (removing this following a behavior)
variants.

Positive reinforcement (giving an appetitive, or liked, stimulus to

someone after a certain behavior) and negative reinforcement
(removing a disliked, or aversive, stimulus after a certain behavior)
both serve to increase a behavior's frequency.

So positive reinforcement gives something liked, negative

reinforcement removes something disliked.

Positive punishment (giving an aversive, or disliked, stimulus or

punishment after a certain behavior) and negative punishment
(removing an appetitive, or liked, stimulus after a certain behavior)
both serve to decrease a behavior's frequency.

So positive punishment gives something disliked, negative

punishment removes something liked.

Further, there is an established process for shaping human behavior

with operant conditioning, and it's the one we'll be learning, using,
and following in this article:

1. State Goal (tell her what you want to have happen and why)

2. Monitor Behavior (pay attention to what she actually does)

3. Reinforce Desired Behavior (reward her for good behavior)

4. Reduce Incentives for Undesired Behavior (remove rewards

for bad behavior)
You'll notice, interestingly enough, that giving aversive - disliked -
stimuli is not in the list.

It's all about giving something liked, or taking something liked away
(giving or removing a reward).

At no point in the process do you give something disliked or have to

take it away (giving or removing something unpleasant or
uncomfortable).

Personally, I wasn't aware of operant conditioning until later in my

seduction career, and I only learned the basic principles of "reward
good behavior, punish bad behavior" early on. It took me years of
refining to arrive at the conclusion that using aversive stimuli was
usually undesirable, and simply giving and removing incentives was
far more effective.

But it is, and we'll go into why below.

The Problem with Aversive Stimuli

 In "End Relationship Drama
with These 2 Rules," I
mentioned that one of the
reasons women in relationships
will sometimes cause drama is to
get a negative emotional
reaction out of you.

That's right... sometimes women

want you to give them
something bad for drama.

The reasons why are a little

more complex than we want to
get into here, but suffice it to say
that positive punishment isn't
always a negative for people. Just like some children will cause
trouble simply to get noticed by their parents and get any kind of
attention - even the "bad" kind - so too will women.

This is the problem with "disliked" things - if getting your

attention was what she really needed, then positive punishment
often isn't really punishment at all... it's incentive. It's a reward.

Rather than being a bad thing, this form of punishment gets twisted
into being a good thing.

And when you punish the girl this way, instead of her being
discouraged from pursuing a certain behavior, she ends up
encouraged, because now she knows she can get a reaction out of
you with it.

This doesn't show up in lab experiments with mice in a cage - a

punishment is nothing but bad - there's no additional social
attention, no boost, nothing good in it at all, just pure negative
affect, through and through.

But in the real world, things aren't so simple, and the aversive
stimulus you mean to use as "punishment" can actually provide
reward. Things like:

Attention (even if it's to yell at her)

A response (even a negative one)
Her knowing she can get you to react if she wants to
Her knowing she has the ability to push your buttons

... all simply serve to reinforce a behavior (unless the punishment is

so severe that is thoroughly discourages it - we'll talk about this in a
bit).

The problem with positive punishment (giving aversive stimuli...

what most people traditionally think of as punishment) is that it just
as often reinforces a behavior in real world non-laboratory settings
as it dissuades someone from it.

And the problem with negative reinforcement (removing an aversive

stimulus) is that unless you can find some way to be constantly
punishing a woman in the real world, there's not really all that much
aversive stimuli for you to remove.

So if we can't use positive punishing to all that good effect most of

the time in our relationships, and negative reinforcement is
impractical for our purposes, what can we do?
If using aversive stimuli to punish is out - except in a few select
cases which we'll review below - that means we've only got two (2)
options for dealing with behavior:

Rewards (given or taken), and

Extinction

And aversive stimuli is out, because positive punishment (following

up bad behavior with punishment) can actually serve as
reinforcement, and because for us to use negative reinforcement
(following up good behavior by taking punishment away), we'd need
to be punishing our partners in a relationship all the time unless they
did what we wanted them to do.

Yeah, that's not practical.

So that cuts us down to three options for affecting behavior,

normally:

1. Positive reinforcement (following up good behavior by giving a

liked-thing)

2. Negative punishment (following up bad behavior by removing a

liked-thing)

3. Extinction (ignoring a behavior and letting it slowly fade away)

We'll take a look at each of these, but before we do, I want to cover
one other thing:

Using operant conditioning for shaping human behavior.

Behavior Shaping

Behavior-shaping needs to rely

on emotion. Nothing else truly
works. However, when you're
dealing with humans, you
aren't dealing with purely
emotional creatures as you are
with dogs or rodents. You're
dealing with beings that think,
that reason, and that
understand; and you'll get far
more mileage with them if they
know why you're doing what
you're doing and can throw the
force of their minds behind
reconditioning their behavior
themselves.

One of the big fears of people first hitting this website is that it's all
manipulation. There's a scary word. Here, we are manipulating
people like puppets on emotional strings... pull them this way and
they do this, pull them that way and they do that.

With the operant conditioning process of behavior shaping, you

get to wash your hands of any charge of manipulation. You tell
the person you're using this with exactly what you're doing, make
sure they understand it, and then do it.
Chances are, if you're doing it for the right reasons, they'll even
support you on it.

The process goes like this:

1. State Goal (tell her what you want to have happen and why)

2. Monitor Behavior (pay attention to what she actually does)

3. Reinforce Desired Behavior (reward her for good behavior)

4. Reduce Incentives for Undesired Behavior (remove rewards

for bad behavior)

So, let's say you have a girlfriend who has the habit of texting while
the two of you are out at restaurants, which you go to twice a week
because you both enjoy eating outside. You consider it disrespectful
that she's texting during your meals and think it looks bad, and ask
her to stop. She says she will, but keeps doing it anyway.

Following the above process, you do this:

1. Tell her that you find it rude that she texts during dinner, and
you'd like her to stop, and you know she would too, but she
keeps forgetting. So you're going to start taking a week off
from going to restaurants with her after each restaurant-texting
slip up. She protests; you tell her, no, this is the only way we'll
change that behavior, so we're going to do it.

2. You keep track of her behavior, and stay aware of when she's
reaching for her phone out at dinner with you.

3. When she doesn't text during dinner, you keep going to dinner
with her as planned (positive reinforcement; you keep giving
her something she likes). When she does, you take the next
 week off from going to dinner (negative punishment; you
remove something she likes).

Here's another one. Say you're dating a girl who's really cool and
really cute, except that she keeps using some specific phrase over
and over again and can't seem to stop ("Ohmygodzounds!" is the
one we'll use for this example). The first 20 times she uses it, it's
funny; after that, it's just irritating. You ask her to stop, and she says
she will... but doesn't.

So you:

1. Tell her that because you want her to stop using that and you
don't think she can on her own, you're going to help her, and
any time she says "Ohmygodzounds!" you're going to point out
to her that she said it, and then you're not going to speak to her
for 20 minutes, and you don't want her speaking to you either.

2. Then, you pay attention to that word.

3. When she doesn't use it, you continue speaking to her as usual.
When she does, you point it out to her, tell her you can't speak
with her for 20 minutes, and then tell her you'll talk to her again
in 20 minutes, and go in another room and shut the door.

You might have to do that 3 or 4 times the first night you start doing
it with her, and once or twice the second night, but by the third
night she'll be all but cured, and you'll be amazed at how quickly
you'll have rid her of something you simply could not rid her of
any other way.

That's the power of operant conditioning for you.

How Rewarding Works

Rewards are used to encourage a behavior, or at least not
discourage it.

For instance, we can assume that your girlfriend enjoys talking with
you. So being able to talk with you normally is a form of positive
reinforcement. Taking that away is negative punishment.

There are all kinds of rewards scattered throughout your

relationship. Anything that she enjoys, that makes her feel good,
and that she values that comes from you is a reward. These include:

Spending time together

Talking with one another
Being seen in public together
Being physically affectionate
Having sex with one another
Going on outings together
Going on trips together

... and any number of other things you can think of that you do
together.

You can give her more of these things as rewards for good
behavior, and less of them as penalties for bad behavior.

Rather than add something aversive as a response to bad behavior,

simply remove something she likes, like going dancing with her.

You must make sure the reinforcement is right for the behavior
you're shaping, of course.

If you cancel a vacation with her because she hogged the covers
again, that's a little much. And if you seek to reward her making you
a 6-course meal when she never cooks by talking to her a little more
than usual, she's going to be disappointed and underwhelmed.

Match rewards, or the removal of those rewards, to the

behavior being reinforced or punished.

How Extinction Works

Sometimes something will be

minor enough that you don't
need to use the giving or
taking of a reward to deal with
it. It's the equivalent of a
young child who learns a dirty
word and keeps using it
because people keep
laughing... as soon as the
laughter stops happening,
the word stops getting
used.

Your relationships work exactly like this.

Imagine your girlfriend came up with a nickname for you that you
aren't too fond of. Say she decided to start calling you Teddy
Ruxpin, because you wore a shirt that kind of looked like the shirt
Teddy Ruxpin wears one day. For reasons we won't explore here,
you don't like being called by this name.

What do you do?

You don't use positive reinforcement. You don't use negative

punishment.

You just ignore it.

So when she shows up at your apartment and says, "How's my
Teddy Ruxpin doing today?" you simply don't answer. You just stay
engrossed in what you're doing. When she says, "Jerry, you okay?"
you look up and say, "Hey babe, how was work today?"

Then, every time she refers to you as Teddy Ruxpin or asks you a
question and calls you that, you simply pretend not to hear her.

Eventually, this goes away, and Teddy Ruxpin is extinct.

When to Use Positive Punishment (Aversive Stimuli)

As we discussed in "Women and Drama" and "Fighting in a

Relationship: Causes and Cures," there are a few times when you
DO want to get angry, fight it out, and outright positively punish a
romantic partner for bad behavior.

You'll use this when a girlfriend is:

Accusing you of something harshly

Being extremely rude or deliberately hurtful
Making threats (this is a big one; you must have zero tolerance
for threats)

... and anything else in that category of "extreme and petulant."

What kind of aversive stimuli should you use?

Either:

Righteous anger and indignation,

Kicking her out / leaving, or
Breaking up with her.

In that order of extremity. Usually the first is enough for dealing with
these, but sometimes a situation calls for more.

I won't go over these again since they're already covered in detail in

the two articles just linked to. Do have a look at those if you'd like to
know more about them.

If you're wondering why something less strong than these isn't

an option, it's because anything weaker falls into the realm of
passive aggressive.

If you simply rely on, say, sarcasm, or bitterness, as a response to

very bad behavior, that's actually passive aggressiveness, and it
comes across as weak. It is, therefore, not effective punishment.
Use righteous anger instead.

Is It Really That Simple?

Yes - behavior shaping is really that simple.

Just tell her what you're going to do and what you want the
result to be, monitor the behavior, and reinforce it one way or
the other.

That's what I told that mother to do with her daughter, and that's all
you need to do in your relationships.

There's no need to yell, chastise, or get upset about something that

hasn't happened, or something that has (most of the time). Instead,
simply:

1. State Goal (tell her what you want to have happen and why)

2. Monitor Behavior (pay attention to what she actually does)

3. Reinforce Desired Behavior (reward her for good behavior)

 4. Reduce Incentives for Undesired Behavior (remove rewards
for bad behavior)

... and you're golden.

Instant (well, almost) good behavior... and you won't even have a
small scale rebellion on your hands, or have to go snatching sugar
cane from a baby.

Chase Amante

CORRECTIONS: I'm much obliged to Slightly Confused for catching

the error in terminology throughout the earlier version of this post.
I'd mixed up "negative reinforcement" with "negative punishment,"
and stated repeatedly that you should not use punishment except in
extreme scenarios. What I actually meant was you should not use
aversive stimuli in extreme scenarios. Slightly Confused called this
to my attention, and the article has been corrected. Thanks, SC.

About the Author: Chase Amante

Chase woke up one day in 2004 tired of

being alone. So, he set to work and read
every book he could find, studied every
teacher he could meet, and talked to
every girl he could talk to to figure out
dating. After four years, scads of lays, and
many great girlfriends (plus plenty of failures along the way), he
launched this website. He will teach you everything he knows about
girls in one single program in his Mastery Package.

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