animal psychology, conditioning/training //
H. Sapiens defaults to punishment when trying to train/condition animal, despite that virtually no animal species actually respond to this & that positive reinforcement works on anything with a brain.
The exceptions are domesticated animals, which often can be effectively trained with negative reinforcement. It's even been proposed as a definition of "domestication": an animal is domesticated if it's evolved to respond to crude human training methods.
animal psychology, conditioning/training //
@lioness @madewokherd It's also that, like, negative reinforcement is supposed to emphasize the *removal* of unpleasant stimulus and not the *addition* of it. Technically, stuff like "if you do well on your test, you won't have to do that chore you hate for a week" is a negative reinforcement. Just going "I'll hurt you if you don't do what I want" will fail.
animal psychology, conditioning/training //
@madewokherd it just doesn't work all that well!
& with any kind of conditioning, the positive/negative reinforcement needs to come as close as possible to the behavior being shaped. the part of your brain working at that level isn't clever enough connect "people mad about report card right now" to "didn't do homework last week", it'll probably apply the negative reinforcement to getting / showing the report card itself or something.