Sapolsky’s ideas on lack of free will (Determined 2023) might leave you cold (they warmed my heart) but surely belief in the power of reinforcers is unavoidable.
For everyone. Reinforcement drives our lives. Ours, horses, every species. You can argue about the choice to behave all day, but reinforcement is what shifts behaviour in our world.
I’ve been thinking. Again. Yes, this is a rerun in my brain that happens more regularly than I’d probably like to admit.
Training animals, we can tend to lose touch with the depth of reinforcers available. People imagine reinforcement as that moment at the end of a behaviour, something you deliver like a prize. But it’s so much more complex.
Perhaps we forget this because much of the horse world still treats training as purely transactional. Cue delivered. Behaviour offered. Reinforcement follows. For the most part, in the horse training world, reinforcement is the removal of pressure that was used to cue the behaviour.
But for those of us working with R+ based training we can also miss some of the reinforcers. We certainly miss the motivating operations that can affect our reinforcers. Reinforcement can be complex.
The environment.
The setup.
The timing.
The choices.
The history.
The horse brings all of them, and more, to the table. The outside, obvious stuff and the inside bits that we often can’t or won’t see. Many reinforcers have nothing to do with what we think we’re delivering.
Reinforcers are not tidy or even singular. They sit in the world the horse is navigating. Predictability.
Space.
Information.
The chance to offer a behaviour without being shut down for trying.
Access to something they value.
A moment that makes sense to them, not just to us.
And the same is true for humans. We talk about reinforcement as if it lives in the outcome. The behaviour achieved. The video clip posted to Instagram. The Substack post you crafted. The reinforcement is considered as the response you get.
But for many of us the reinforcement is also happening in the process. Feeling the sun, the breeze. Well, here in North Devon, the gale. The feeling of engaging with something that holds your attention. Being in the moment. When we pay attention to the full picture, training looks different. It becomes something the horse can actually engage in rather than endure. You start to see the small indicators that they’re with you. You start to shape sessions that work for them because the reinforcement sits inside the experience, not outside it.
And maybe that is a point worth holding on to. Reinforcement is not the afterthought. It is the fabric of the interaction. The thing shaping behaviour long before we label it. When we notice that, training stops feeling like a sequence to get through and becomes the place where learning actually happens. You don’t need anyone to see it for it to be reinforcing.
So when we say reinforcement drives behaviour, this is surely what we mean. Not just the neat delivery at the end. The whole life landscape the learner moves through.
Ignoring this makes training glitchy. It collapses into a purely transactional process.
When we pay attention to the full picture, training looks different. It becomes something the horse can actually engage in rather than endure. You start to see the small indicators that they’re with you. You start to shape sessions that work for them because the reinforcement is within the experience, not outside it.
And maybe that is the point worth holding on to. Reinforcers abound in all our lives. They are the fabric of our interactions. The thing shaping behaviour long before we even notice it. When we do notice, training stops feeling like a sequence to get through and becomes the place where learning happens.
