Changing Behaviour Using Trust and Leadership

A few thoughts from James French who founded the trust technique, and some follow on thoughts from me.

“We are so fixated on trying to fix the behaviour that often another [unwanted] behaviour comes out, because we haven’t addressed what drives the behaviour – feelings. Change the feeling to change the behaviour.”

James is saying that a behaviour is a result of an internal emotional reaction [to an external stimulus]. It therefore follows that the behaviour won’t change until the way the animal / person feels about whatever they are reacting to changes.

Therefore fixing problem behaviours becomes a matter of learning to work through emotional states, because the emotional state is the cause of the behaviour being a “problem behaviour” rather than a “desired behaviour”.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it is a description of both behaviour and operant conditioning as defined by B.F. Skinner (not the dog training quadrants nonsense).

Why is this important? Because in mammals behaviour follows this law:

A Stimulus causes an emotional reaction which causes a behaviour.

So what about conditioned responses and involuntary reactions? Conditioned responses are types of behaviour, not causes of behaviour, they have at some point been imprinted onto you, usually by your own experiences, i.e. operant conditioning.

What about instinctive or genetic behaviour? (I’ll put involuntary responses in this category too, as colloquially I think of these as the breed specific behaviour traits in dogs, but technically all behaviour is involuntary) This is a good one to tackle. Even instinctive behaviour is driven by emotion, or feelings. Let’s take a Border Collie for example, they have an innate desire to chase, to move animals, to herd. It’s very common to see them fixate on things that move like bikes and cars. Why? Because the movement stirs something deep down in them, that’s still an emotion, even if it’s instinctive; mammals don’t internally communicate via language, well Humans have an internal monologue (some of us anyway) in our neocortex, whereas other mammals do not, but in terms of behaviour the neocortex exists to rationalise and justify the decisions of the older limbic brain, which is the emotional centre and the bit that our behaviour actually comes from.

That’s right. Your behaviour, and your dog’s, is controlled by the limbic brain, not the neocortex. The crazy part? Our limbic brain does not have any capacity for language. Therefore our, and all other mammals, internal communication system is all “feelings” or emotions. Feelings is a simplistic word, but it’s all we’ve really got. Humans come with a higher ability to rationalise the reactions (behaviour) that come out of the limbic brain using the newer parts of our brain than other animals, and that is why we can do things like assess danger and overcome fear so quickly.

So back to our Border Collie, if there is no instinctive coded desire to chase, i.e. the internal feeling in the limbic brain that connects with movement and says if you chase that you’ll feel good, really good, you’re meant for this, CHASE IT DAMMIT! (Now think hard about trying to communicate this feeling to chase to yourself internally without being able to use language, and you’re at the dog’s emotional and thinking complexity level, awkward, no? Hold that thought for later.) If that emotional reaction to the movement isn’t there, the Collie won’t chase, won’t hyper focus, why? There’s nothing that is bringing any satisfaction or satiation to the animal, no desire to do anything because the emotional brain centre is not interested and doesn’t light up the reward circuits. It doesn’t release any signals that cause a decision to focus or move. Even in the case of instinctive behaviours, they remain driven by the emotional centre of the animal’s brain, same as us.

Let’s step back again to ourselves for a minute. I’m going to cause you to do a behaviour through playing with your emotions. Here’s a picture that will cause a behaviour, I can even predict with some accuracy what your emotional reaction to the picture, and therefore behaviour will be:

Basket of Puppies

You’re saying oooh aaaaahhhh how cute! You’re smiling too. Your emotional reaction to the stimulus, the photo of the puppies, was a happy one, leading you to make a happy expression on your face and emit some happy noises (perhaps the noises didn’t come out, but I bet you made them in your head).

What even are these sounds we make when we see cute puppies and babies? Remember I said that our limbic brain has no capacity for language………you’re expressing something from deep within you because you like the puppies, but the part of you driving that behaviour at the first moment of reaction cannot form language, so what comes out is the verbal equivalent of body language. A vocal but non-verbal expression of the emotion before your newer brain has a chance to rationalise it into words, which follow a few seconds later. That instant outburst of cute noises is the level of complexity of behaviour. It is purely emotional in the moment. Rationalisation comes a few seconds later. Does that make sense in what you see from your dog? It’s worth noting that most of what we do on a daily basis has little to do with the conscious brain, that takes too much energy. We rely on the limbic brain to navigate us through most of what we come across and do.

So let’s turn to the unpleasant stimulus, anything works here, spiders, snakes, bears, lions, your ex-spouse…….

The exact same process occurs when you notice the unpleasant stimulus, an internal emotional reaction takes place, and that leads you to do a behaviour, which in the case of the above list will likely be fight or flight, unless you are sufficiently tough that those triggers don’t actually bother you, which means you’ve worked out how to cope with the additional stress caused by them being in the environment and to come out the other side unscathed, i.e. you’ve become socialised to them. If you’ve worked out how to cope with them and come out the other side unscathed, the key is then how did you learn to cope?

I’d wager that someone had to help you through a huge fear spike that made you want to run away or fight. There are a couple of ways that this can be done. If it’s a low level fear, you can watch people successfully navigate the problem and you can learn how they did it and you can copy them. When you see and learn that it works your fears will drop away. This is called social cognition.

The other way, for more deep seated fears goes like this; you put your trust in another person to directly help you. This can be done voluntarily if you are actively seeking help (getting over a phobia), or, because you’re in a situation of panic (you’re stuck on a walk with a large snake nearby blocking your way) you had to reach out to someone. Let’s explore why you need another person and what was it about them that enabled you to trust them in facing something that scared you? They showed you the most attractive thing that you can be shown when you’re in a state of fear. They showed you calm confidence and an ability to remain that way in the face of you panicking and the thing that was scaring you. That calm provided you with the crutch you needed to overcome the panic, and to start calming down, only then can you start to use the rational part of your brain. This is how psychologists get people over their phobia’s. The trusted person provides you with empathy, calm and confidence, and can show you how to successfully navigate the situation. It’s another form of leadership and we are all deeply attracted to confidence and calmness when we’re in a state of fear. It is the most attractive thing in existence when you are scared. Once you’ve begun using your rational brain, you’ll start working through the fear, learning that it isn’t really scary, or if it is, how to get out of the situation without getting hurt. This is operant conditioning in action, this will change your emotional reaction to the stimulus causing fear, and therefore change your behaviour.

Dogs cannot rationalise as well as humans, their brains are not as complex, it is therefore our responsibility to become their rock, their empathetic calm confident leader and to give them the chance and the time to work through their emotions to change their behaviour. This does not involve distracting them from the fear, it allows them the space and time to face it, and work through it.

This is the relationship and trust method at work, and that is how we change behaviour using it.