A woman trains her husband in the New York Times:
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.
No doubt this has been the most popular article in the NY Times thanks to the nod to equalitarian sensibilities in comparing men to animals. But rewarding positive behavior isn’t exactly new, after all, every incentive plan from auto sales to NFL contracts is based on the concept.
What is useful is the encouragement to avoid the concept of punishing negative behavior. While punishment is effective and even required in some relationships, such as the parent-child one, it’s actually destructive in romantic and marital relationships. The man or woman who deals out the silent treatment or plays the “no sex for you” game (or its alternative, the “no money for you” game), deserves to suffer the natural consequences of such activities.
People are smarter than animals, so they should theoretically be much easier to train. Of course, the trick, as with animals, is to be consistent in the delivery of rewards. Unfortunately for men, they are much easier to train than women since the answer to “what do men want” is usually more easily found than the one for Freud’s famous question.