The cycle of pushing beyond a difficult level or boss is probably familiar to most everyone: You fail a lot, over and over.

Maybe under certain circumstances, that would apply, but even though the profession is called “Dog Training,” adding behavioral conditioning to obedience fleshes out training and evolves into ...

Karen Pryor is a behavioral biologist, a pioneering dolphin trainer, and an authority on applied operant conditioning—the art and science of changing behavior with positive reinforcement.

But how? The mid-1900s, psychologist B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist theory of “operant conditioning” came to their rescue. This methodology of psychological behavioral conditioning provided an almost ...