Human Training

Click on the title for a link to an article in the NY Times written by a woman who discovered that techniques used for training "animals" work quite well on humans too.

This article has become one of the most popular articles in the Times. Ever since it was first published, it has hovered in the top five articles being emailed around to folks. On one hand, I find it illogical that humans would have to resort to interacting with each other as if they were "animals" while at the same time thinking "but of course!"

I find it funny that humans have been doing the gender tug of war since they first started organizing themselves. But, it has taken them thousands of years, and the taming and training of non-humans, to discover the secrets to getting along in the same household.

I take from this article the notion that "training" your spouse is as much retraining your own reactions as it is imposing a new behavior upon the other. But also, I learned that humans are complex critters and simple aversion conditioning, obviously, isn't sufficient for teaching new behaviors in human adults. If aversion conditioning did work - it wouldn't be called "nagging" - since nagging implies that it is repeated to the point of being ineffective. A smart critter would figure out that if the nagging were annoying enough, they should stop the behavior that elicits the nagging response in the first place.

Sparkle, in her newly married and bun-in-the-oven status, pointed out that such an article could never be written/published with the reverse gender roles. Namely, a man writing about using animal training techniques on "his" woman. And, thus lies the problem. I think a female writer would still consider the husband to be a separate entity whereas men seem to think of wives as property or an extension of themselves. However, I am just guessing here. The Phenom and I are hardly the typical relationship - human or other wise. I can say that the Phenom has the remarkable ability to learn from mistakes and we rarely argue and never have the same argument twice.