Negative Reinforcement
The Basic Idea
You are slacking off on your phone at the office and your boss walks by with a withering stare or a dry comment, prompting you to get back to work. You feel uncomfortable, as you’ve been called out by your boss, and get back to your computer. However, days later, you catch yourself slacking off yet again.
This is an example of negative reinforcement. In this scenario, your boss has provided a consequence that will inhibit you from performing the same mistake again. The next time you have the urge to watch YouTube or TikTok at work, the negative feeling of your boss’ disdain will likely remind you to stay on task.
A common misconception surrounding the term negative reinforcement is that a punishment must be applied to get rid of unwanted behaviour. That is not the case - in fact, reinforcement and punishment work in opposition. The key lies in their different end results. When a punishment is applied, it is usually to weaken or decrease the offending behaviour. When negative reinforcement is applied, it is in an attempt to increase or strengthen a target behaviour.
Negative reinforcement is a type of operant conditioning prevalent in almost all aspects of our lives. A child who throws a tantrum over a plate of vegetables will continue to scream if their parent takes away the plate to calm the child down. This kind of learned behaviour is easy to pick up but may be difficult to quit or reverse if you are not aware of its existence.
I think what television and video games do is reminiscent of drug addiction. There's a measure of reinforcement and a behavioural loop.
– Walter Becker
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
