Having read and applied Pryor’s book and having not-insignificant experience with animal training: no, all of it does not apply to humans. It’s tempting to want

Having read and applied Pryor’s book and having not-insignificant experience with animal training: no, all of it does not apply to humans. It’s tempting to want to ascribe all human behavior to “lizard-brain” motivations (and fits nicely with modern fads like an obsession with unconscious bias) but humans are far smarter and more adaptable than animals (including and especially dogs). Techniques like extinguishment for instance work very poorly with humans while working exceptionally well with dogs. I’d say the pieces that are best for influencing how to work with people are (and obviously much of this does come from Skinner) are variable reward systems and immediate feedback of good/bad behavior. That’s about it. I’ll also close by saying that Pryor’s methods are most relevant when there is ample time for the training and when consequences of misbehavior are relatively low. If the behavior being extinguished is for example randomly attacking other dogs, Pryor’s methods don’t effectively address that kind of thing, despite her claims to the contrary. And while Koehler gets a lot of justified criticism, in my experience with potentially dangerous animals at least like large-breed working dogs, a mix of Pryor-like and Koehler-like approaches are required. The happy clicky feedback isn’t going to convince an aggressive Malinois not to shred someone’s arm, much as we wish it would.