My review of Atomic Habits — a.k.a fundamental dog training principles applied to human behaviour change
I’ve just finished reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits — an international bestseller that was recommended by many people when I recently asked about which behaviour change methods people had found to be effective in their own life. Among other things, I noticed that the most important concepts in the book are actually straight out of dog training manuals… applied to humans.
I spend a lot of time working with my two spaniels in dog sports like agility and detection dog practice so I think about canine behaviour almost as much as I do humans. That’s probably why James Clear’s internationally acclaimed book Atomic Habits sounded so remarkably familiar: many of the behaviour change mechanisms he describes in the book are also used in dog training, and based on fundamental psychology concepts like operant conditioning — just packaged in really nice a way that helps us apply them to change our own behaviour.
I’ve picked out some quotes from the book to show you how they are similar to dog training.
“Who’s a good boy?”
To start with, the book is structured around what the author calls four laws of behaviour change: make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. In other words, if you want to increase the likelihood of a behaviour, you need to make it clear what should be, make it an attractive option to try out, easy to perform and round it off with a nice reward to increase the likelihood of the behaviour occurring again.
This is exactly the same approach that is used to train dogs: you need to communicate clearly what you expect them to do so it’s an obvious and attractive (=interesting) option compared to whatever else they might want to do. Once the dog is engaged, set them up for success — make it easy to do the behaviour at first, and don’t forget to reward them with a treat at the end.
In fact, many of the techniques in the book are actually based on basic rules of operant conditioning: increasing good habits with positive reinforcement or negative punishment, and decreasing bad habits with positive punishment.
