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Drinking From the Toilet: Real dogs, Real training

The Matching Law: What It Is, What It Isn't, and Why It Matters | Hannah Branigan

Drinking From the Toilet: Real dogs, Real training

Drinking from the Toilet: Real Dogs, Real Training

How To, Education, Pets & Animals, Kids & Family

4.7 • 677 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hannah follows up last episode's hot take on training speed with a deeper dive into the matching law, the behavioral principle that describes how learners allocate behavior in proportion to reinforcement schedules. She covers the original pigeon experiments, what decades of follow-up research have complicated, and how understanding this equation (without actually doing the math) can make you a more thoughtful and effective trainer in real life. 


Key Takeaways:

  • The matching law describes behavior as proportional to reinforcement, but real life is messier than the original equation suggests: Variables like reinforcer quality, difficulty of the behavior, and delay of reinforcement all affect outcomes in ways the simple version of the law doesn't account for.

  • Reinforcer value matters as much as reinforcement rate: A less frequent but more valuable reinforcer can outweigh a higher rate of a less valuable one. You can use this intentionally to load one side of the scale in your favor.

  • If your dog prefers an easier behavior even when the harder one pays better, your criteria may have jumped too fast: Dogs, like students given two stacks of math problems, will gravitate toward what's more fluent. That preference is useful diagnostic information.

  • Delayed discounting is real and shows up in training: The longer the gap between behavior and reinforcement, the less influence the reinforcer has. Getting the treat out of the jeans pocket slowly is not the same as getting it from your hand quickly, and your dog's behavior reflects that.

  • Matching law doesn't excuse us from timing and mechanics: Understanding the principle is useful. Using it as a reason to stop troubleshooting your delivery is not.

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About the Host

Hannah Branigan is a teacher, trainer, podcaster, and author of Awesome Obedience and its companion field guide. She is a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT) and a faculty member at the Karen Pryor Academy for Animal Training and Behavior. Her work is grounded in applied behavioral science and focused on helping serious dog trainers build better skills through positive reinforcement.

Keep up with Hannah and find all her work and resources here:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey there, fellow training nerds. You're listening to drinking from the toilet. If you like to

0:06.8

geek out about combining the science of behavior with positive reinforcement philosophy in real life,

0:11.1

well, you've come to the right place. I'm your host, Hannah Branigan, teacher, trainer, podcaster,

0:16.2

and author of the book Awesome Obedience and its companion, Awesome Osteedience, the Field Guide,

0:21.3

which are both available from clickertraining.com.

0:24.2

So this week, we are going to talk about the matching law.

0:28.0

Is it real? Is it not real? Either way, why should we care about it as dog trainers?

0:34.2

So actually, I think a lot of dog trainers have at least heard of the matching law at this

0:38.3

point, whether you've come across it on social media, maybe on a different podcast. I know that at

0:44.5

least some of you have heard of it from somewhere because that was actually one of the questions that

0:49.2

came up on the post that I made about positive reinforcement training taking longer that we talked about in

0:54.8

the last episode. And that's a good question. And it's an interesting topic. So let's talk about it.

1:01.9

On the most basic level, matching law is about how we make choices about what to do. So it's an

1:09.0

attempt to model how we allocate behavior. You may have heard the phrase

1:13.7

behavior goes where reinforcement flows. And so with the matching law, it's an equation that

1:19.2

tries to describe mathematically the relationship between the rate of behavior or the time spent

1:25.0

doing a particular behavior and reinforcement schedules.

1:29.4

So if you have two different behaviors, behavior one and behavior two and two different

1:34.1

reinforcement schedules, R1 and R2, you'll see it written out as B1 over B2 equals R1 over R2.

1:43.1

And all that's really saying is that we tend to perform behaviors in a

1:47.9

ratio that's proportional to the reinforcement schedule for each of those behaviors. So let's put this

1:54.1

in more concrete terms. Looking in the same situation, maybe your dog has two different behaviors.

...

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