The Nobel Prize for Unintended Consequences

I really should be careful about what I teach my dogs.

When they were puppies, we enrolled them in basic obedience classes. The idea was to teach them to perform certain behaviors on command. We did this with a food-based system of rewards:

I say “sit.”
The dog sits.
The dog gets food.

Simple enough, right? Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for showing that dogs can be conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell. How did he do it?

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