A new study just looked at this and the answer sheds light on something much bigger than dog training!
It revealed how people can look at the same evidence and arrive at completely different conclusions about whether using fear or discomfort is acceptable in professional training.
This new peer-reviewed scientific study was just published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2026.1744448/full
It wasn’t testing whether positive reinforcement works better than aversive methods.
It was studying the trainers themselves. Us!
The researchers interviewed 35 professional dog trainers across the United States. Some exclusively used positive reinforcement. Others used mixed methods or what many people call “balanced” training –
meaning they used reinforcement, but also sometimes used tools like shock collars or prong collars that deliver stimulation to the neck to interrupt behavior.
The study was trying to understand how trainers think.
How they make decisions. How they interpret evidence.
And why two trainers can look at the same dog and arrive at completely different conclusions about what’s appropriate.
The most important finding wasn’t about tools at all.
It was about how people know what they know.
This is what’s called an epistemic divide.
Epistemology is simply the study of knowledge: How beliefs are formed. What counts as evidence. And how humans decide what’s true.
The study found that positive reinforcement trainers were more likely to ground their decisions in behavioral science, formal education, and empirical research.
Mixed methods trainers were more likely to also rely on personal experience, what they’ve seen “work”, what they’ve been taught, and what “feels” effective in practice.
Neither group believed they were doing harm. Both believed they were helping dogs. But they were operating from fundamentally different sources of knowledge.
Some people grounded their conclusions primarily in empirical evidence. Others relied more heavily on experience, tradition, or intuition.
If something makes a behavior stop, it can appear that the method worked.
But science asks deeper questions: What happened internally? What happened neurologically? What happened emotionally? What are the long-term consequences?
The reality is, suppressing behavior is NOT the same thing as resolving it.
And here’s something especially important:
Many of the positive reinforcement trainers in the study had previously used aversive methods earlier in their careers.
But after exposure to behavioral science, and after observing dogs more closely,
many described moving away from using fear, pain, or intimidation as training tools.
The study doesn’t prove that knowledge automatically causes this shift.
But it does document a clear pattern:
exposure to behavioral science was frequently associated with trainers intentionally moving away
from the use of aversive methods.
And this same epistemic divide exists everywhere.
In dog training. policing. political systems. And colonial structures.
In any system where people act with certainty.
This study helps explain why the dog training conversation has been contentious for so long:
It’s not simply a disagreement about dogs.
It’s a disagreement about how humans construct truth itself.
And when you understand behavior more deeply, you begin to see that cooperation isn’t just kinder, it’s more compatible with how learning actually works.
When I train my own dogs or work with others, reinforcement is the foundation. Using high-quality rewards makes it clear what you want, without introducing fear, which interferes with learning.
If you want a step-by-step system built on these principles, you can sign up for my 30 Day Perfect Pup program at Pupford.com/training (linked on my channel page!)
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