Why was it that back when we were in high school the sound of the bell stripped us of all further desire to work. Or how when we think we feel a vibration we immediately reach for our phone searching for the next text message, Facebook or twitter update. Or why we immediately respond with “fine, you,” when asked how we’re doing?
The quick and easy answer is that it’s a habit, or it’s proper social etiquette. The long and complicated though infinitely more interesting answer is that we’ve been conditioned. Within behavioral psychology there are two fundamental concepts that play a role in assisting in understanding the complex behaviors we engage in every day. They are classical conditioning, and operant conditioning.
Conditioning? Are you trying to call us robots, or animals to be trained?
No, not exactly. We are animals, and sometimes we do engage in repetitious actions like robots but no, that’s not what I’m saying at all.
Adhering to KISS I’ll try to keep this as simple as possible.
Classical Conditioning: There are 4 pieces to classical conditioning. The CS: conditioned stimulus, the UCS: unconditioned stimulus. The CR: conditioned response, and the UCR: unconditioned response.
Stop all the medical mumbo jumbo, and give it to me straight doc:
To keep everything simple we’re going to use an example, it’s actually a famous example about a man named Ivan Pavlov and his dog.
One day Ivan noticed that when his dog saw dog food, (dog food=UCS) he would begin to salivate in anticipation, (salivation=UCR). So Pavlov began to wonder, is it possible for me to make my dog salivate before he sees the food? A lot of scientific thought ensued, and the result was this, Pavlov decided that when it was Fido’s lunch time he would ring a bell (CS) moments before presenting the food.
Some days or weeks passed and Pavlov decided to check and see if there was anything to his little experiment. So one day during lunch time he rung the bell and noticed that his dog immediately began to salivate (CR) even though there wasn’t any food in the room!
That is, the core, and simplest version of what is known today as classical conditioning. Pairing a ‘generated’ stimulus with a ‘natural’ stimulus in order to cause the ‘natural’ response to occur on the ‘generated’ stimulus.
Here’s an example that I’ve found helps me keep it all straight in my head. Imagine a friend, any friend will do, now imagine yourself smiling (CS) at the friend, follow up this smile with a pinch on their arm (UCS) your friend will then feel pain and anxiety, (UCR). Do this often enough and eventually your smile alone will be enough to make your friend feel pain and anxiety (CR).
The dark side of classical conditioning:
When I first learned about conditioning back in high school I also learned about an experiment done by a notable psychologist of his day (whose name eludes me) on a young girl, and the disastrous aftermath.
The psychologist gave the girl a fluffy white bunny (a teddy bear not the living animal) once the girl began playing with the bunny he would make a loud noise behind her, startling her and causing her to cry. After enough pairings of this, white fluffy bunny, and loud noise, he observed that just the sight of the white furry bunny would make the girl cry.
Knowing of extinction he assured the parents that the girl would be fine within a few days. Then generalization occurred. One day at home the girl came across a white fluffy blanket, upon spotting it she immediately began to cry. It was soon discovered that a white fluffy anything would make her cry, even though according to calculations extinction should have occurred.
What happened here is generalization, and that is when our conditioned stimulus spreads to everything resembling it. This is less likely to happen with older people (those of us who aren’t toddlers), although being conditioned with a stimulus that has multiple identifying features can trigger it.
OKAY…So that’s classical, what’s operant?
Operant conditioning is a way of influencing our behavior based on the reward or punishment we receive from engaging in that behavior.
Here’s an example: we are siting in our cubicle at work when suddenly the fire alarm goes off. (This is our environment acting on us), in response we escape the building, (this is our behavior reacting to our environment), and we are then rewarded with our life and health.
That reward of safety will act as strong positive reinforcement to engage in that exact behavior the next time we hear a fire alarm.
But doc I still don’t get it!
I know, it took me a while too, and by the way I’m not a doctor, just a psychology nut.
For this example we turn to children: children go to school and receive homework. They then chose whether or not to do this homework, doing the homework rewards them with good grades and praise, not doing the homework punishes them with a loss of privileges and disappointment in those they look up to.
Or if you don’t have kids, or remember what it was like to be kid turn to your puppy.
Puppy decides that your brand new living room carpet is prime real estate to relieve himself. You catch him in the act and scold him, while hastily carrying him to the nearest exit.
Eventually puppy learns that going in the house is bad, and becomes less likely to engage in the behavior because of the associated punishment. Puppy also learns that going outside is good and becomes more likely to engage in the behavior due to the subsequent reward of pats and praise.
But wait, does this mean that every conditioning I’ve ever had stays forever:
Absolutely not, conditioning both operant and classical has a shelf life. That can vary from days or weeks to years, it depends on how strong the conditioning and associations are. However, if you are repeatedly exposed to the CS, a dog without a leash, but the dog doesn’t do anything hostile to illicit fear, soon enough that particular conditioning will fade away.
The flip side to conditioning of just about any type, is that, once you’ve been conditioned even if extinction does occur it’s a lot easier to become reconditioned with the same stimulus and response.
Where can I use this?
You can and do use both classical and operant conditioning all the time. Just about every action we engage in has an associated reward or punishment, all of those instances are instances of operant conditioning.
When we’re driving somewhere and the car in front of us suddenly breaks we react by slamming on our own breaks and having a spike in heart rate and arousal.
Then later on when we’re riding as a passenger and a car slams on the brakes in front of us, we may mimic slamming on our own invisible brakes and we have that spike in heart rate and arousal. Or if we’re watching a movie and we see a car brake abruptly, we experience that tension of the body and heightened arousal.
All of that, is classical conditioning. So you see we’re not robots, or animals, well we are animals but we’re usually not robots. Conditioning is just a way to explain our behaviors, and help us further understand why and how we end up doing the things we do. Even not feeling awake until your morning coffee is conditioning, to an extent…
It’s never that simple is it doc?