Many conceptualize psychology as an exotic, non-applicable,
clinical exercise in memorizing useless facts. However, this couldn’t be
further from the truth. Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior
(according to the first sentence of APA’s definition). The brain is the most
complex machine that mankind has come across thus far. But this doesn’t mean
that we shouldn’t try to understand it. We look for causalities in other areas
of our lives. We trust the economists when they explain dividends and things
like that to us. And even though at first we may not see the application, if we
pay close attention, we can learn something that can help our financial
situation. I feel the same about psychology, only the results can permeate even
more of your life.
So, in honor of psychology’s dedication to the human cause
and its role as an applied science, I’m going to be talking for the first few
posts about something that I see as paramount for anyone who ever wants to get
anything done to know about—conditioning.
There are two types of conditioning—classical and operant.
And they simply work. If there is only one thing that psychology can prove and
that works time after time after time, it is conditioning.
Classical conditioning came first and it makes the most
sense to me to talk about it first, so I’ll start there.
What is classical condition, you might ask. Well, I might
answer, classical conditioning is basically whenever two things become linked
in the mind. Have you ever heard the dentists drill and cringed? Or have you
ever eaten your favorite food, gotten food poisoning, and then not liked that
food anymore?
I’ll give you another example from the man who coined the
phrase—Ivan Pavlov. Ivan Pavlov took some dogs to his lab and offered them meat
powder. They did what any dog owner knows they would—they salivated. But that’s
not the interesting thing—dogs naturally do this when food is around. The
interesting part comes whenever he started ringing a bell every time that he
gave them their treat. Day after day, they were given the meat powder and the
bell would ring.
After some time, Pavlov stopped giving the meat powder and
just rang the bell. Then one of the simplest and most important things in the
field of psychology happened: the dogs still salivated.
With no meat powder, the dogs salivated. The bell became
linked in the dogs’ mind and they reacted to the sound of the bell just as if
they were sniffing the meat. It’s kind of like whenever your dogs hear you open
up the pantry where the treats are and they start running to you. The pantry
being opened doesn’t automatically excite them—what’s exciting is that they’ve
linked it with the treats. And treats are exciting.
Humans do this to. A lot.
Let’s compare a human example to the dog example that we
just saw.
How do heterosexual men feel when they see an attractive
young woman walking out of the ocean in a bikini? They like it, right? Think of
this as the meat powder—it’s an unconditioned stimulus, or something that an
organism naturally likes without conditioning. And what do we know about
unconditioned stimuli like the meat powder? We know that you can link it with
stuff. This is exactly what beer companies do. They put attractive individuals
on their ads. They do that, and we link the two in our minds. It sounds odd,
but companies spend billions of dollars researching and executing this kind of
thing because it WORKS.
Remember those things. Classical conditioning is when two
unrelated things become associated in the mind. Look for examples—they’re
everywhere. The man who has the phobia of dogs because he was bitten as a child
(he ASSOCIATES dogs with getting bit). When you smell the food that you ate
before you had that stomach virus and you think that you’re going to throw up
(you ASSOCIATE the food with getting sick). You pick up one container of
detergent because it has a better package than another one (you’re ASSOCIATING
quality packaging with a quality product).
This isn’t an exotic science. You see it around you all the
time, you just have to know where to look.
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