Do you ever find yourself salivating when you sit down to a tasty dinner? According to learning theorists, this biological response to a tasty plate of grub could be a learned behavior, learned via a process called classical conditioning. Let's go back a sec.
We didn't know how to salivate until we learned it? No, that's not quite it. Otherwise babies would have even more on their plates in the first year of life.
Salivating is an automatic process that makes up part of the digestive system. The learned element of this behavior is that you don't need to eat a cake to start salivating anymore. You could simply look at a cake. Better still, you could just think of a cake.
The first person to apply the example of salivation to classical conditioning was the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. That's why another term for classical conditioning is Pavlovian conditioning, and it was discovered by accident. Pavlov was conducting research on dogs gastric systems when he noticed that the doggy participants would start salivating when they heard or smelt food in eager anticipation of feeding.
Testing this observation further, Pavlov found that if he played a sound to the dogs before feeding, soon enough the dogs would start salivating to this otherwise neutral stimulus alone. Here's what's happening in diagrammatical form. Before conditioning, an unconditioned stimulus, the food, produces an unconditioned response, salivation. That's reflexive biology.
However, during conditioning, a neutral stimulus such as the ringing of a bell and the original unconditioned stimulus become associated with each other. This is a learned association. The neutral stimulus predicts the unconditioned stimulus, which causes an unconditioned response. The neutral stimulus gradually becomes a conditioned stimulus, which produces a conditioned response, even if the original unconditioned stimulus isn't present. It's easy to see lots of applications of this learning theory in day to day life, it's not just relevant to dogs.
In fact, early attachment theorists had a theory of cupboard love, which suggested that babies form attachments with their parents because they are a neutral stimulus that provides food, which gives the baby pleasure. The cupboard love theory of parental attachment has gone out of fashion somewhat. But an experimental study by Watson and Rayner showed that human phobias can be learned through classical conditioning.
The 1920 Little Albert study, which would probably not be permitted today on ethical grounds, saw the researchers create a phobia of white rats in an 11-month-old baby simply by slamming a hammer against a steel bar after baby Albert had looked at a white rat. Albert subsequently demonstrated a phobia of all white fluffy objects, including Santa Claus. Combined, the two studies presented in this video show that classical conditioning can be used for better or for worse.
An interesting question remains. As adults, are we still so easily manipulated? If you found this video interesting, please like, comment and subscribe to Psychology Unlocked. For more articles and videos, head to psychologyunlocked.com