Classical conditioning is a type of learning that involves forming associations between different stimuli, such as different things in the environment. It’s the reason why we flinch when we see lightning in response to the coming thunder or why we feel anxiety when we enter a doctor’s waiting room in fear of receiving an injection. Classical conditioning is even used in advertising, which is why we salivate after seeing an advertisement for McDonald’s on television.
John Watson’s experiment with Little Albert provides a useful model in identifying the different forms of stimuli and responses involved in classical conditioning that leads to fear. In the experiment, Watson exposed the child, Little Albert, to a white rat. At first, the white rat elicited no response from Little Albert. However, when the white rat was also presented with a loud banging noise, Little Albert began to cry because he feared the noise. Eventually, Little Albert began to cry after seeing just the white rat alone because he was conditioned to associate the fear of the accompanying loud noise with the appearance of a white rat.
In this case, Little Albert’s unconditioned response was crying when exposed to an unconditioned stimulus in the form of loud banging noise. After all, it’s only natural that a young child should cry after hearing a loud noise. The conditioned stimulus was the white rat, which Little Albert learned to fear after conditioning, which elicited the newly conditioned response of crying whenever he saw the white rat.
There are other instances in which classical conditioning can make us fear the simplest things. I grew up hearing stories of how my grandfather was a prisoner of war for two years in the early 1960s. For two years he lived in a constant state of fear while enduring extremely uncomfortable conditions, including eating the same unhygienic, foul-tasting lentil dish every single day. When he was finally released and returned home, he asked my grandmother never to cook lentils in the house because he was conditioned to associate that particular dish with his time in the camp. In my grandfather’s case, the unconditioned response was fear of the unconditioned stimulus of living in the camp as a POW. The conditioned stimulus became the lentil dish he was served every day and his conditioned response was irrational fear and discomfort associated with those lentils because it brought back painful memories. This example shows how unintentional classical conditioning can be detrimental to people’s psyches.