In the 1920s, behaviorism became a popular form of psychology. It was the idea that external stimuli triggered mental events and that is how we learn. One very influential psychologist on this perspective was Ivan Pavlov. He created the experiment which is now known as “Pavlov’s dogs.” In this, he would train a dog using a bell. Each time he fed the dog he would notice the dog would salivate. He then introduced the bell in when the dog was being fed. He would place the food down, ring the bell and the dog would begin to salivate. Repetition was key, but over time the dog became accustomed to this bell sound and associated it with food. What Pavlov discovered was that if the dog expected that the sound of the bell was associated with mealtime, the dogs would salivate. He kept conducting this experiment over and over to ensure his data was accurate, and he kept getting the same results. By the end of the experiment, no food was necessary to get the dog to salivate, only the chime of the bell.
When we first got my two westies, everyone in the house made an agreement to train them to go outside. My stepmom had the idea of attaching a bell to the door, so the puppies could get used to hitting it when they needed to go outside. We started by walking them to the door, hitting the bell ourselves, then allowing them to go outside. We did this for a couple of months and then stopped walking them to the door. Because they were so used to the sound of the bell meaning they could go outside, they would walk to the sliding door themselves and hit the bell and wait patiently for someone to let them outside. They learned this behavior just as the dogs in Pavlov’s experiment did overtime and by removing the initial factor. In Pavlov’s experiment it was the food, in us at home version it was us walking the puppies to the door. The bells in both cases acted in the same manner and the outcome was similar. Pavlov believed that you could train anyone to do anything using this method and I do believe he is right. It is fairly simple, the idea is really just having that person associate a certain thing with a particular outcome, and over time it will begin to happen on its own.