Classical Conditioning

Ever wonder why you may reach for your phone when you hear someone else’s phone go off that happens to have the same ringtone as you? Or how cats are trained not to jump on furniture? Classical conditioning is the answer. Classical conditioning is the way in which behavior is taught through association.

How Conditioning Works

For example, a cat naturally doesn’t care about a couch and will climb on it all day if it wanted to. The couch in this case would be the Neutral Stimulus (NS) because it elicits no natural response from the cat. Anybody who knows anything about cats knows cats hate getting prayed with water. The spray bottle is the Unconditioned Stimulus (US) because it naturally elicits an Unconditioned Response (UR) which is running away. Now imagine if we begin to consistently spray the cat with water every time it jumps up on couch. Eventually, the cat will associate the couch with getting sprayed with water and won’t go on the couch anymore. The NS that the cat didn’t care about has now become the Conditioned Stimulus (CS) because we taught it to associate a harmless couch with the feeling of getting sprayed. This aversion to the couch out of fear is the Conditioned Response (CR) we were looking for.

Over time, the cat may Discriminate the couch with other pieces of furniture and refrain from jumping on those too. Consistency is key as well, however. After some time, the cat may quit responding to the association and this conditioning would experience Extinction. In this case, it’s important to condition again to elicit Spontaneous Recovery.

Conditioning for Educators

Can you identify what the NS, US, UR, CS, and CR is?

When I personally was a kid growing up in the classroom, my peers and I had so much energy and would constantly talk while the teacher was talking. My teacher found a way to safely condition us to stop talking at inappropriate times by turning off the lights and lecturing us. Every time our teacher would turn off the lights, she would explain how disrespectful we were being towards our fellow classmates and to us and that made us feel extremely embarrassed and quiet. After days of doing that, whenever we got too noisy, as soon as the lights got turned off, we all immediately stopped talking and then knew we were being disrespectful.

- - - - NS: The lights
      - US: Getting lectured
      - UR: Feeling embarrassed
      - CS: The lights
      - CR: Feeling embarrassed

Why this is Important

Classical conditioning can be an easy and non-invasive way to elicit or discourage a specific behavior from students. In my past experience, my teacher successfully gained control back of the noisy classroom until we understood that talking out of turn is disrespectful and we shouldn’t do that. Teachers everywhere should take advantage of such a great psychology technique to indirectly better their students!

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.

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