The concept of psychology that I would like to share is operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is the use of reinforcement or punishment to increase or decrease a certain behavior. This forms an association between the reward or punishment with that behavior and the person or animal being taught will learn to do or not do that specific behavior. This can be easily confused with classical conditioning, which is that there already is an association between two things. A good example of classical conditioning is Pavlov’s dogs, who would salivate to the sound of a bell after being fed every time the bell rang. The salivation was caused by the food initially, but after the association was made, the dogs would salivate by just hearing the bell.

I have tried this myself by using operant conditioning on my fish Bruce. Bruce is a betta fish and recently I have been training him to come to the front wall of his tank every time I feed him.  The reason that this is operant conditioning and not classical conditioning is that I will feed him only when he is at the front wall and I will not feed him when he is not at the front of the tank. Lately I have noticed that when I stand in front of the fish tank, he will swim up to the front wall and swim there eagerly, waiting to be fed. This is then classified as classical conditioning, because he has already associated that if he swims to the front wall of the tank he will get fed, and so now he will swim to the front expecting to be fed. The operant conditioning led to the classical conditioning due to the association that was made during the operant conditioning phase.  Other examples are also apparent in cases with teaching children new things. Operant conditioning is often used when a child uses bad behavior and so is punished when they display that behavior which makes them decrease that behavior in order not to be punished. This also works with reinforcement as well. There are many ways to learn, and this is just one way we can do so.