Repeatedly give a dog a treat when you ring a bell, dog will associate bell with treat and happiness. Eventually phase out the treat and dog still associates bell with happiness.
(This is my watered down take. )
Not questioning you but if it is that simple why is it a big deal and used almost everywhere?
The only difference between you and a dog is that you choose what you want to be trained to do.
Willpower as a concept is (mostly) fake and a significant portion of your life will be spent on autopilot. Make sure your autopilot is very well trained / programmed, and give it good environmental “rails” to follow to keep you on track.
Pavlovian conditioning is also more about innate reflexes and autonomic (involuntary) reflexes. The dog can’t decide (as much as it does decide anything) to drool when it hears the bell, it’s body (and salivary glands) have just associated the bell with the food deeply enough that the former stimulates the same response as the latter.
This means that you can gain more control over your involuntary reflexes by pairing them with external stimuli that you do control. The most common use-case is using sound and smell to calm oneself on-demand without pharmaceuticals. For example:
keep a small keychain or necklace with a sealed container with a cotton swab soaked in essential oil such as lavender. Mediate daily or at least several times weekly in a space you feel safe using breathing exercises and inhaling the scent of the lavender. Then, when you are in a space you feel less safe but need to be able to calm yourself (such as when giving a presentation to an audience) you uncap the container and smell the lavender. Your conditioning to that stimulus should cause your autonomic nervous system to calm itself (however, if you stop meditating,l / practicing calming yourself to the stimulus more often than you use it in the upsetting situation the conditioning will reverse and you will begin finding that stimulus upsetting).
I mostly use this for sleep, I always sleep to the sound of a raging thunderstorm which serves both this sensory function as well as covering unexpected noises that might wake me.
Hope you find this useful!
Because the example just demonstrates an example of conditioning, but the implications are much wider. The idea is that one signal can be replaced with another, which could be beneficial or detrimental, could intentional or accidental, may or may not be long lasting, but mostly just applies to a lot of situations quite a lot different than the exact example but the example serves as a convenient, familiar shorthand for referring to it easily.
The idea is that this can be applied to people because the brain finds and remembers a pattern. Replace the bell and the served food with another cue and event pair.
You mind if we dive a little bit further in your answer? if not it’s cool but thanks for replying nonnetheless
The original experiments measured the dog’s drool. Ring bell, present treat, dog drool.
Eventually, ring bell, dog drool immediately. No treat necessary.
This laid out a basic framework for conditioning / learning. It showed that the dog was doing more than just following its biological programming to drool when consuming food. Its brain learned that the bell meant food was coming, and its body responded appropriately.
This lead to the… theory?.. of classical conditioning, which I ignorantly boiled down to just a few functional components to help me remember.
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Reinforcement vs Punishment. Pretty straightforward.
- Reinforcements are good stuff (treats) that cause behaviors (drooling) to appear more frequently.
- Punishments are bad stuff that make behaviors go away.
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Positive vs Negative.
- Positive is adding the reinforcement or punishment when the desired behavior presents. Positive reinforcement encourages the behavior. Positive punishment dissuades it.
- Negative is removing the reinforcement or punishment. Negative reinforcement is removing what had been a constant reward, like attention, in response to a target behavior to dissuade it. Negative punishment is basically torture, finally stopping the bad thing when the desired behavior presents, encouraging it.
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Variable vs… Constant? Forgetting…
- variable positive reinforcement is sometimes rewarding the behavior, like a slot machine. This leads to slower development of the trained behavior but with exponential growth. It’s much more powerful training in the long term.
- Constant(?) reinforcement, giving the reward every time the behavior presents, gives linear progress. The behavior will train more quickly but less reliably. When the reward disappears, the behavior diminishes quickly, but with variable training the subject is used to sometimes not being rewarded and the behavior will persist.
Classical conditioning is very powerful. A famous example I remember is using it to teach a squirrel to water ski. It works well on simple minds, and it works to a degree on almost any mind. It’s often drastically over-applied to explain or try to train any behavior in any being, which is probably why it feels like you hear about Pavlov’s dog everywhere. People use it as a metaphor to try to explain virtually any behavior.
But developed humans are much more complicated than that. I loosely remember that operant conditioning was kind of the next level up and pretty well explained behaviors in slightly older kids, and even that wasn’t the most advanced model I learned. It’s the most advanced one I remember though. If memory serves, adult human behavior is still too complex to be explained with any simple model, a mystery we’re still unraveling.
I’m trying my best to regurgitate lessons I learned decades ago, so give me a break and take it all with a grain of salt.
Long story short, you hear about Pavlov’s dog everywhere because behaviorist models of learning built on classical conditioning are the best most people have, and they use it to explain any behavior despite it being woefully insufficient in most cases.
To learn more, maybe look for some academic psychology books or just information about classical conditioning generally.
That’s the best I got. Sorry for any misinformation. Good luck on your search.
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The brain is constantly looking for patterns in your life. It’s trying to relate events and your senses to what you normally do. It does this because it’s looking to save the body energy by automating responses to triggers. (Less energy for thinking about what to do means more energy for other things.)
What this means is there are actions you take without even thinking about it. For example: when you get into your car, you may unconsciously put on your seatbelt.
Ok I am not defending the practice but what about beating your wife? (this is the way I keep hearing it used to explain why the abused stay with the abuser) I always thought and still think it is bullshit. Case in point. Lets don dickle it for a second. Lets say you work a nice and cushy cubicle job you are happy with it and everything. You go home happy because you enjoy your job. Now one day at exactly 8am as you are seated and smack you upside the back of your head as hard as I can. Then I walk and go on my day of mine. Next day same thing. Next day same thing. Lets say this goes on for a month or more. You (not you specifically) are telling me that at exactly 8am your not going to duck to avoid it? Now with my argument how does pavlov’s dog apply to battered wife syndrom?
The person will cringe as soon as they hear the door open, because they know what’s next.
Battered spouse is more complex, there are codepency issues, kids, poverty, self-esteem from constant degrading behaviour etc. The spouse may choose to stay for a complex set of reasons
I’m not entirely sure what conversation you’re wrapping people into. I don’t know what they say about battered wife syndrome, you would have to tell us.
That said, I think you’re missing the push and pull nature of spousal abuse. It’s not just punching your wife, it’s creating an unstable environment that the victim believes they can overcome and that it is valuable to overcome it.
The negative reinforcement side, that is the abuse and the removal of it for “good behavior”, is often paired with shame. The wife is not just ducking an uppercut, she is made to believe that she deserved it. Would you divorce your husband if you thought you were at fault for all of your marital problems? Abuse victims often think that they are lucky someone is even willing to put up with them.
The positive reinforcement side, that is the honeymoon-like love-bombing that happens between abusive episodes, is what the spouse actually wants. But it’s given only intermittently, like a skinner box (another concept you should look up), which creates a dynamic very much like gambling to make an addict of the victim. They spend most of their time trying to figure out how to create those good times without realizing that it’s being deliberately withheld from them like a dangling carrot on stick.
Both of these contribute to why the spouse stays.
If your contention has more to do with operant conditioning not being inherently evil, uh, that would be true. It’s a normal psychological function. Abusers… abuse it, but there are other reasons why it might be useful to associate a sound with food, for instance.
Because it’s so simple, it applies to psychology (including for humans) very broadly. Remove the context of dog and food and bell.
event -> reward -> response
becomes
event -> response
And being able to predict or control behavior (responses) without providing value (rewards) is a powerful concept.
Edit: instead of ‘without providing value’, I should have phrased that to be more generic.
Yea but why do counselors try to use it for battered women syndrom?
Think of PTSD as the conditioned response to stimuli.
Instead of “happiness” it’s “panic, anxiety, etc”
Instead of “bell” it’s a bunch of other triggering stimuli associated with violent partners/family
Counselors want to replace those negative pathways with positive ones. They want to recondition the brain to have better responses to the stimuli that trigger negative behavior.
Because this kinda conditioning is fairly common across many animals, including humans. Pretty much anything with a brain. These studies were the beginning of understanding how brains learn.
It’s like that time Pavlov rode the tram in Prague, and they rang the bell to warn pedestrians that were in the way.
Pavlov said “shit, I forgot to feed the dogs”
A Pavlovian response is an automated reaction triggered by a given event, that regardless of context, the individual can not withhold.
The classical example is about dogs being fed after the ringing of a bell. This created the association that food always followed the bell ringing. At some point, only the bell ringing made the dogs salivate, in expectation of the food.
In the real world, how can this influence people?
Imagine you get exposed to something - sight, sound, feeling - and that stimulus is followed by a reaction, be it voluntary, involuntary or even coerced. Give it enough repetitions or a very strong impression and a very hard to overcome association is made, that can stay for a life time.
Bell. Dog. Food.
When bell, food.
Dog eat food.
When bell, give dog food.
Food when bell.
Dog learn food when bell.
When bell, dog expects food, because dog get food when bell before.
As you can surmise references to this phenomena are likening whatever action to the ringing of the bell, which makes the subject expect an action that has been previously associated with the bell, allowing for effective training. The Dog does not know why it expects food when the bell rings, just that when the bell rings it gets hungry and expects food to be there.
Thanks for the answer… no sarcasm. How does that relate to like rape, battered women, ptsd. I really don’t see the jump.
Both negative (when bell, I will hit you) and positive reinforcement (when bell, I will give food) are associated with Pavlov’s dog experiments (for shockingly obvious reasons).
For PTSD and other traumatic things, this is an example of negative reinforcement; something bad happened and something neutral happened, now they are associated forever in the victim’s mind. i.e.
Soldiers seeing their friends get blown up while in a humvee and associating any music playing or the humvee engine sound with that scene.
When you have a ‘Pavlovian response’ it is a stimulus (bell) that makes your mind consciously or unconsciously remember the reward/punishment (food) that happened at the same time; causing an involuntary response (hunger/salivation in the original experiment).
PTSD is the conditioned response your body and mind go to from repeated negative situations. Even though you may be out of the War (as an example) loud noises can trigger the previous war mode of fight/flight in you
TL;DR: do a thing, and give treat. eventually remove treat and the expectation of the treat remains.
The gruesome reality is that to empirically measure the operant conditioning, this fucked up dude would surgically sew in drain tubes into the salivary glands into the animals and measure the saliva output to demonstrate the conditioning.
