John Watson Classical Conditioning Theory

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Classical conditioning can explain almost every aspect of human behavior. John Watson proposed that the process of classical conditioning (based on Pavlov’s observations) was able to explain all aspects of human psychology. Every form of interaction from speech to emotional responses were just patterns of stimulus and response. Watson denied completely the existence of the mind or consciousness. Watson believed that all individual differences in behavior were due to different experiences of learning. He certainly isn’t pulling this out of nowhere however. "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I 'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I …show more content…

For example, dogs don’t learn to salivate whenever they see food. This reflex is innate. In behaviorist terms, it is an unconditioned response. Pavlov showed the existence of the unconditioned response by presenting a dog with a bowl of food and then measuring its salivary secretions. However, when Pavlov discovered that any object or event which the dogs learnt to associate with food (such as the lab assistant) would trigger the same response, he realized that he had made an important scientific discovery. Accordingly, he devoted the rest of his career to studying this type of learning. To summarize, classical conditioning, later developed by John Watson, involves learning to associate an unconditioned stimulus that already brings about a particular response with a new conditioned stimulus, so that the new stimulus brings about the same …show more content…

This process is known as generalization. I have recently been classically conditioned to drive differently due to an accident. One day I was on my way to work merging onto the highway. I stopped to check for traffic and saw there was none. As soon as a let go of the brake and idle forward, an old retiree in his ’97 Ford F150 comes barreling out from behind a dumpster with no headlights on at 7:00pm. He smashed into the front half of my car and totaled. I really loved that car too. From now on, every time I pass that dumpster, my foot hovers over the brake nanometers away ready to smash it if anything every happens. In my case, the unconditioned stimulus was the accident and the unconditioned response was my paranoia. My conditioned stimulus is now seeing the dumpster which triggers my conditioned response to become paranoid. I only had liability on my car rather than full coverage, so I got to see my car get towed away, while the driver at fault rode away with a little dent in his bumper. Unfortunately, unless that dumpster seizes to exist, I don’t believe my way of thinking will be

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