Classical Conditioning

On June 17, 1777 the United States congress agreed upon a flag to represent the United States of America. This flag has gone through various changes throughout the history of the United States; however, the basic look of the flag has remained the same red, white and blue with thirteen stripes and originally thirteen stars. The stripes are meant to represent the thirteen original colonies that America came from. The white in the flag is meant to represent the purity of the nation, the red is meant to represent the hardiness and valor of America and the blue is meant to represent the color of the chief. The stars on the flag represent the States incorporated by America. The flag is no more than a piece of cloth; however, through classical conditioning

Corsini (1994) defines classical conditioning is the idea that through repeated enforcement of an idea that a person will respond to a stimuli in a very different way than without the influence of classical conditioning. “The result of classical conditioning is known as conditioned response.” (1994 pg237) The first psychologist to study this theory was Ivan Pavlov in 1904. A person’s natural response to stimuli is known as an unconditioned response, or a response that had zero influence from an outside source. An example an unconditioned response is salivating when in the presence of food, nothing is telling the organism to salivate. (1904) The salivation is a direct response to the stimuli, the presence of food. Through the use of classical conditioning organisms can be trained to react to stimuli in certain ways. An example of classical conditioning is when a dog knows when a person is going to take them for a walk when the person grabs the dog’s leash. The first time the person

Mary Cover (1924) proves this theory when she classically conditioned a child to fear a white rabbit and then classically conditioned the same child to no longer fear the rabbit. Classical conditioning can be very dangerous because it can be used to essentially brain wash groups of people. The most infamous case of classical conditioning was during the 1930s and 40s when Adolf Hitler classically conditioned Germany to love him and the Nazi party. Hitler took this classical conditioning to the next stage when he had Germany’s history re written to make the Jewish population seem like the enemy. Hitler successfully conditioned so much of Germany that he could start the extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. This brain washing successfully killed over six million Jews without much of the German population even bating an