Conditioning and Free Will Conditioning

Conditioning and Free Will

Conditioning is the process of making an animal (such as a dog or human) habitually respond in a particular way to a particular situation. Classical conditioning, as discovered by Pavlov, operates by encouraging the subject to associate one stimulus (such as a ringing bell) with another (such as being fed), and hence to react to the one as if it were the other (such as by salivating at the sound of a bell). Operant Conditioning works by encouraging the subject to associate one stimulus (such as being fed) with a particular response (such as hitting a button), and hence to continue or avoid that behavior to meet its needs (such as hitting the button in order to get food). It is impossible to say which is more "effective," because they have different uses. Classical conditioning is hardly effective at training animals to perform specific behaviors, though it may be very useful at teaching them to make associations. However, Classical conditioning does not have much effect on the external world -- its effectiveness is mental, in that it teaches animals about contiguity. Operant conditioning, on the other hand, is an extremely effective form of behavior modification. When classical conditioning begins to modify behavior, it starts slipping into an operant definition: for example, if a dog were consistently to hear a bell before being shocked, and it learned to climb up on a rubber surface to avoid the shock, this would be an intersection of operant and classical conditioning. Classically, the dog's fear was a conditioned reflex to the sound -- in operant terms, the dog's climbing behavior was a conditioned by the "reward" of avoiding the shock.