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Types of Conditioning The major premise of behaviorism is that all actions on the part of living things should be categorized as behaviors. From this point of view, behaviors are not limited to physical acts such a movement but they also include internal acts like thinking or decision making. One of the main concepts found in behaviorism that is useful to the study of consumer behavior is known as conditioning. Conditioning can be thought of as a process of encouraging or discouraging a specific behavior in response to some condition or stimulus. In behaviorism, conditioning is divided into two major types: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. The first type of conditioning is known as classical conditioning. The most wellknown example of classical conditioning is the famous experiments and observations made by the Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Pavlov. As part of his study on the digestive system, Pavlov discovered that the secretion of saliva in dogs could be triggered by a stimulus other than actual food. He observed that the mere presence of the person responsible for feeding the test animal would cause an increased production of saliva similar to what would be expected if the person was actually bringing food to the animal. This observation led Pavlov to carry out experiments in which a neutral stimulus (the conditioned stimulus) was paired with another stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus) that normally produced a specific behavior. What was learned was that the animal could be conditioned to respond to the conditioned stimulus in the same way it might respond to the unconditioned stimulus. An easy way to understand this concept is through the following step-by-step simplification of Pavlov’s work: • • The dog salivates when fed (the unconditioned stimulus). Each time the dog is fed, a bell is rung (ringing the bell is the conditioned stimulus). After this is repeated a number of times, it will be found that the dog begins to salivate at the sound of the bell, even when there is no food present. Although an experiment on salivating dogs may seem difficult for consumer behavior, many examples of how the concepts of classical conditioning apply are readily available. The key to their identification lies in recognizing the neutral conditioned stimulus in the example. Neutral, in these cases, means something that is not directly related to the response of the consumer. An example that is familiar to nearly any parent in the United States is the 1 Types of Conditioning behavior of small children in response to the sight of certain fast-food restaurants and their signs. In reality, neither the signs themselves nor their actual shape have anything to do with the food they serve, yet to the parent, children seem to become instantly hungry whenever they spot such a sign. Although the reaction may seem somewhat mysterious because the children cannot yet read, the association of the sign with food (particularly French fries) is a strong example of classical conditioning. In essence, the fast-food restaurant’s sign has become conditioned stimuli, just like Pavlov’s bell. The other major type of conditioning is called operant conditioning and was the focus of B. F. Skinner’s experimentation. The major difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning often comes down to a matter of when the stimulus that influences the behavior is applied. In the case of classical conditioning, the new stimulus usually comes before the primary stimulus. In Pavlov’s experiment, the ringing of the bell was done just before the food was given to the dog, which causes the dog to associate the sound of the bell with food. With operant conditioning, the new stimulus usually comes after the primary stimulus and reinforces the response. An example of this would be teaching an animal to perform some trick—such as jumping through a hoop—by giving a treat each time the animal successfully performed the maneuver. 2