Download Types of Conditioning

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:
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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
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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.
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