Alright, so in that little sign behind me I just kind of rubbed out the A and put in a UR. small difference in spelling between nature and nurture. But in psychology it's a huge difference in terms of how people think about phenomenon. and, and for many years I think it was really an attempt to do an either or. This is nature, this is nurture influenced. but overtime we've come to realize that just about every psychological phenomenon is some mix of the two. So I've told you a little bit about the nature perspective. now I want to tell you about the emergence of the nurture perspective and this whole school of psychology called Behavioral Excuse me, Behaviorism that kind of came along with that and embraced that whole nurture aspect of behavior. Okay, so Week 4, Lecture 2. The Rise of Behaviorism or Nurture Strikes Back. yeah, so, here's how I would like to frame this for you. I've already kind of set this one up a little bit, that you know, we had all these experimental psychologists doing their thing. Trying to say psychology's a science, psychology's a science. And then along came Sigmund Freud with his clinical perspective on things, and suddenly everybody got to know that,everybody kind of thought that is what psychology is about. And you could almost hear the more scientifically minded psychologist screaming somewhere in their labs. So this is behaviorism is going to be a reaction to partly to the perception those scientist had that while Freud had interesting ideas. They were not testable scientific theories and therefore they would not advance psychology. You needed testable theories to advance to science. alright, but, he ha, he did his thing, Sigmund Freud. Darwin, of course, also had, was having a huge influence as, as I highlighted in the previous lecture. not so much Darwin himself, but as the ripples of his work continue to expand. They touched virtually every area of research, and of course, through things like eugenics, they were starting to touch psychology in a very strong way. And, and of course, I already highlighted William James and his functionalist approach to psychology. So clearly it was already there. But eugenics brought in this whole other cloud. Because, you know? While people could say it's based on scientific principles, and it kind of was. There was still certainly something very creepy about it. And something that a lot of people reacted viscerally as, you know, wrong, negative, evil, in some cases. So, imagine this context now. You're, you find yourself as an experimentally minded psychologist. This is the era in which you live in, Freud doing his thing, eugenics kind of living out. And along comes this guy name Ivan Pavlov. And I'm really going to highlight Pavlov today. And yes, all three of these guys are white guys with white beards. You start to think that Santa Claus is in, you know, embodying different bodies and having influences on the world. that's just sort of how early science was I'm afraid, at least in Western science. So, Let's highlight Pavlov. and one of the things I like to highlight about Pavlov is, the role of chance. And, and the way he reacted to it. So, a, I'm a dog lover, a, I'm not thrilled by this, this is not a living dog, but it once was. This is actually one of Pavlov's dogs preserves. So Pavlov did a lot research on dogs. He was actually a physiologist. He was interested in the digestive system. So he had these apparatuses hooked up to the dogs. What these apparatuses would do is collect saliva. Because originally, what Pavlov, imagined his research to be about is he was going to give these dogs various kinds of food. And he was curious about how different foods would differentially activate our digestive system. And you can measure how reactive the digestive system is By how much saliva is in the mouth. So if something really kicks in our digestive system, we produce a lot of saliva. And so this was essentially a measuring instrument to detect how much saliva was being produced. Okay, everything good so far, except here's what happened while they were trying to do these experiments. Early on things seemed to work okay. They could prepare some kind of food, they'd put it in the dogs mouth. And when they put it in the dogs mouth they would see this sudden change of drooling corresponding to the presence of the food. But, after not many trials, something kind of annoying started happening. As soon as the events were happening that predicted food. So specifically, as soon as some research assistant or somebody started to prepare the food. Or even go to the cupboard where the food was held or anything like that. Suddenly, the dog started drooling. It didn't have any food in it's mouth at all, but it was already salivating, before the food came in the mouth. Now, a lot of the scientists could view this as a real nuisance. Like, crud, how could I measure the change in drool, saliva as a function of food in that mouth. If there's a change of saliva, salivation that's already occurring before I put the food in the mouth. What the heck is going on? Well, what was going on was learning. This dog and his compatriots were quickly forming association. Between the preparation of food and the ultimate presence of food in their mouth. And so they were reacting to the preparation, almost like they already had food in their mouth. And Pavlov recognized that for what it was, and said, wow this is really cool. This is perhaps more interesting than my original research question. I want to study that learning. And ultimately he called that kind of learning, Classical Conditioning. and he formalized it in the following way. So here's here's a trial he would use and here's some of the, some of the terminology that goes along with it. Its a bit of a clumsy terminology in my perspective, but I'll try to make it make sense for you as we go through. So we start off by talking about and unconditioned stimulus and an unconditioned response. two things to help you with the terminology. First, think of the word conditioned as the word learned. So, an unlearned stimulus and an unlearned response. Conditioning was what Pavlov referred to as the procedure in which learning occurs. So it, the, the link between this stimulus and this response, did not require any learning. It was already there. It was unconditioned. It was just there, present, right from the, the get-go. The other thing to, to note, and I've already kind of alluded to this is we're not really talking about the stimulus, and we're not really talking about the response. We're talking about the link between them. So to think about this, if you put food in a dog's mouth, the dog will salivate. That is a natural, automatic, physiological response. So there's a link between food and salivation, this stimulus and that response, that does not have to be learned. It's there when we're born, it's unconditioned. So people refer to that as the unconditioned stimulus of food provoking the unconditioned response of salivation. Okay, so the dog has that when they come into the lab. Now, first time the dog's in the lab, let's say we blow a whistle. And we ask, are they going to salivate when I blow a whistle? Well, why would a dog salivate when you blow a whistle? and so originally before conditioning, before learning, they do not salivate. Okay, so we can talk about this, this, whistle initially as being what we call a neutral stimulus, that does not produce any learned response. Because the animal hasn't learned anything yet, okay? no salivation. But now here's the interesting part, and this, this phase 3 would happen repeatedly, over and over and over. So what we would do is whistle and then give them food. And of course, the food will produce a salivation response. That is an unconditioned response to the unconditioned stimulus of food. When we do this over and over, whistle, food, dog salivates, whistle, food, dog salivates, whistle, food, dog salivates. Do that over and over and over, and then we do our test trial. And our test trial is, we blow the whistle. We don't give food, we just blow the whistle. And what you'll typically see is salivation, it's a slightly different salivation. Let me come back to that. But, you see salivation. So this dog compared to before conditioning, now after conditioning when you blow the whistle It will salivate. And we now call this a conditioned stimulus, and a conditioned response. We have taught the dog this connection, between the whistle and salivation. So it has learned to salivate to the whistle. So we call this now a conditioned stimulus which produces this conditioned response. Now you might go, hey wait a minute. I thought salivation was an unconditioned response. Now we're calling it a conditioned response. This is why I referred to that link. It's not so much salivation, it's salivation in response to the whistle, that had to be learned. That's why we call that a conditioned response. This is salivation in response to the food that did not have to be learned, that's why we call it unconditioned. And in fact if you look at the two salivations, the artist tried to depict this a little bit, they're different. The nature of the salivation will be different. It could be more or less, usually less, but the artist actually has depicted as more. But it's usually less salivation, to the condition stimulus than to the real one. okay? So he showed, you can do this. You can condition animals to in this case salivate, but to do all sorts of things. They're forming some sort of prediction. They're learning that the whistle is going to predict the occurrence of food, and therefore they start to react to the whistle, the same way they would react to food. So, they're typical response to food gets transferred now to the whistle, and they will now salivate to the whistle. Alright, so, Pavlov was doing that, and that led the way to a bunch of different kinds of experiments. So, here's just one sense. If you're doing these learning trials, and you say how many learning trials do you do before you test. And then when you test how many drops of saliva do you get and what you see is after a couple learning trials, not many but very quickly. The animal is learning and after about six or eight learning trials he's salivating quite a bit, after learning. And so, then, an interesting question was, okay, you do more trials, it really doesn't make a difference. He's kind of learned it by now, he's what we call asymptotic. but what if you know start just blowing the whistle and not giving food. And you blow the whistle and not, and don't give food, and blow the whistle and don't give food? Well, you'll see that eventually, the animal stops drooling. When the whistle no longer predicts food, they stop drooling. And that's what we call extinction. The CS condition stimulus, the whistle alone okay? And we see extinction. Now if you give a little bit of a rest and you come back, one of the things you see is what is called spontaneous recovery. The, the animal was down here but the next day when you blow the whistle, it drools quite a bit again. It's almost like ooh is the game still on? But then if we just give the CS alone, it extinguishes again, it goes back down. We wait 24 hours, there's a little bit of spontaneous recovery to gain, but just a tiny bit and then it goes down flat. Okay, my point in this is look at that. That's data, all right? And to the experimental minded scientist, this was science. This was not asking people what they saw in their head. This is looking at a very objective measure of drops of saliva. Something you can measure very clearly and how that changes as a function of what you're doing to the animal. This was really good science, and it had something to do with psychology, because it's about learning. So the experimental psychologists were like wow, okay, now we're talking. This is the answer to Sigmund Freud. This is a scientific approach to a psychological issue of learning. And also, in this age of eugenics. This kind of data showed, and you know what? This is about the environment. This is about the animal learning associations, and learning how to adapt is response is responding in light of them. So this is not genetics, this is learning. This is environment, this is nurture. And so suddenly all of this behaviorist's data and it really did become a whole school of psychology was a real answer. A real sort of antidote to some extent to the strong push for the influence of genetics. All right, now all of this was embodied, primarily in the character of something named John B Watson. we've talked about John B Watson before. I've told you about the little Albert experiment. Remember when he conditioned fear responses and John B Watson was not shy about his claims. He thought that through behavioral techniques you could explain everything there was to know about human psychology. So he really thought behaviorism was the way the way forward for psychology. a really scientific approach that could provide all the answers to all the questions. and he said that, you know, very loudly and clearly. And ultimately started this whole school of psychology that will be the focus of this week's lectures, a school called behaviorism. All right, so a little bit of reading and videos. First of all, this is Phillip Zimbardo talking about classical conditioning. So he will walk you through some of what we just described with a little bit more video. this is a kind of funny college example of a guy classically conditioning his roommate. but a really nice example of, of the process applied to humans. So you'll see that it applies quite well. and here's a link back to that little Albert experiment in talking about John Watson in general. And you'll see how, you know, he really saw this as a direct response to eugenics, and, and some of the push is about genetic influences. So you'll get that nature nurture vibe happening here. on the reading side, this, this is the actual Nobel prize an article about the Nobel prize acceptance from Yvonne Pavlov in 1904. So if you want to get more of a sense of, of that. and this is just a reading about classical conditioning. giving you a real good sense of, of classical conditioning and how it works. a lot of what we covered, but just, you know, another perspective on it, alright? So that's cool. So now we, we have our combatants. We have, you know, nature and nurture. We're really going to be emphasizing the nurture part in the rest of this chapter. Because it's really going to focus on behaviorism, how behaviorism grew, and how it applies to our real life. All right, fun journey. Hope you come along.
