Psychology of Communication: learning

Conditioned reflex

The pioneer of research into what he called conditioned reflexes was Pavlov.

A typical experiment of Pavlov's was as follows:

On numerous occasions a bell is rung just before a dog is fed. The dog salivates as usual on receiving its food. Then the bell is rung without any food being presented. The dog salivates in response to the bell ringing.

In Pavlov's terms:

•  the food is an unconditioned stimulus
•  the salivation in response to the food is an unconditioned reflex
•  the sound of the bell is the conditioned stimulus
•  the salivation to the stimulus of the bell alone is the conditioned reflex.

Pavlov also found that:

• it is much easier to form a conditioned reflex if the unconditioned stimulus follows the conditioned one (i.e. the food follows the bell)
• it is easier to form a conditioned reflex if the conditioned stimulus (bell) occurs very close in time to the unconditioned stimulus (food)
• the intensity of the stimuli is important - a dog salivates more if trained on larger pieces of food; and it also salivates more in response to a louder bell

This research ought to be relevant to Communication and Media Studies. What we often want to achieve as a result of communicating is a permanent change in someone's behaviour. For example, advertisers hope to modify someone's purchasing behaviour in response to their advertising; politicians hope to modify our voting behaviour through their party political broadcasts; parents hope to modify their children's behaviour in response to their desperate pleas.

In experiments conducted by Staats and Staats ((1958) in Jonas et al (1995)) words were presented auditorially to subjects immediately after the visual presentation of a name of a nationality. The words presented auditorially had either positive or negative connotations (e.g. vacation, gift, biter, failure). Dutch was systematically paired with positive words, Swedish with negative ones. When tested afterwards, subjects rated Dutch more positively than Swedish. Jonas et al suggest that such a conditioning process may help understand the development of prejudice against social groups who are consistently associated with negative information in the media.

Of course, where purchasing, voting and so on are concerned, we are not talking about reflexes, but rather about learned behaviour. Nevertheless, Pavlov's experiments are very suggestive and came to form the basis of further research into learning.

Related articles:

Behaviourism

Behaviour modification

Berlo on learning

Schramm's Fraction of Selection