“Sweet, you did a good job in your exams. As promised, we bought a lot of clothes for you as your reward”, “I’ll give an additional grade for those who will pass their activity early”, “If you will clean your room, we will allow you to hang out with your friends”.
Honestly, at the age of 19, I still love to do the things that will benefit me. When I want to hang out with my friends, I will wash the dishes, clean the house and any help that I can do to my parents so that I will get their permission. Or sometimes, when I want to increase my allowance, I am reviewing the whole night to get a high grade on our quizzes and at dinner I will tell them that I got the highest score and some boastful stuffs just to get what I want. And I even make such cute voices (but I really do not know if it is cute, kidding aside) and some clingy acts to make my sister tutor me in mathematics, however in return she will make me do her duty in our household chores and unfortunately, it is the laundry. Moreover, the most exciting part is, I can get paid whenever my classmates want me to do their research or homework, it is alright for me as long as I have the money. Frankly, this is my inner side and all of us were like this is it not?
The people around us gives us some benefits to change our behavior or to encourage us to behave in the same way in a similar situation. We were easily to be tempt especially when we like or want something. Because we like the prize that we will get, it reinforces us to somehow behave the way they want us to behave and so we change.
But what if we do not get a benefit out of it? What we will do? What if your parents said, “Honey, I know that we promised to buy clothes for you when you get the high grade but we lack financially for now, so please understand”? At first, we will understand the situation and we still do study hard to get a high grade again but when your parents broke their promise for one last time, we started to get tired, we will lose our motivation and so we will not study like the way before. Our behavior always does change depending on the situation. People can learn not to do things as well as to do things.
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, proposed the classical conditioning or stimulus substitution. He experimented the response of a dog with the meat and bell. And the dog salivated in response to a bell tone. Pavlov showed that when a bell was sounded each time the dog was fed, the dog learned to associate the sound with the presentation of the food. In simple terms, two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response in a person or animal (McLeod, 2018).
And so, I realized that this is the reason why washing the dishes were now belong into my daily routine, why studying seriously became normal for me or why my body suddenly got awake when I heard my alarm clock. At first, we are doing these things because of our interest but while we are repeating doing these things, it became just our normal acts until we do not care about the benefit that we will get in return.
John Watson famously said, "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors”.
He believes that we can be trained to learn things as we response to it and because of our different experiences it affects how we behave on certain things. Do you ever encounter a kid that his parents were dictating him what he will become in the future? Well, I did, his parents said that they want him to be a lawyer and then he became a lawyer. He is actually my grandfather. I asked him once when I am in the middle of uncertainty of what course will I choose because my father also told me when I was a young kid to be a Lawyer, “Gramps, why did you end up to be a lawyer?”.
He looked at me for how many minutes and I wonder if he did not hear what I said or what but then he answered, “My parents wanted me to be a lawyer and so I did”. “But why? Is that what you want?”, I blurted, out of curiosity. “Well, I only remembered that when I was little, they said that they want me to be a lawyer and I really do not have any course that I want to take that time and besides that is what they planted on my mind maybe that is the reason why I cannot think of any course that I really want. But later on, it became my passion too. Law has always a place in my heart even though I am now retired”.
I comprehend that we can learn all the things if we want to. We can be controlled by someone if we want to. And we can trained ourselves the way they want us if we want to.
The proponent of Connectionism theory, Edward Thorndike presented The Law of Learning which involves three parts; the Law of Effect, Law of Exercise, and Law of Readiness.
First, the Law of Effect, it is the emotional reaction of the learner. When we received a positive outcome, there is a tendency that we will repeat what we did again. Way back when I was twelve-year old, I loved to play games on my phone but I am scared with thunder.
Second, the Law of Exercise, this encourage us repetition to acquire skills as old saying says, “Practice makes perfect”. There is one time that a thunderstorm comes but I want to get onto my next level with the game so I continued to play but then the thunder striked at our tree in the backyard of our house so I got scared.
Lastly, the Law of Readiness, it defines the physical, mental and emotional state of the learner and cold room is equal to negative learning experience, which means that when we come up against such negative learning experience it affects our physical, mental and emotional state. And so, whenever there is a thunderstorm, I never held my phone and just turn it off because I learned that my phone attracts the thunder.
We can get a traumatic experience and it changes our behavior. On how we act if we will face that situation again and sometimes it holds our two arms in the back.
Burrhus Fredeick Skinner advocate the Operant Conditioning, it involves a Positive Reinforcement, adding good stuff to increase a behavior just like when we want to have a new laptop from our parents we will turn into a saint, just kidding, we will do what they want us to do like buy some groceries, cook their favorite food or massage them at night.
Next, the Negative Reinforcement, it means delaying bad stuff to increase a behavior. For example, in order my parents to stop being stress at me for hanging out with my friends, I will just tell to my friends to hang out next time.
And then, the Positive Punishment or adding bad stuff to decrease a behavior, in particular, when someone hurt us, we will leave that someone because it hurt us once.
Lastly, the Negative Punishment which means delaying bad stuff to increase a behavior just like our parents will ground us if we got into fight again.
Our behavior defines of who we are and what we are. Sometimes there is a change that is good to us and there is a change that is not. We can adapt and adjust on our environment but it is us who chose whether we move forward or backward. We may have experiences that can get us fall into that deep hole but sometimes those experiences, mistakes and challenges can be our rope to get out of that hole, we may come across to that failure again but this time we will know what we will do and we never noticed that we are getting used to it until we became invulnerable.
Credits for the lead image:
