Mind Control?
What if you were able to tell someone a command while they were sleeping and when they woke up they would follow your orders? This is known as a form of behavioral conditioning. Throughout Huxley’s book Brave New World, the whole society goes through behavioral conditioning to make a “perfect” world. Unbenounced to most people, this controversial topic is happening in today's world as well. Those who oppose behavioral conditioning claim that it will be used to take advantage of people and does not let people have free will. However the benefits outweigh risks, in that behavioral conditioning helps people with mental problems and can safely eliminate negative flaws in a person making them a better person.
Behavioral conditioning
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The process of conditioning does not have to be painful one study was testing to see if they can bypass the natural reaction of loud noises and the blink of an eye. To test this they watched people’s eyes while they played two types of noises one was white noise and the other was a normal everyday noise like a dog barking. (Malmierca). This helps people with mental disabilities be more accepted by society. Like many experimental processes it can be improved with efficiency and to be able to do it in less time. It has help groups of “Adolescent social skills groups consistently demonstrate immediate improvements in social and communication skills in participants during treatment; however, participants tend to show limited sustained treatment response over longer term follow-up” (Wink). In the world today people call other people that have mental disability names because they are not the same as themselves. Therefor, if this process were to cut out a lot of things that make them different using behavioral conditioning. Having a person that can be in social situations without being called names and can work harder and being able to fully function in the work force is a contribution to society unlike if they were to not try because that is what they have been told their life because they did not fit in.
Behavioral conditioning is not a bad thing but it definitely
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Those people thought that "civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic." (Huxley) in thinking this the people have no reason to fight because without nobility no one would stand against in an effort to be better than his fellow man and no one would fight for things like love or fight to defend it. This shows that they want everyone to be the same and no one should be noble or have heroism so there would not be any fighting. In the world today it can be used so people can be themselves and not be tied down with a label of a coward or handicapped. Today behavioral conditioning can be used to improve the social abilities of people with autism allowing them to further themselves (Wink). This way helping people become who they want to be and steer away from the negative stereotypes that are labeling them. While today’s society is trying to help people become individuals, the people in Brave New World are trying to keep everyone conformed so there is no cacos in their
Sleep teaching and mind control: hypnotism techniques used for manipulation and power over the individual. Hypnotism is not widely promoted in our society as formal education; yet, it lingers on the horizon. In Huxley's Brave New World, hypnopaedia is used to promote economic stability and control emotions of the inhabitants living in England.
...tized to it. Aversive conditioning involves replacing an old, positive response to a stimulus with a new, negative one. An example of this is instead of feeling relaxed after smoking a cigarette, a therapist might make a patient feel another negative emotion like embarrassment or fear. The last method of behavioral therapy is operand conditioning, which has been used for years and is simply rewarding someone for good behavior and withdrawing the reward for bad.
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates ways in which government and advanced science control society. Through actual visualization of this Utopian society, the reader is able to see how this state affects Huxley’s characters. Throughout the book, the author deals with many different aspects of control. Whether it is of his subjects’ feelings and emotions or of the society’s restraint of population growth, Huxley depicts government’s and science’s role in the brave new world of tomorrow.
Controlling the Mind The ability to hold two contradictory ideas at once and accept both of them is known in the novel 1984 by George Orwell as “doublethink.” It is more than just reality control, for it must be preformed constantly and immediately to ensure that all thoughts are orthodox. Doublethink is not forced upon the citizens of 1984, yet it has become an action of everyday life, much like breathing and eating. It is essential to the stability of the Party and all of Oceania because without it, the morale of the people would plummet. In addition, doublethink prevents the true reality of humanity from being understood, which allows the Party to maintain control over all aspects of life. The ability of the word doublethink to portray how the Party keeps the citizens of Oceania under its control makes it the most important word in the novel.
A fundamental theme of the Brave New World is to achieve perfection through deceitful control. Technology, conditioning/predestining, and manufactured happiness are tools of control to achieve what the leaders believed to be perfect. The Director proves my point in describing the Fertilization Process, “the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society…” (5). Perfection in their minds is manageable conformity without opposition. Ford’s control over the society is especially insidious because the people don’t know they’re being controlled so they’re not going to fight. It’s become normalized. The actions of the leaders and Ford propose a question, “Will this end in overall perfection in our society?” The almighty Ford decided to turn a world just like ours into one he views as a utopia. Since Ford’s methods are meant to be deceptive and efficient, they are often torturous. Even before the babies were hatched, technology was already being used to control for a better future.
Conditioning is a very complex idea consistently mentioned throughout the book. Conditioning is consistently used to keep the population thinking what the government wants to think. The government controls the person after being cloned until they are at an age in which they can fulfill the job they were made to do. The masses of people are indoctrinated, and since the usage of books is limited to the higher castes of society (Alphas and Betas), so there is ...
The famous Milgram experiment focused on the conflict between blind obedience to authority and personal conscience. It turned out that 65% of ordinary people blindly follow orders given by an authority figure, and only 30% are able to follow their personal conscience (McLeod). Considering that the vast majority acquire blind obedience to authority just in the process of nurturing, imagine what would it be like if blind obedience is built into one’s nature? In the novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates ways in which government and advanced science control society by conditioning embryos to blindly follow desirable social norms. Every conditioned individual would have merited instincts
F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura, focuses on changing the behavior of clients. This type of therapy “aims to decrease the frequency of maladaptive behaviors, and increase the frequency of adaptive or helpful behaviors” (Corsini & Wedding, 2014, p 194). Behavior therapy does this by using trait theories of personality and assuming that “each individual has unique, enduring patterns of behavior that can be observed across a wide range of situations and that these patterns can be understood in terms of specific personality characteristics – traits – that vary in intensity from low to high” (Corsini & Weddin, 2014, p 199). Behavior therapy also uses concepts such as classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning “is a form of learning in which one stimulus, a conditioned stimulus, comes to signal the occurrence of a second stimulus, an unconditioned stimulus…[an unconditioned stimulus] is typically a stimulus that naturally causes a characteristic response, known as an unconditioned response” and operant conditioning “is a form of learning in which the frequency, form, or strength of a behavior is influenced by its consequences” (Corsini & Wedding, 2014, p 200-201). Concepts like these, including reinforcement and punishment, can be wide spread and used in various types of situations which is why this therapy is a good one to use with other
Often times conditioning is used in a therapeutic way in order to change old habits into healthier habits. A superb example of this would be someone of negative habits being taught that said habit is immoral or socially unappealing which in turn would change the individual’s mindset to think of this habit as appalling thus rewiring his brain to stop the tendency. Likewise certain conditioning habits at a young age is extraordinarily beneficial teaching the child that unacceptable behaviors are both socially and morally unacceptable. This positive conditioning gives the child proper development skills necessary for everyday life to
Classical conditioning refers to a type of learning in which a previously neutral stimuli took on the ability to stimulate a conditioned response in an individual (Gormezano & Moore, 1966). To prove that environment was more impactful than genetics, Watson conducted an experiment on an infant, little Albert. Initially, Albert showed little fear towards rats. When Watson repeatedly exposed Albert to the rat accompanied by a loud noise, the latter began to develop fear towards not just the rat but also other furry animals. Watson successfully showed that the acquisition of a phobia can be explained by classical conditioning (Watson & Watson, 1921). Regardless of their genes, the associations of the right stimuli can result in the development of a new behaviour in any individual.
Habituation is an example of conditioning. Most behavioral modification relies on conditioning of one form or another, whether by pairing a desired result with a reward, or by discouraging an unwanted behavior by removing a reward (typically attention of one form or another). Reinforcement of conditioning is accomplished through consistent reaction to behavior either rewarding or discouraging behaviors that are desirable or undesirable. Desensitization takes this technique to its extreme by flooding the animal with the stimulus in increasing stages until it stops
... Society is facing a challenge of whether or not the world should stop mental control or keep it going with the worry that it may take over the world one day. More realistically though, it could turn man into a community of people who are controlled by the government and do not have any emotions and can not figure out anything for themselves.. If the world misuses psychological conditioning enough, it will be a threat to humanity and that is not something that people of this world should think of as something good, because it could potentially ruin all of mankind. Works Cited Biderman, Albert D. "The Image of "Brainwashing"."
...s to enjoy basic human rights that embrace family, personal relationships, and individualism. Today’s society is able to comprehend how with the technological advances Huxley’s world could be a reality, but with the privilege of a democratic society, civilization would not allow the medical intervention for reproduction, the conditioning for happiness and consumerism.
B. F. Skinner, the most well-known American Psychologist who was the top exponent of the school of psychology that was known as behaviorism, preserved the impression that learning is an end result of change in evident behavior. The changes in behavior are determined by the way individuals reply to stimuli (events) in the environment. B.F. Skinner defined this phenomenon as operant conditioning. Operant conditioning means changing of behavior by the use of reinforcement which is given after the desired response (McLeod, 2007). This
“Behavior theory consists of ideas about how human actions and emotions develop, are sustained, and are extinguished through principles of learning” (Walsh, 2010). Positive and negative reinforcement is used to help manipulate the behaviors of the individual. The theory has been used to help eliminate unwanted behaviors. In addition, behavior theory has been use primarily with children, and persons with developmental disabilities. According to Walsh (2010) behavior theory evolved in the 1960s from a field of philosophy to the field of science. Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning, which plays a major role in behavioral theory. Classical conditioning is the process of learning through ones surroundings, conditioned, and unconditioned stimuli and response. B. F. Skinner discovered operant conditioning the process of learning to influence the future responses to the environment (Clark, 2004). The two concepts has been used throughout the behavior theory to help assist clients with unacceptable behaviors that is occurring. The combination of the two concepts has been a very helpful aspect to the behavior theory. Both concepts offer a different approach or solution to the behavior of the client.