Interpreting the World: A Reflection on Psychology Monika Rabjohn Nazareth College of Rochester Interpreting the World: A Reflection on Psychology Van Voorst stated “Every understanding of our new experiences is made in light of an understanding that we already had going into the new experiences,” (2015). Therefore one’s reality is dictated by how an individual has been affected by the world and how they then interpret it. It is our internal cognitive evaluations which determine how we express our relationship to a stimuli through our behavior. Studying learning and conditioning, behavior in society, and emotion allows one to evaluate how different individuals determine beneficial or unbeneficial behavior, become affected by society, and react to external and internal stimuli. Learning and Conditioning Children are constantly growing and interpreting information. How we learn and are conditioned influences what we determine to be useful behavior or worthless behavior . One type is classic conditioning which is the association of a stimuli and a specific response (Wade, Tavris, & Garry, 2014). For example a dog will salivate if presented …show more content…
Children can often be seen modeling adults by observing and imitating their actions (2014). This can encourage both prosocial and antisocial behavior as seen with Bandura 's “Bobo Doll” experiment (2014). This experiment consisted of children being exposed to a doll, one group immediately interacted with it and the other group interacted only after watching an adult punch, kick, and hit it with objects (2014). The first group interacted with the doll positively, while the second mirrored the adult by showing violence towards the doll (2014). Therefore, observational learning may have negative influences if a child is consistently exposed to violent, antisocial, or discriminative
This experiemtn showed kids a video of people acting violenctly toward the doll and then passively toward the doll. The kids how saw the doll actedupon aggressively were more inclined to do the same. Now that the impact of violence has been esstablished. It is important to adress how gender effects children.Tv shows and commercials often steroetype women and men into their roles. Generally in the idea of men being ggressive and dominating over women. Leading to young men thinking that being aggressive over women is ok and shows to young women that if a man is like that toward you it is ok and normal. (Earles, K., Alexander, R., Johnson, M., Liverpool, J., & McGhee,2015) This belief is also supported by an interview with Neil Malamuth from UCLA. in this interview there is one statement that is very relevant to this idea "that violence against women is more accepted and thus the acts of violence are more likely to occur." The easy thing to see is the increase in savage acts that has increased in the last few decades.what is less black a white but just as much a problem is how society as a whole has started
One example of the “Social Learning Theory” is the Bobo doll experiment conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961. In this experiment children were either exposed to an adult exhibiting aggressive behavior or non-aggressive behavior towards the doll. When it came time for the children to interact with the doll, the children who were exposed to aggressive behavior were more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior (Nolen, n.d.).
Children who were exposed to aggressive model later showed a substantial amount of the model’s physical and verbal aggression. The responses were almost identical to the original behavior. Children who were exposed to non-aggressive models or who had no exposure to any models, rarely produced such responses. The ways that children expressed their aggression in ways which clearly resembled the model’s novel behavior showed strong evidence of learning by imitation.
Chapter nine is mainly about behaviorism. Behaviorism is the theoretical perspective in which learning and behavior are described and explained in terms of stimulus- response relationship. There are two things that could be observed and objectively measured, these two things are environmental stimulus and learner’s behaviors or response. Stimulus is a specific object or event that influences an individual’s learning or behavior. A response is a specific behavior that an individual exhibits. Behaviorist believe that people are born with a blank slate with no inherited tendency to behave on way or another. Over the years the environment slowly molds or conditions the slate so that it is no longer blank. Conditioning is the commonly used term by behaviorist for learning that typically involves specific environmental events leading to the acquisition of specific responses (Ellis, 2013, pg.265).
Behaviourism is a theory of learning which suggests that all behaviours are obtained as a result of conditioning...
Conditioning is the process that involves the specific stimuli and specific response in order to changes the behaviours of the children. There are two type of conditioning which are classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
Learning can be quantified through observable behaviour and is adaptive to a creature’s specific environment at an individual level rather than species level. Behaviour can be broken down into two main categories, respondent behaviour, which is impacted by events that preceded it and operant behaviour, which is behaviour that is influenced by events that follow it. Behaviour can be analysed using a three term contingency of ABC. A is the antecedent, which can increase or decrease a behaviour depending on what is desired, B is the observed behaviour and C is the consequence of that behaviour, certain consequences increase behaviour whilst some decrease it. There are many different ways we learn behaviour and many different types of conditioning. Operant conditioning influences operant behaviour and uses the principles of positive and negative reinforcement and punishment to strengthen desired behaviours whereas instrumental conditioning involves making a response that is instrumental, it is an activity that is voluntary which elicits a consequence. A third type of conditioning is classical conditioning, which can be defined as an association being made between one stimulus and another, resulting in a relationship. For the purpose of this essay, classical conditioning will be the focus.
In Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment, performed in the 1960’s by Dr. Albert Bandura, showed the children a video of an adult hitting, punching, kicking and, moreover general aggression towards the doll. While another group of children viewed an adult, being gentle with the Bobo doll and a control group in which there was no influence towards the doll. Because Dr. Bandura used isolated groups and used unique methods with each group, his research, classified as an experiment as he was manipulating a factor, which was the type of attitude shown to the Bobo doll that the children watched (Myers, 2014). In the begging of the study, there were 72 children, 36 boys and 36 girls, observed at the Stanford University and tested for aggressive behavior
The idea that people learn from one another through observations, modeling, and imitation has been identified as the theory of social learning. Psychologist, Albert Bandura, proclaims that human personality is an interaction between the environment and the mental processes of the individual. To test this theory, Bandura established that children can learn a social behavior such as aggression simply by observing the modeled behavior of another person. Physically aggressive children acquire aggressive tendencies by how their parents have disciplined them. If screaming, slapping, beating, etc., is evident, children are likely to mimic such behaviors and this has the potential for escalated abuse and essentially, violence begets violence. This theory also infers the influence media violence on
One of the most researched topics in the history of psychology is aggression. One goal of social scientists has been to define aggression. Some believe that aggression is biologically preprogrammed, others look toward situational factors and this study suggests that aggression is learned. This study was conducted by Albert Bandura and his associates in 1961 at Stanford University. The researchers proposed that the children be exposed to adult models with either aggressive or nonaggressive ways, they would then be tested without the models present to determine if they would imitate that aggression they observed in the adult.
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.
Behaviorism includes two theories: classical conditioning, and operant conditioning (McLeod, Psychology Perspectives, 2007). Classical conditioning proposes that behavior, attitudes, and responses are developed by associations. For example, a dog can be conditioned to salivate to the sound of a bell if every time that the bell is rung, food appears. Operant conditioning, on the contrary, is the theory that suggests that behavior, attitudes,
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
Behaviorism is the point of view where learning and behavior are described and explained in terms of stimulus-response relationships. Behaviorists agree that an individual’s behaviors is a result of their interaction with the environment. Feedback, praise and rewards are all ways people can respond to becoming conditioned. The focus is on observable events instead of events that happen in one’s head. The belief that learning has not happened unless there is an observable change in behavior. “The earliest and most Ardent of behaviourists was Watson (1931; Medcof and Roth, 1991; Hill 1997). His fundamental conclusion from many experimental observations of animal and childhood learning was that stimulus-response (S-R) connections are more likely to be established the more frequently or recently an S-R bond occurs. A child solving a number problem might have to make many unsuccessful trials before arriving at the correct solution” (Childs, 2004).
From the time humans are born, they begin the process of learning and trying to understand the world. Conditioning is one way of learning in which a response becomes more frequent as a result of reinforcement. We can also learn through associations and punishments. There are two types of conditioning that will be discussed within this paper, classical conditioning and operant conditioning. I will further discuss how both classical and operant conditioning are prevalent within my article claims and then explain why both conditioning methods are important in everyday life.