Pavlov and Watson are similar in the fact that
they both study behavior, but Watson preferred to not use animals while Pavlov
used dogs. Behaviorism is obviously the
study of behavior in animals and humans.
Originally Behaviorism was used only on animals and the occasional
human. In today’s society we do more
experiments involving humans than animals since 1.) It is more humane and 2.) Humans
can talk back while animals cannot.
Pavlov was a Behavioral psychologist
who used mainly dogs to study conditioned reflex. He would harness them into a cage or in a
room and would give them one condition which could be a buzz, ring or
bell. Once the dogs were used to that
then he would make the sound and give them a sprits of meat powder, which would
make them salivate. He would do this
over and over again and after a certain number of time then he would take away
the meat powder and just make the sound.
Every time the dogs would hear the sound they would instantly start to
salivate even though they did not get the meat powder. Another experiment Pavlov did involved shocking
the dog which created coined phrase of “Learned Helplessness”.
Watson did pretty much the same
thing that Pavlov did except he used a little infant boy, who he named Little
Albert. In this study they started out
by showing Albert things that he loved.
After he got used to seeing them then they slowly took them away. Albert had befriended a little white rat and
every time Albert reached for the rat someone went behind him and created a
loud popping sound. At first Albert was
startled, but he still reached for the rat only to hear the sound again which
caused him to cry this time. After more
studies they discovered that not only was Little Albert afraid of the rat, but
he was also afraid of anything that was fuzzy, or that could be considered an
animal. They called this
Generalization. I somehow find this to
be more cruel than Pavlov’s experiments; maybe because I have phobias of my own
and so I do not find it fair to create phobias in other people.
When comparing these two I have
found that I favor Pavlov over Watson.
Not so much the experiment ideas, but that Pavlov wanted to use animals
in his studies over humans. I can see
PETA outside my offices now. Personally
I wish Pavlov had used more of a variety of animals just to see if the
conditions might have been different. I
hated the fact that Watson used a baby.
I can understand him doing it, but at the same time I am just not
comfortable with the idea. I do not
necessarily have a definite opinion of the radical behaviorist, except to say
that I still prefer animal studies over human studies. Animals cannot lie while humans can. These experiments just make me think of the
movie “A Clockwork Orange”. In this
movie they had made the prisoner (a young man) sick (by giving him a shot of a
particular medicine) every time he saw violent or sexual scenes just so he
would hopefully stop being a violent rapist.
At first it did work, but in the end the condition became extinct and he
would not get sick with the thought of raping or being violent towards others;
which of course, could cause problems for the prisons if anyone ever found out
that that young man was out of prison and could rape and be violent towards
others again.
Behaviorism is an interesting study
and one that could revolutionize how we see nature only if people are willing
to grasp the concept that animals are that different from human beings. I am not saying that animals are exactly like
humans, but that they can feel certain emotions as we can, such as, fear,
hunger, excitement, passion (not necessarily in the same sense as we can),
love, and friendship. If we all just
took a break from human studies and went back to animal studies we may be
surprised with what we find now that we know so much about our own minds.
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