Higher order conditioning.The actual technical definition sounds a little convoluted and crazy.
A condition stimulus functions as a unconditioned stimulus for the purpose of
conditioning a new condition stimulus. Say what? That's kind of complicated. But, if
you break it down, it's not so bad. A condition stimulus, well, we rang the bell. Let's do
it this way. Let's flash a light but instead of giving food we give a shock. You learn
in one trial, right? Flash a light in a pen, dog's in the pen, dog gets shocked.
That's been done before. Now, the light goes on, what does dog do? Jumps. Automatically, right?
It's conditioned. That light was previously neutral now it's a conditioned stimulus to
cause the dog to have a fight-or-flight response, the physiological part is, is the classical
condition, his jumping and trying to avoid it is operant. But now where we find, I can
take a new neutral stimulus. I can flash a light and give a shock and establish that
relationship. So that I flash a light and I'll get a jump out of the dog. But now I
can flash a light and then ring a bell but not shock the dog. And guess what happens the next
time I ring the bell? The dog jumps, like it was a light, right? Even though the bell's
never been paired with a shock, the bell has been paired with another condition stimulus,
right? So what happens is the condition stimulus acts, the light acts like it's an unconditioned
stimulus to be paired with the bell to create the same effect. Now, that's a little bit,
you know, academic, but if you think about it, how do we learn language? How do we learn
what people mean with body language, right? Early on you're a baby. You know pleasure
and you know pain, and if you know pleasure and somebody holds you, and they cuddle you,
and they say 'I love you, I love you, sweetie-poo, you the coolest sweetie-poo ever was, awesome
baby, love this baby.' Love, feeling, love, feeling, right? Originally, what do you get?
You get a person who provides the unconditioned stimulus, if you remember we were talking
about Harlow's monkeys, right? This is a behaviorist views, it's not a humanist view, but you start
getting a chaining of things going on right? Originally, I'm hungry, this stimulus feeds
me. Previously neutral stimulus gives me the unconditioned stimulus of food, which brings
pleasure, and then it starts talking, and it talks when it's not feeding. I love you,
I love you, and now we have this feeling that comes about, good feeling brought about by
the word that was previously neutral that has now chained other things that are originally
chained to feeling good. So, emotions and words, so 'I love you sweetie, sweetie.' Now
you become an adult and somebody goes 'I love you,' and you go 'Aw, that feels great, I
feel so good.' And they start going 'I love you pookie-hookie.' Pookie-hookie feels good
now, right? Pookie-hookie gets chained to love, which is chained to that original feeling,
and pookie feels good now right? So, what you get is this chained set of emotional valiance
that comes with stimuli that were previously neutral. The word 'pookie,' the word 'love,'
it's just a syllable, right? We could have called it anything, 'amore,' doesn't sound
anything like 'love,' but it is the same thing, right? It's the same stimulus only in the
sense that it connotes the same meaning, but they sound very different, so you can see
that the different syllables have to be acquired in terms of learning, but this can also be
true of negative words, and negative emotions. And you can see how this works in training
dogs or people. We all get trained in our lives, so if you want a dog to not do something,
then you can go 'no!' Pop! On the butt, with a newspaper, right? And dog's like 'what!?'
It freaks out. But what happened, right? That event gets paired with a pop on the butt,
which is aversive, and the word 'no!' So, the next time all you have to do is do what?
No! And you don't have to pull out the paper because that's acquired the power to get the
dog to behave different. But, the thing is, you've got to be careful with people because
you start talking down to kids and others, as they grow up and they start to self impose
those words, they feel bad when they hear things. Such a damn jerk, I feel bad because
'damn jerk' might have been what I was called by people while they were spanking me as a
kid, or something to that effect, right? And it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter,
I could go, if a dog was doing something I didn't want it to do, I could go 'no.' Pop!
And the next time I went 'no,' that dog would be like this. Doesn't matter, you see what
I'm saying? It's the stimulus as it gets chained, and that's what we're talking about is chaining
together stimuli in such a way that you create a very complex set of learning it becomes
difficult to disentangle. It's an implicated, an addiction, withdrawl, originally elicited
by lack of the drug, comes to be elicted by a dealer, drug taking environment, paraphernalia,
internal state, etc. All these things they get chained, upon chained, upon chained, higher
order groupings of stimuli. So, does that make sense? It's a lot,
I think more sensible
when you explain it that way than just the original sentence, which is a little bit hard
to grasp on its own. Now, let's talk about behaviorism, and John B. Watson
is the father
of behaviorism, and there he is with Rosalie Rayner. You remember we talked about him early
on? We talked about the behaviorism. School of thought. Largely, that's the school we're
dealing with in this chapter. We will move onto other perspectives within this chapter
and then beyond this chapter, we won't be talking much about behaviorism anymore, directly.
Watson and Roslie Rayner did this classic study with little Albert. Watson's point was,
you tell me that people have emotions, but I can show you, that I can make people have
emotions, I can teach them emotions. In fact, he said something along the lines of 'you
give me any, a dozen healthy infants, and my environment to raise them, and I can make
them anything I want them to make by controlling their environment, and the consequences of
their behavior. I can make them become thieves or lawyers, whatever you want.' Now of course,
that's a ludicrous statement on a lot of levels. Philosophically for one, but also ethically,
and pragmatically, you really don't have full control over anybody's total environment,
to make them anything you want. Although, you can see in some oppressed states of totalitarian
governments, you actually can do that. You can make them be anything you want them to
be. That's his point. So he's like 'I can make a kid be scared of something that he
was never scared of.' And he did this with using old little Albert. Nine months, eleven
months, that varies, there's a lot of stories about little Albert. Became aversed to a white
rat after a loud noise was sounded. Loud noise was made by taking a four foot steel bar and
slamming it with a hammer. That's a loud aversive noise. Now, as I showed you the other day,
you don't need to be taught that. That's an inborn reflex, right? A loud noise, scares
you. My kid was little, he sometimes jumped out from behind a door and go 'whooo.' And
I'd just be like this, he's like 'man, I though I scared you,' and I'm thinking 'you did,
you did.' I learned not to show it, but inside I went 'oh god, alright.' Because we all have
startle reflexes, right? You can learn not to manifest them, but this little shot of
adrenaline still comes out when you've got this stimulus that you didn't expect. So,
what it is, he showed this kid was not scared of a white rat or a bunch of other stuff;
rabbit, a dog, a seal fur coat, Watson himself, Santa Clause Mask, this kid wasn't scared
of any of that. This kid was really hardy. So they took him, and they put a white rat
in front of him and they go 'baaa!' So you had a little reaction inside of you but imagine
you're eleven months old, there's a white rat in front of you and that exact same feeling
came over you out of nowhere. You previously weren't scared of the white rat, but guess
what happened the next time they put the rat in front of this kid? He started freaking
out, he started crying, which we would assume was because he was classically conditioned
to release adrenaline, and he started to try and crawl away which was operant conditioning.
He tried to get out of the situation because Watson was able to do exactly what he said
he would do. He showed beforehand this kid is not only not scared of this rat, he's mildly
curious about it, right? It's interesting to him, he'll actually reach out and try to
touch it. But then you associate it, right? In the environment
with an unexpected loud
and startling noise, and after conditioning you get that. He's like 'see?'
I've made him
scared, you said people were just scared, I made this kid scared of this stimulus that
he used to like, and they never tried to remove the fear, which is an ethical issue, but little
Albert may have died several years later anyway, but if he didn't, you can imagine that this
kid at eleven months old might go through his entire life avoiding anything and they
also showed stimulus generalization, he no longer liked the dog, he no longer liked anything
that had white fur on it, right? Anything that was associated with that scenario he
no longer liked, and he could have gone through his whole life fearing white rats and by the
time he was an adult he would have no idea why he doesn't like them, right? He would just
say 'oh, I've always hated them. I dunno why, they just freak me out.' And that would be
normal human behavior.