Blog Post #8

Classical Conditioning is a way of learning by relating certain things with anticipated events. So it would be like after so long, every time you saw or heard something you knew that something else was going to happen along with it. My cats obviously salivate when they see food. So when we moved the food into a container that makes noise when we opened it, the cats eventually learned that the sound of the container opening meant they were going to get fed and would come running. Operant Conditioning is a way of learning by either reinforcing or punishing a certain behavior in order to strengthen the behavior. So In other words when you do something and how your parents react, will either cause you to behave in that way more if it was reinforced or less if you were punished for it. I’ve learned that if I do my chores I’m usually rewarded (reinforced) by getting to go out with my friends. So now I do my chores without even being asked. This is all very interesting to me because I think it’s amazing how you can have such an impact on animals and people. I mean you can alter someone’s behavior, to a certain extent anyways. That just seems crazy. This applies to my life in the fact that I can think of many examples in my own life where I’ve shown classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Both examples in this blog and a lot of the ones we’ve mentioned in class like the lightening one and a ton more, all show my own classical and operant conditioning.

Positive reinforcement is when you are “rewarded” for a certain behavior in order to get you to behave that way more. Negative reinforcement is used to remove certain things in order to increase a behavior. Since my grades were good I got positive reinforcement by getting a curfew extension. So as long as I kept up my good grades I could keep my curfew extension. When I was sick I took medicine so that way I would feel better and after taking it I did. Punishment is when you get in trouble for behaving a certain way. I was punished when I arrived late for my curfew and the next time I went out I had to be home early.

Honestly I thought all the statistics that were mentioned in the section about observation learning were extremely interesting. I mean I knew people watched a lot of TV but I for one, didn’t realize it was as much as they said and two, I didn’t realize what was actually going on with the violence on TV. All the stats that went along with the antisocial effects were crazy, like how most of the time violence on TV goes unpunished or is considered justified and the pain of the victims aren’t really shown. All of these things influence kids in one way or another. I think its getting really bad and I really don’t like watching it myself anymore and I don’t plan on letting my kids, in the future, get into the whole violence craze that’s going on right now. It kind of gives an explanation to why people are doing the violent acts they are. I’m not saying its right but that could be part of the reason why it’s going on.