Now, I’m sure you’re asking: Who is Pavlov? And what’s up with his dogs?
I stumbled across this the other day, and found it really interesting and wanted to share about it. Pavlov’s dogs (no, not his feet) was an experiment conducted by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychologist who introduced a theory that revolutionised our understanding of learning and behaviour.
Pavlov’s theory, centers around the concept of associative learning. He sought to explore how organisms, including humans, acquire new behaviours and responses through repeated associations between stimuli.
In his most famous experiment, he observed that dogs naturally salivated when presented with food. However, through repeated pairings of a neutral stimulus, such as a bell with the food, the dogs eventually began to associate the bell with the arrival of food. As a result, they started salivating at the sound of the bell alone, even in the absence of the food.
Alright cool, but what does this have to do with us?
Similar to Pavlov’s dogs, children are also accustomed to associate food with the bell during school. We often find ourself hungry and excited to eat as the bell goes.
So, I question, what makes us any different to Pavlov’s dogs? What other stimuli do we associate with things without realising? And how can we use this information to our advantage, by training ourselves to do things without realising?
By that point, we can finally call it a mastered habit!