Tags:: #🌿 Links:: #HD2600 # Behaviorist learning aspects to personality ### Summary The behaviorists believed personality was entirely built through nurture and people were born a blank slate. There was no tampering of the personality from unconscious aspects of the psychi like discussed in [[Psychoanalytic aspects of personality]], [[Neo-analytic aspects of personality]], or individual personal constructions of the world like touted in [[Cognitive constructivist aspects of personality]]. Rather peoples unique conditioned responses from classical and operant conditioning caused different behaviors to occur in the same situation. The behaviorists said there were two main methods through which we were conditioned from the environment: - Classical conditioning - Operant conditioning # Classical Conditioning Classical conditioning is the process through which a neutral stimulus becomes a conditioned stimulus by continued association with a positive or negative stimulus over time. For example, in Pavlov's famous dog experiment a dog was conditioned to salivate from the ring of a bell because of it's association with food arriving. ### What are the three phases inside of classical conditioning? The three phases are: - Acquisition - Extinction - Spontaneous Recovery During acquisition a organism is initially ingraining a conditioned response. During extinction the conditioned response is becoming dissociated with the positive or negative response it was first built on. During spontaneous recovery, a previously conditioned response that has gone extinct gets brought back up by being associated once again with its previous positive or negative response. Because it has already been ingrained before it has a sort of muscle memory and becomes conditioned again faster. ![[Pasted image 20230301102541.png]] This process is very similar to [[The forgetting curve]]. ### How does classical conditioning associate with personality? What we associate with pleasant or unpleasant experiences we learn to avoid or strive towards in our environment. In other words, our personalities are partly shaped by the things we have been classically conditioned to avoid or seek. ### How can we overcome the negative classical conditions we have? Two methods: - Visualization - Desensitization In visualization you imagine yourself confronting your fear to practice overcoming the anxiety of it. [[Mental rehearsal of how you will act in a situation makes it more likely you will act that way in the situation]]. In desensitization, you expose yourself to your anxiety in levels. ### How does neuroticism get encoded in personality in terms of classical conditioning? In Pavlov's 1927 experiment he classically conditioned dogs to pair circles with receiving meat and ellipticals followed by nothing. However, over time he made the circle more and more elliptical. The dogs responded by becoming incredibly neurotic. The theory is they didn't like the ambiguous nature of the stimulus. ![[Pasted image 20230301103607.png]] This can be extrapolated to humans through implying neuroticism as a personality trait in humans could be ingrained through continued ambiguous stimuli. This has empirical support inside of the [[Attachment theory]] literature as those with a anxious ambivalent [[Attachment styles|attachment style]] tend to have inconsistent responses from caregivers to distress. [[Uncertain situations are generally more likely to be dangerous]] which is why we pay more attention to them. # Operant Conditioning Operant conditioning is built on the foundation of Thorndike's law of effect which states that actions which lead to reward are likely to be repeated. Operant conditioning works through positive and negative reinforcements. Positive reinforcements increase the likelihood of a desired behavior where as negative reinforcements (punishments) decrease the likelihood of the undesired behavior. This was studied through the Skinner box in which a rat was given food if it pressed a lever when a light was green but shocked if a light was red. Positive reinforcement occurred when rats touched the light while green and negatively reinforced while the light is red. ![[Pasted image 20230303102441.png]] ### What did traditional behaviorists think of the unconscious? - They recognized thoughts and unconsciousness existed but gave little credence to its effects on behavior - They understood genetic predispositions could set the bounds for certain behavior but didn't have a large influence on behavior - They believed complex behaviors were just sets of habits combined together ### Shaping The behaviorists believed complex behaviors were a result of shaping, combinations of conditioned responses. In essence our entire personalities were shaped implicitly or explicitly through conditioning. ### Clark Hull's Drives Clark Hull believed we had primary drives that motivate all human beings include hunger, thirst, sex, and avoidance of pain. In essence, the degree to which our behaviors are shaped by conditioning have to do with the drives that motivate all humans. ## Dollard and Miller's Social Learning Theory Borrowing from Hull's Theory, Donald and Miller believed we had primary *and secondary drives* which were socially conditioned. Secondary drives are drives we learn to desire through social learning in society that you could layer back to the primary drives that we are born with. For example, love, power, social acceptance, respect, are all secondary drives that stem from our primary drives. Combinations of conditioned responses to our primary and secondary drives form the habits we have in our lives. Habit hierarchies refer to the hierarchy of habits we would be most likely to do in a particular situation. Our individual habit hierarchies are called our personality styles. ## Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) Reinforcement sensitivity theory says that underlying genetic predispositions poses us to be more or less responsive to reinforcements and punishments in the environment. This suggests that some people will be more sensitive to reinforcements and some people will be more sensitive to punishments. This reminds me of [[Biological aspects of personality#What is Grays Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory?|Grays reinforcements sensitivity theory]] which theorized we had two motivational systems that either made us more prone to be punishment avoidant or reward seeking.