Accidental Manipulation? | Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning. 1897. Russia. Ivan Pavlov.

When dogs lend a hand to psychology.
Well, it was more of a tongue than a hand.

Joy and Milkah were treated as royalty; By a mere ringing of a bell, they were served food. This happened so often that they got used to their lavish lifestyles. So much so that they began salivating at the simple sound of the bell, even without any food in sight. Tongues out, eyes wide open, salivating in expectation.

I’ll have to admit that Joy and Milkah were not really royalties; they were actually part of Ivan Pavlov’s experiment. He was interested in studying their alimentary cycles. Weird, right? Yeah.

But then he accidentally noticed something strange. At first, they showed no particular reactions to the ringing bell; they were neutral to it—unsurprisingly. And unsurprisingly still, like anyone else, food made them salivate.

Pavlov went on to associate these two stimuli, the neutral stimulus, the bell ringing, and the unconditioned stimulus, the food. After repeated exposure—and here is the something strange—Joy and Milkah weren’t indifferent to the bell ringing anymore. They were conditioned to salivate; accidentally manipulated to do so.

This experiment is a hallmark of psychology. It demonstrates how we can be conditioned to associate a certain behavior with a previously neutral stimulus just by pairing it with an unconditioned one that already elicits the desired behavior.

Do this for a while and voilà! You can have your friends fall asleep just by you clapping your hands (Okay. It’s a little bit of a stretch, but you got the point).

Ohh...and by the way, Joy and Milkah were Russian dogs.