S-R association. If you were to pair a green light with Pavlov ’s bell tone, after
a while the dogs would start to salivate when the green light came on. This
process of building one conditioned S-R association on another is called
second-order conditioning.
Because the stimuli you experience are often inadvertently paired with
other aspects of your environment, you are probably not aware of the manyS-R associations that influence your behavior. Research suggests that our pre-ferences in food, clothing, and even friends can be determined through this
process. A friend of mine guesses that he enjoys country and western music
because his father used to play it on Saturday, his favorite day of the week.Anxious participants in one study sat in a waiting room with a stranger
(Riordan & Tedeschi, 1983). Although the two did not interact, participants
reported unpleasant impressions of this other person. The researchers rea-soned that the incidental pairing of the anxiety with the stranger created a
negative association with that person.
However, researchers have also uncovered several limitations of classical
conditioning. For a new S-R association to persist, the unconditioned and
conditioned stimuli must be paired occasionally or otherwise reinforced.
When Pavlov presented his conditioned dogs with just the bell tone, the dogs
salivated less and less until finally the dogs failed to salivate to the tone at all.
This gradual disappearance of the conditioned S-R association is called
extinction. Moreover, two events presented together will not always produce
an association (Rescorla, 1988). Certain stimuli are easily associable, but it
may be impossible to create some S-R bonds through classical conditioning.
Operant Conditioning
At about the time Pavlov was demonstrating classical conditioning in Russia,
American psychologists were investigating another type of learning through
association. Edward Thorndike put some stray cats into “puzzle boxes. ”To es-
cape from the box and thereby obtain a piece of fish, hungry cats had to engage
in a particular combination of actions. Before long, the cats learned what they
had to do to receive their reward. These observations helped Thorndike (1911)Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)
Conditioned Stimulus (CS)Unconditioned Response (UCR)
Conditioned Response (CR)
FIGURE 13.1 Classical Conditioning Diagram346 CHAPTER 13 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach