Operant Conditioning Paper

The purpose of this paper is to examine behavior conditioning and military medical training. First the author will briefly summarize Classical Conditioning. Then the author will briefly summarize Operant Conditioning. Finally, the author will describe how the desired outcomes of the military medical training program require a mix of both, Classical and Operant conditioning.

Classical conditioning is a reflexive or automatic type of learning in which a stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus (Pavlov, 2016). Over a hundred years ago, Ivan Pavlov discovered and proved that classical conditioning applies to animals through his experiments with a dog. In short, the response of the dog to seeing food was salivation, but through conditioning, using the sound of a tuning fork every time food was presented to the dog,

Thorndike’s theory states that “responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation” (Psychestudy, 2018). In this theory, we learned that behavior can be modified through the use of positive and negative reinforcement or reward and punishment. American psychologist, B. F. Skinner, demonstrated the effectiveness of positive reinforcement through his experiment with the Skinner boxes and hungry rats. Inside the box was a lever and when it was accidentally pressed by the rats as they moved around inside, food would be dispensed into a container beside the lever. The rats then learned that by pressing the lever, they would receive food and would automatically go straight to the lever once put inside the box. By doing this, a cause and consequence scenario was introduced and ensured that the rats would repeat the action