On Our Best Behavior

Despite its unethical past, behaviorism is still successful today.

As Isaac Newton proposed, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. After the first peak of the popularity of Freud and his focus on the unconscious, a very different movement got hold of especially the United States, England, and Russia, namely, behaviorism.

You’ve probably heard of one of the most famous behaviorists, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, or rather, his dog. Well, to be fair, not actually his dog, but the dogs he and his colleagues did tests with in their laboratory.

Initially, Pavlov and his colleagues wanted to investigate the differences in salivation when dogs were given different kinds of food. Much to the frustration of Pavlov’s colleagues, however, whenever the dogs realized food was coming soon, by hearing a buzzer sound, they already started to salivate, without even having food in their mouths. Pavlov found this so interesting that he posed a new thesis and started the now-famous behaviorist experiments.

In the experiments conducted by Pavlov, he demonstrated what is now known as classical conditioning. It is important to understand this form of conditioning since it is referred to and used frequently in the business world.