behaviour modification; one was developed by Pavlov, and the other by Skinner. I’ve chosen Pavlov and Skinner because their research had an enormous influence on 20th
theories, and affected generations of teachers and students.
Pavlov, who was born in 1849, carried out
experiments in a type of conditioning that we now call classical conditioning. Whereas Skinner, born in 1904, experimented with what he called operant conditioning. Now let’s compare the two.
associated with Pavlov’s research at the beginning of the 20th
First, we’ll look at classical conditioning, which is century. Has anyone ever heard of Pavlov’s
dogs? … Yes? Good. Well, his experiments are quite famous. Experimenting with dogs, Pavlov found that it was possible to train or condition them to produce a natural response to an artificial stimulus.
Let me explain. As we know, the natural response
to the natural stimulus, food, is to salivate. Now, during his experiments, Pavlov flashed a light every time the dogs were given food. Gradually, they learnt to associate food with a flashing light. Eventually, the dogs would salivate when the light was turned on, even without the food. In this way, Pavlov replaced the natural stimulus of food with the artificial stimulus of light. Pavlov called this a conditioned reflex.
Now let’s turn to the concept of operant
conditioning. In Skinner’s most famous experiment, a rat was placed in a glass box (which we now call a Skinner box) where there was a lever. When the rat, by chance, hit the lever it was rewarded with food. Little by little, the rat learned that by hitting the lever it would get food. You could say it learnt to associate cause with effect. Skinner called this type of behaviour modification operant conditioning, because the rat was active in producing the effect it wanted.
So, to sum up, both classical and operant
conditioning, can train animals to behave in a certain way. However, in classical conditioning, they have no control over their behaviour, whereas in operant conditioning, they can learn to behave in a way that will earn them a reward.
Unit 3, Lesson 3.2, Exercise B≤1.11
Part 1 LECTURER: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m glad to see such a good turnout today, because we have a visiting speaker, Dr Michael Todd, who’s going to talk about his work as an occupational psychologist.
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-century learning
As you probably already know, occupational psychologists are also known as work – or organizational – psychologists. They have many roles: counsellor, problem solver, organization designer, team builder and investigator. This afternoon, Michael is going to give us an example of some of the things he does in his job. So, by the end of the lecture, I hope you’ll have a realistic picture of what’s involved in practising occupational psychology and maybe even some thoughts on whether it would suit you as a profession. Now I’ll hand over to Michael.
DR TODD: Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me. As Dr Freeman said, occupational psychologists work in many different capacities. I work in the Human Resources department of a large university, where one of my responsibilities is to support the university’s equality and diversity policy, which ensures that all employees are treated fairly. This afternoon, I’m going to describe a project I’ve been working on recently: investigating why there are so few women in senior posts at the university.
Unit 3, Lesson 3.2, Exercise C≤1.12
Part 2 The project I’ve been involved in over the last year started because there was a lot of concern that women were not fully represented in senior positions at our university. We wanted to find out if women were disadvantaged by organizational bias or affected by prejudice. We focused on women in this case, but our study could equally have looked at other social groups, such as the disabled or the over-50s. Our final aim was to see whether we needed to make institutional changes to improve women’s promotion opportunities.
We approached the study from a constructivist
point of view, which, as you probably already know, assumes that people’s behaviour is shaped by their social interaction. In other words, we were assuming from the beginning that the institutional structure would be largely responsible for the degree to which women occupied senior positions. However, we also wanted to take into account the effects of personality and look at staff attitudes towards success and women’s roles in the workplace.
The stages of the project included: formulating
research questions, collecting, organizing and interpreting data, and presenting our results in terms of the university’s organizational structure.
Before I go on, I want to say a word about data collection. I’m sure you’ll have realized by now
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