Unconscious Mind and Behaviorism: Quick Notes

Most mental activity is unconscious; the question shifts to: why is any mental content conscious at all?
Evolutionary/deception rationale: unconscious motivations help deceive others; self-deception can make lies more credible; social impression management and evolved lie detection mechanisms.

Freud championed psychoanalysis; Skinner popularized behaviorism, packaging and presenting it to both scientific and popular audiences.
Three radical claims of behaviorism:
- Learning is from experience; no fixed human nature; people are malleable by environment.
- Anti-mentalism: science should study observable stimulus–response, reinforcement, punishment, and environment; internal states are not the basis of science.
- No essential species differences: humans and animals share learning mechanisms; animal studies inform human learning.

Decline in response to familiar stimuli after repeated exposure; adaptive and prevents over-sensitization to constant inputs.
Important for studying minds of nonverbal beings and infants; foundational for later development.

Association learning between stimuli; Pavlov’s model.
US (unconditioned stimulus) → UR (unconditioned response)
CS (conditioned stimulus) paired with US → CR (conditioned response)
Extinction: CS alone reduces CR; spontaneous recovery: after a break, CR can reappear.
Generalization: CR extends to similar stimuli (e.g., Little Albert and fear of similar furry objects).
Timing: the conditioned stimulus should precede the unconditioned stimulus for best learning; prepared responses may differ from original responses.
Key examples: Pavlov’s dogs; Watson’s Little Albert; fear conditioning; implications for phobias and habit formation.
Extensions and applications: hunger cues, sexual responses, phobia treatments (systematic desensitization, aversive conditioning), therapy considerations.
Clockwork Orange example: aversion therapy via conditioning (unconditioned stimulus: nausea; conditioned stimulus: violence; conditioned response: fear).

Learning the relationship between actions and outcomes; voluntary and contingent on consequences.
Thorndike's law of effect: behaviors followed by reward are strengthened; those not rewarded are weakened.
Reinforcement vs punishment:
- Positive reinforcement: add a rewarding stimulus to increase behavior
- Negative reinforcement: remove an aversive stimulus to increase behavior
- Punishment: decreases the likelihood of a behavior
Shaping: reinforce successive approximations toward a complex behavior.
Schedules of reinforcement:
- Fixed vs variable
- Ratio vs interval
- Examples: fixed ratio (reward every N times); variable ratio (unpredictable rewards; e.g., slot machines) -> high and persistent responding
Primary reinforcers vs conditioned reinforcers; token economies in training.
Real-world examples: pig training; teaching animals to play ping pong; Skinner’s guided missile experiments; dog training with praise linked to treats via conditioning.

Partial reinforcement effect: behaviors are more resistant to extinction when reinforcement is intermittent.
In real life, reinforcement is often intermittent; schedules shape long-term persistence of behaviors.

The unconscious mind plays a central role in behavior; deception and social impression management are key evolutionary functions.
Freud vs Skinner exemplify competing traditions: psychoanalysis vs behaviorism.
Behaviorism centers on three core learning mechanisms:
- Habituation
- Classical conditioning
- Operant conditioning
Conditioning dynamics depend on timing, reinforcement schedules, extinction, and generalization.