Classical and operant conditioning

In short: Conditioning is learning through association. In classical conditioning a stimulus becomes linked to an automatic response; in operant conditioning you learn from the consequences of your own behaviour.

In more detail: Classical conditioning goes back to the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, operant conditioning mainly to the American psychologist B. F. Skinner. Both explain many everyday habits, preferences and fears, but not all of human learning.

In detail

• Pavlov’s dogs: Dogs that regularly heard a signal tone before being fed eventually began to salivate at the tone alone.
• In everyday life: A phone’s ringtone triggers tension, a particular scent brings back memories of a holiday; fears can also develop this way.
• Operant learning: Behaviour followed by pleasant consequences becomes more frequent; behaviour followed by unpleasant consequences becomes less frequent.
• Positive reinforcement: Something pleasant is added, such as praise or a reward.
• Negative reinforcement: Something unpleasant is removed, for example when fastening your seatbelt stops the warning tone in the car; this is not punishment, although the two are often confused.
• Punishment: An unpleasant consequence, or the removal of something pleasant, is meant to reduce behaviour; however, it does not show what to do instead.
• Extinction: If reinforcement or the signal link is permanently absent, the learned behaviour usually weakens.
• Shaping habits: Small rewards immediately after a new behaviour help to establish it (gewohnheiten-aendern-und-aufbauen, motivation-intrinsisch-und-extrinsisch).
• Limits: People also learn by observing, reflecting and understanding; moreover, early experiments such as the “Little Albert” study are now regarded as ethically unacceptable.