The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002.
conditioned response
In psychology, the response made by a person or animal after learning to associate an experience with a neutral or arbitrary stimulus. Conditioned response experiments by Ivan Pavlov (seePavlov’s dogs) paired a neutral stimulus (sounding a bell) with a natural response (salivating) by associating the bell with the presentation of food. Conditioned response experiments by B. F. Skinner and other behaviorists (seebehaviorism) associated an arbitrary action (an animal’s pressing a lever) with a positive reward (presentation of food) or a negative reward (an electric shock).
‡ Response conditioning is used in behavior modification. Stop-smoking clinics, for example, may use an electric shock whenever a patient lights up. The patient will then associate smoking with the unpleasant experience of the shock.
