Pavlovian Response

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — VIKTOR E. FRANKL

By Alex P. Vidal

The name Pavlov may make us want to cry “Dogs!” We would call this a Pavlovian response, but that would be oversimplifying the point made by the phrase’s namesake, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), stressed Dr. Michael Macrone, author of Eureka!

Chiefly to blame is the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, which in coining “Pavlovian response” in 1974 (phrases such as “Pavlovian conditioning” and “Pavlovian system” are older), used it merely as the equivalent of “predictable reaction.”

Macrone said Pavlov himself was actually more interested in unexpected or counterinstinctive behavior than in the predictable. He first made his mark–and won a Nobel Prize in 1994–with some glamourless but crucial work on the secretion of gastric juices.

Pavlov discovered that while, predictably, the pancreas goes to work whenever we start chowing down a hamburger, it can also be set off just by thinking about a hamburger, or even by seeing a plastic model. He identified these curious latter instances as cases of “psychic secretion,” laying the groundwork for his more famous later theories.

EXPERIMENTS

In a series of experiments that would appall contemporary animal-rights activists, Pavlov rigged up a few dogs to measure their secretion of saliva in response to various stimuli. Predictably enough (as per Pavlov’s earlier research), the sight of raw burger set their mouths a-water, confirmed Macrone.

Pavlov then discovered that the dogs could also be made to salivate in response to any arbitrary stimulus–say a sound or a kick–that they came to associate with the imminent introduction of dog chow. He called such arbitrary stimuli “conditioned” and the dogs’ reaction a “conditioned reflex”–that is, artificially induced by training or habit. (The term first appeared in English in 1906 in the journal Nature, according to Macrone)
Not knowing when to leave well enough alone, Pavlov went on to extrapolate from these and other, more complicated observations a sort of grand psychological theory, attempting to explain almost all behavior, normal and deviant, in terms of acquired reflexes and their various interactions.

OVERBOARD

After a brief vogue in the West, Macrone explained further, many of Pavlov’s more grandiose claims were tossed overboard, but they were warmly embraced by the Soviets. Though not a Marxist himself, Pavlov’s theories were virtually tailor-made to suit the Marxist view that human behavior arises out of the material conditions and patterns of life.

“If people are habituated to servitude by oppression, they can be molded anew once liberate,” wrote Macrone. “In other words, the Soviets system could condition a Soviet citizen. The results of this theory can be found in your newspaper.”