While reading
Brave New World, it is hard for the reader to understand how the punishments
that the Delta babies receive can cause them to fear the objects placed in
front of them. This
process in psychology is known as behavioral conditioning. Punishments can affect us much more than we think. For example, I was talking to a friend whose
father disliked orange juice and would never drink it. He hadn’t tasted orange
juice in 25 years. One
day someone asked him why he disliked orange juice so much. He remembered an
incident that occurred when he was 4 years old. He walked into the living room
where his parents were entertaining guests and awkwardly spilled an entire
bottle of orange juice on the new rug. The guests laughed at him and he
received a hard spanking from his parents, along with an embarrassing scolding.
From that day forward he never drank orange juice. Once he realized that bad
memories had affected him, he decided to taste orange juice. And to his great
surprise, he liked it. From that day on, he continued to drink it. This story shows that behavioral conditioning can
affect us more than we realize. My question is: “How have you been programmed
by behavioral conditioning?”
I agree with you on that subject entirely. In fact, when I was young, my mother told me to get perfect scores. The next thing I know, I became a perfectionist, with my own mind being ripped apart if I don't get a perfect score. It seems that we can assume that people at a very young age can be susceptible to ideas, since our minds hunger for knowledge of the world.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you that everyone is affected by experiences that happened to them when they were young. I think your story added great evidence to support that. When I was little a ginormous dragonfly flew right into my face, and since then I have been terrified of any sort of bug that flies.
ReplyDeleteKerrina, one traumatic experience (dragonfly in the face) is not the same as behavioral conditioning, which -- as the name implies -- takes place over long periods of time. Your terror of flying bugs may OR MAY NOT be a consequence of the fateful dragonfly experience. You do not mention whether you were totally okay with big flying things in your face prior to the dragonfly incident, for example. I think that has more to do with our genetic wiring. It seems sensible to be averse to big flying bugs. Probably part of our long term survival as a species --
ReplyDeleteYou make a very good point, for basically the whole time I've been going to school, my parents have made it clear many, many times that basically, if I don't get good grades, I won't go to college, and if I don't go to college, then I'll end up a homeless bum (or something of the sort). Whenever I did bad in school or misbehaved, my parents would revoke some privileges telling me how I wouldn't deserve them if I acted like that, so to this day I hardly feel deserving of anything and it's affected me greatly. Behavioral conditioning can make a huge impact on our lives, and it seems the earlier it starts, the harder it is to try to forget or fight back against.
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