Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Contemporary Views of Operant Conditioning215been learned rather than learning itself. To describe learning that is notimmediately demonstrated in overt behavior, Tolman used the termlatent learning.From these and other experiments, Tolman concluded thatlearning involves the acquisition of knowledge rather than simplychanges in outward behavior. According to Tolman (1932), anorganism essentially learns “what leads to what.” It learns to“expect” that a certain behavior will lead to a particular outcomein a specific situation.Tolman is now recognized as an important forerunner ofmodern cognitive learning theorists (Gleitman, 1991; Olton, 1992). Many contemporarycognitive learning theorists follow Tolman in their belief that operant conditioninginvolves the cognitive representation of the relationship between a behaviorand its consequence. Today, operant conditioning is seen as involving the cognitiveexpectancy that a given consequence will follow a given behavior (Bouton, 2007;Dickinson & Balleine, 2000).“Well, you don’t look like an experimentalpsychologist to me.”© The New Yorker Collection 1994 Sam Gross fromCartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.Learned HelplessnessExpectations of Failure and Learning to QuitCognitive factors, particularly the role of expectation, are involved in anotherlearning phenomenon, called learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was discoveredby accident. Psychologists were trying to find out if classically conditionedresponses would affect the process of operant conditioning in dogs. The dogs werestrapped into harnesses and then exposed to a tone (the neutral stimulus) pairedwith an unpleasant but harmless electric shock (the UCS), which elicited fear (theUCR). After conditioning, the tone alone—now a CS—elicited the conditionedresponse of fear.In the classical conditioning setup, the dogs were unable to escape or avoidthe shock. But the next part of the experiment involved an operant conditioningprocedure in which the dogs could escape the shock. The dogs were transferredto a special kind of operant chamber called a shuttlebox, which has a lowbarrier in the middle that divides the chamber in half. In the operant conditioningsetup, the floor on one side of the cage became electrified. To escape theshock, all the dogs had to do was learn a simple escape behavior: Jump over thebarrier when the floor was electrified. Normally, dogs learn this simple operantvery quickly.However, when the classically conditioned dogs were placed in the shuttlebox andone side became electrified, the dogs did not try to jump over the barrier. Rather thanperform the operant to escape the shock, they just lay down and whined. Why?To Steven F. Maier and Martin Seligman, two young psychology graduatestudents at the time, the explanation of the dogs’ passive behavior seemed obvious.During the tone–shock pairingsin the classical conditioningsetup, the dogs had learned thatshocks were inescapable. No activebehavior that they engaged in—whether whining, barking, orstruggling in the harness—wouldallow them to avoid or escape theshock. In other words, the dogshad “learned” to be helpless:They had developed the cognitiveexpectation that their behaviorwould have no effect on the environment.Martin E. P. Seligman: From LearnedHelplessness to Positive PsychologySeligman (b. 1942) began his researchcareer by studying learned helplessness indogs, and later, in humans. He applied hisfindings to psychological problems inhumans, including depression. He alsoinvestigated why some people succumb tolearned helplessness while others persist inthe face of obstacles. Seligman (1991,2005) eventually developed a program toteach “learned optimism” as a way ofovercoming feelings of helplessness, habitualpessimism, and depression. Electedpresident of the American PsychologicalAssociation in 1996, Seligman launched anew movement called positive psychology,which would emphasize research onhuman strengths, rather than humanproblems. As Seligman (2004) explained,“It became my mission in life to helpcreate a positive psychology whose missionwould be the understanding and buildingof positive emotion, of strength andvirtue, and of positive institutions.”