Conditioned reflexes and habit formation / by W. Horsley Gantt.
- W. Horsley Gantt
- Date:
- [1932?]
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Conditioned reflexes and habit formation / by W. Horsley Gantt. Source: Wellcome Collection.
7/10 page 7
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Conditioned reflexes and habit formation / by W. Horsley Gantt. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![We have just seen how extinction of the conditioned reflex may easily occur when the conditioned stimulus is given too often without supporting it by the uncon¬ ditioned. In the habits of adults the unconditioned stimulus is perhaps far removed from the conditioned stimulus, and is linked up to it through a long chain. The alarm clock rings ; we do not get up, and it ceases to stimulate us, to call out the conditioned reflex of arising. The unconditioned stimulus here is not so easy to detect as in the dog which fails to react to the bell connected with food, and it is probably a compound one (the fear of falling into disrepute, losing of one’s job, meeting with disapproval—which is quite likely an unconditioned stimulus for man just as an overpowering frightful enemy is for an animal). Again: “ Seize the very first opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may expe¬ rience, in the direction of the habits yon aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects [that is, conditioned reflexes], when resolves and aspirations communicate the new set to the brain. . . . No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete oppor¬ tunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.” This is just the same way of stating the preceding rule from the standpoint of conditioned reflex elaboration. James’s final rule of ” keeping the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day ” involves both the emotional state and the value of repetition in the elaboration of conditioned reflexes and in the preven¬ tion of their gradual spontaneous extinction. Morals and Prejudices Besides these maxims we wish to make several direct applications from the study of conditioned reflexes to habit formation. It will be seen that after the first conditioned reflex in a certain centre is elaborated it takes fewer trials for each succeeding one up to a certain point. This is a basic law of education. That extinction of the second conditioned reflex is much easier than of the first, and that when once it has been extinguished and restored it is never so stable as it was before extinction, has an enormous significance in the destruction of moral codes, explaining why a person untrustworthy in one thing is usually so in another, the chaos produced by revolutions](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b3062924x_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
