Conditioning and Free Will Conditioning Term Paper

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Classically, the dog's fear was a conditioned reflex to the sound -- in operant terms, the dog's climbing behavior was a conditioned by the "reward" of avoiding the shock.

Some critics of theories regarding conditioning suggest that it is distasteful to talk about conditioning humans, because this removes the idea that we have free will. It is possible to condition humans, of course. The purpose of spanking children, for example, is to try to condition them not to behave in certain way because it will result in pain. However, it is a misnomer to suggest that conditioning removes free will. It would be more accurate to suggest that conditioning is the outcome of free will combined with intelligence.

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Free will enables the animal or human to choose responses that are most rewarding, and conditioning teaches them what responses are likely to be most rewarding. It is always theoretically possible for any animal (human or otherwise) to go against their conditioning; however, if the conditioning has been thorough, going against it will seem inadvisable. Thus there is no actual tension between conditioning and free will, one must merely learn to adapt the idea of free will to a cost-analysis system related to conditioning......

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