50 Psychology Classics (43 page)

On the other hand, there are many success stories of women who have managed to carry their institutions to the pinnacle of success without necessarily copying “male” styles of management. Psychologists note that women and men have a “preferred cognitive strategy” or way of dealing with the world based on the way their brain is wired. A culture with advanced working practices, Moir and Jessel observe, will try to allow both to exist for the greater productive good.

We think we are free-willed beings who are not determined by our sex, but our brains are so constructed that it is difficult to be objective about which feelings, thoughts, and actions are ours as an individual and which are simply driven by our gender's natural instincts and hormones. Though not determined
by our “brain sex,” we are strongly shaped by it, and awareness of these shaping forces cannot be a bad thing.

Brainsex
quotes American sociologist Alice Rossi: “Diversity is a biological fact, while equality is a political, ethical, and social precept.” Equality is a fine idea, and of course girls and boys should have all the same chances in life, but if they don't go into the same careers, Moir and Jessel note, it does not mean there is something wrong. While being sympathetic to feminist aims, they comment that women become more powerful not when they try to be like men, but, on the contrary, when they maximize and celebrate their differences. This may sound like “reverse feminism,” yet it is the only approach that reflects the biological truth.

Instead of trying to deny the differences for some politically correct reason, perhaps we should be marveling at the skills, creations, and particular attitudes to life that each gender contributes. Civilization could not have been created by either males or females exclusively; it needed many different forms of intelligence that only the two sexes in combination can supply.

Anne Moir has a PhD in genetics and runs a UK television production company. With her husband Bill she wrote
Why Men Don't Iron: The Fascinating and Unalterable Differences Between Men and Women
(2000)

David Jessel is a UK journalist well known for presenting television programs relating to the criminal justice system. He and Moir are also coauthors of
A Mind to Crime: The Controversial Link Between the Mind and Criminal Behaviour
(1997)
.

“Conditioned reflexes are phenomena of common and widespread occurrence: their establishment is an integral function in everyday life. We recognize them in ourselves and in other people under such names as ‘education,' habits,' and ‘training'; and all of these are really nothing more than the results of an establishment of new nervous connections during the postnatal existence of the organism.”

“If the animal were not in exact correspondence with its environment it would, sooner or later, cease to exist… To give a biological example: if, instead of being attracted to food, the animal were repelled by it, or if instead of running from fire the animal threw itself into the fire, then it would quickly perish. The animal must respond to changes in the environment in such a manner that its responsive activity is directed towards the preservation of its existence.”

In a nutshell

In the way that our minds are conditioned, we are less autonomous than we think.

In a similar vein
William James
The Principles of Psychology
(p 162)
V. S. Ramachandran
Phantoms in the Brain
(p 232)
B. F. Skinner
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
(p 266)

You have probably heard of Pavlov and his famous dogs, but who was he and what was his contribution to psychology? Born in 1849 in central Russia, he was expected to follow in his father's footsteps and become a priest in the Eastern Orthodox church, but, inspired by reading Darwin, he escaped the local seminary and went to study chemistry and physics in St. Petersburg.

At university Pavlov became passionate about physiology, and worked in the labs of several eminent professors. In time he became well known for his work as a specialist in digestion and the nervous system. As a physiologist Pavlov did not think much of the new science of psychology, yet it was this work that would lead him to insights on “conditioning,” or the way in which animals (including humans) develop new reflexes in order to respond to their environment.

Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex
, translated from the Russian, is a collection of lectures first given by Pavlov at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1924. In mind-numbing detail, it summarizes the 25 years of research carried out by his team that ultimately led to a Nobel Prize. Here, we look at what Pavlov actually discovered and its implications for human psychology.

Pavlov began
Conditioned Reflexes
by noting the lack of knowledge about the brain that existed at the time. He regretted that the brain had become the domain of psychology, when it should have been the preserve of physiologists who could determine the facts about its physics and chemistry.

He paid tribute to philosopher René Descartes, who three centuries earlier had described animals as machines who reacted predictably according to stimuli in their environment in order to achieve a certain equilibrium with it. These reactions were part of the nervous system and occurred along set nerve pathways. One of these reflex reactions is the creation of saliva, and it was the action of the digestive glands in dogs that Pavlov initially investigated. He wanted to chemically analyze the differences in saliva produced in response to food under different conditions.

But in his early experiments Pavlov noticed something strange. There was a psychological element to the dogs' saliva reflex; that is, they would begin to salivate simply when they thought they were
about
to get food. Descartes' idea
of the automatic reaction was clearly not so simple; Pavlov wanted to investigate further.

He decided to try out a range of stimuli on the dogs to see what exactly would provoke their saliva secretion, if it was not just a simple automatic reflex. In order that his experiments would be in real time, he had to perform a minor operation so that some of the dog's saliva passed through a hole to the outside of the cheek and into a pouch where the amounts produced could be measured.

Pavlov gave the dogs various stimuli such as the beat of a metronome, buzzers, bells, bubbling and crackling sounds, plus showing a black square, heat, touching the dog in various places, and intermittent flashes of a lamp. Each of these occurred just prior to giving food, so when the dog heard, saw, or felt a certain stimulus another time, he started to salivate even if the food had not appeared. Merely the sound of a beating metronome produced saliva even if no food was to be seen; physiologically there was no difference between the dog's reaction when he heard the metronome and what happened when he actually saw food. For the dog, the metronome—rather than a bowl of meat—came to “mean” food.

Pavlov realized that there were two types of reflexes or responses of an animal to its environment:

the natural or
unconditioned
reflex (e.g., a dog's salivation when it begins to eat, to aid its digestion); and

the acquired or
conditioned
reflex, which arises through unconscious learning (e.g., when a dog begins to salivate at the sound of a bell, because the sound “equates” to food).

The fact that reflexes could be instilled so that they became part of the animal's natural functioning made Pavlov aware that if an animal was really a machine responding to its environment, then it was a very complex machine. He showed that the cerebral cortex, the most advanced part of the brain, was very malleable, as were the nervous pathways linking to it. So-called instincts could be
learnt
—and unlearnt, since he was also able to demonstrate that reflexes could also be inhibited or
extinguished
by associating food with something the dog didn't like.

Yet Pavlov also noted limits to the creation of conditioned reflexes. They either wore off over time, or the dogs sometimes did not bother to respond and just fell asleep. He concluded that the cerebral cortex cannot be overworked or changed too much. It seemed that a dog's survival and proper functioning required it to retain a certain amount of stability in its brain wiring.

Pavlov observed two levels in the way in which the animal responded to its environment. There was first a “neuro-analysis,” in which it used its senses to work out what things were, then a “neuro-synthesis” to establish how something fitted into its existing reactions and knowledge. In order to survive, for instance, a dog must be able to quickly determine if something is a threat to it or not.

Some of Pavlov's experiments involved removing a dog's whole cerebral cortex. This turned the dog into little more than a reflex machine. It retained its unconditioned reflexes that were hardwired into its brain and nervous system, but was not able to respond to its environment properly—it could still walk, but if it came to even a small obstacle like the leg of a table it did not know what to do. In contrast, with a normal dog even if there is a minute change in environmental stimulus or something new, an “investigatory reflex” will cause the animal to prick up its ears or sniff the stimulus. A dog may spend a lot of time simply “investigating” in order that its reflexes to its environment are fully up to date.

Pavlov knew that the results of his experiments did not just apply to dogs. The more advanced the organism, he said, the greater its ability “to multiply the complexity of its contacts with the external world and to achieve a more and more varied and exact adaptation to external conditions.” “Culture” and “society” could be understood as a complex system of the management of reflexes, with humans only different to dogs to the extent that conditioned reflexes had surpassed the natural ones. While dogs could develop advanced social and territorial knowledge as their optimal response to their environment, human beings had responded by creating “civilization.”

The final chapter of
Conditioned Reflexes
concerns the applications of Pavlov's work to humans. Given that a human has a much more complex cerebral cortex than a dog, Pavlov was wary of reading too much into his own work. However, he noted the following parallels:

The way human beings are trained, disciplined, and enculturated is not that different to how dogs are taught to do things. We know that the best way to learn something is to do it in stages, in the same way that the dogs' conditioned reflexes were effected in steps. And as he found with dogs, humans have to unlearn things as well as learning them.