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IB DP Psychology — Behavioural Approach | SL & HL | Paper 1
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define classical conditioning, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned stimulus, and conditioned response using IB-aligned terminology.
- Explain how neutral stimuli become conditioned stimuli through repeated association and the conditions under which conditioning occurs.
- Describe the processes of acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalisation, and discrimination in classical conditioning.
- Evaluate research evidence for classical conditioning using supporting and opposing studies in ACAS format.
- Apply classical conditioning concepts to a real-world case study from the behavioural perspective.
- Discuss the extent to which classical conditioning provides a complete explanation of learned behaviour.
- Analyse classical conditioning research using relevant concept areas: Causality, Bias, Perspective, and Responsibility.
Introduction & Context
Imagine you are sitting in a dentist's waiting room. You have not yet been called in, nothing painful has happened, and yet your heart is already beating faster. The smell of antiseptic, the sound of the drill from behind the door, the particular shade of clinical white on the walls — all of these things make you feel anxious before anything has actually occurred. Why should a smell or a sound produce a physical response? You were not born afraid of antiseptic. Something, at some point, taught your body to react this way.
This is one of the most fundamental questions in psychology: how do organisms learn to respond emotionally and physiologically to things in their environment that were originally meaningless to them? The answer, proposed by a Russian physiologist in the early twentieth century, lies in a process of association — a mechanism by which the nervous system links two events together so reliably that the presence of one begins to predict, and then trigger, the response originally caused by the other.
Classical conditioning is not merely a laboratory curiosity. It underpins phobias, cravings, emotional memories, and even some therapeutic interventions. Understanding it means understanding one of the most powerful and automatic ways in which experience shapes behaviour — often without our awareness or consent.
🔗 Analogy — The Doorbell and Dinner Imagine your dog always runs to the kitchen when you open a can of food — the sound of the can opener reliably signals that food is coming. Over time, even the sound of you walking toward the kitchen drawer where the can opener is kept makes the dog run in. The dog has not reasoned this out; its nervous system has simply linked the sound to the food so many times that the sound alone now produces the same anticipatory response. This is the essence of classical conditioning: a previously neutral event acquires the power to trigger a response because it has been repeatedly paired with something that naturally causes that response.
Core Concepts
To understand classical conditioning, we need to begin with what happens before any learning takes place. Every organism is born with certain automatic, built-in responses to specific stimuli. Touch a hot surface and you pull