Does Conditioning Work on Humans?
Writers of fiction were quick to grasp the potential of conditioning on human society. In Anthony Burgess’ work, The Clockwork Orange, aversion therapy is used to ‘cure’ the protagonist Alex of his brutal sociopath behavior. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagines a Dystopian society where science has learned to shape and control human emotions through conditioning. Despite these fictional examples, the question remains whether these techniques — which have largely been used to conduct experiments on animals — work on humans. The answer is a qualified yes. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists do frequently use operant conditioning techniques on humans. For instance, the technique is often used in the treatment of autism. A number of experiments have shown that humans show the same patterns of responding that other animals show when exposed to the basic schedules of reinforcement. The qualification comes due to the ability of humans to reason and verbalize rules that may prevent th
