PSYCHOLOGY – MEDIA CONDITIONING

When I was studying Psychology for my civil services examination (CSE) preparation, I came across some self-developmental wisdom which stroked my intellect to reflect a superior understanding.

Classical conditioning:
Ivan Pavlov, a Nobel-Prize laureate, conducted a famous experiment to manifest to the scientific world the conditioning behaviour in animals. He used his pet dog for his experiment. Every day, the specimen dog was kept hungry and after some time, it was fed with its favourite dish followed by a bell sound. For first few days, the dog didn’t show any observable response during bell sound, but, it showed its usual instinct of salivating on exposure to food stimulus. But, when the above process was repeated, the dog got conditioned to believe about “the bell followed by food” phenomenon and hence started to salivate at the very instance of hearing the bell sound. Thus, the dog got falsified and responded differently due to its conditioning.

Modern or Media conditioning:
In human cultures, similar conditioning behaviours are observable. Media like television, newspapers, cinema, magazines, periodicals, etc., promote such conditioning behaviours in human society. They hypnotize people with “false” teachings by taking advantage of human emotions and weaknesses. Most media portray attainment of pleasure or material wealth should be the ultimate goal in life, mesmerise people by stimulating false motivation, create hallucinating instances, etc. Such, exposure make people to get conditioned to “wrong way of life” mirrored as “true way of life.”

For eliminating such conditioning behaviours, our discerning wisdom should be invoked for our guidance. Spiritual and intellectual works can be used to destroy the habits formed by media conditioning. Moving towards media as an education guide rather than as an entertainment guide can be a better solution to such energy eaters. At last, we can boastfully say, “We are superior and intelligent creatures in earth; we aren’t endowed to get conditioned like animals. We are to conquer the world, not to be conquered.”