LEARNING

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INTRODUCTION

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values,
attitudes and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some
machines. There is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is
immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and
knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a
lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which
cannot be retrieved.

Human learning starts at birth and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing
interactions between people and their environment. Research has led to the identification of
various sorts of learning. For example, learning may occur as a result of habituation, or classical
conditioning, operant conditioning or as a result of more complex activities such as play, seen
only in relatively intelligent animals. Learning may occur consciously or without conscious
awareness. Learning that an aversive event can't be avoided nor escaped may result in a
condition called learned helplessness.

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INTRODUCTION

Play has been approached by several theorists as a form of learning. Children experiment with
the world, learn the rules, and learn to interact through play. Lev Vygotsky agrees that play is
pivotal for children's development since they make meaning of their environment through playing
educational games. For Vygotsky, however, play is the first form of learning language and
communication and the stage where a child begins to understand rules and symbols. This has
led to a view that learning in organisms is always related to semiosis.

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The nature and processes involved in learning are studied in many fields, including educational
psychology, neuropsychology, experimental psychology and pedagology.

Learning may occur as a result of habituation, or classical conditioning, operant conditioning or

as a result of more complex activities such as play.

Learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness.

Learned helplessness is learning that an aversive event cant be avoided nor escaped.

Lev Vygotsky suggested that play is the first form of learning language and communication and
the stage where a child begins to understand rules and symbols.

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Learning is a key process in human behavior; it pervades everything we do and think. It plays a
central role in the language we speak, our customs, our attitudes, our beliefs, our goals, our
personality traits (both adaptive and maladaptive) and even our perceptions.

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values,
attitude and preferences. Learning can be defined as any relatively permanent change in
behavior that occurs as a result of practice or experience.

This definition has three important elements -

1. Learning is a change in behavior, for better or worse.

2. It is a change that takes place through practice or experience; changes due to growth or
maturation are not learning.
3. Before it could be called learning, the change must be relatively permanent. We think of
learned changes in behavior as lasting for days, months, or years, unlike the temporary
behavioral effects of factors such as alertness or fatigue.

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Think about yourself and learning. You are attending this class; you will learn something about
psychology from it but learning in the class is only a small part of the learning you have done in
your life. When you got up this morning, you dressed in a certain way, you ate certain things for
breakfast, (and did not eat others), and you began to think about the day ahead of you. Thinking
invoked your attitudes about other people or events; perhaps it caused you to worry about
something. How you dressed, what you ate, what you thought about, how you evaluated other
people and events, what you worried about - are all rooted in your past experience, or past
learning.

If you could understand the learning process and apply our general understanding of it to a
particular person's life, we would go a long way towards explaining many of the things that person
does. If we could understand some of the principles of learning, we would have a better idea of
how to change behavior when we want to change it.

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22nd September 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSqWiTG-o2Y

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1. CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Classical conditioning gets its name from the fact that it is the kind of learning situation that existed in
the early ‘classical’ experiments of Ivan P. Pavlov (1849-1936). In the late 1890s, this famous Russian
physiologist began to establish many of the basic principles of this form of conditioning. Classical
conditioning is also sometimes called respondent conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning.

Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses

Example of classical conditioning. Pavlov designed an apparatus shown in figure, that could measure
how much a dogs mouth waters in response to food or other things in its environment. At the
beginning of this experiment Pavlov noted that no saliva flowed when he rang a bell. He then trained
the dog by sounding the bell and, shortly afterwards, presenting food. After the sound of the bell had
been paired with the food a few times, he tested the effects of the training by measuring the amount
of saliva that flowed when he rang the bell and did not present food. He found that some saliva was
produced in response to the bell alone. He then resumed the training – paired presentations of bell
and food - a few more times and then tested again with the bell alone. As training continued, the
amount of saliva on tests with the bell alone increased (up to a point, of course). Thus, after training,
the dog’s mouth watered - salivated - whenever the bell was sounded. This is what was learned; It is
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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses

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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses (Another Example)

Student volunteers were the subjects in this experiment. Each student sat in a booth in which a brief
jet of air could be puffed at his or her right eye. The response to this puff was a sharp blink of the eyes.
Half second before each puff, a dim spot of light came up. Test showed that at the beginning of the
experiment, the students did not blink in response to the light. The light and the puff were paired - light
followed by puff - a number of times. Soon the students began to blink when the light came on before
the puff. The number of blinks to the light increased steadily as more and more pairings were given.
Figures show how the blinking to the light increased during the experiment. Each point on the graph
shows the percentage of blinks to the light during ten pairings of light and puff. The students had
learned to blink when the light came on; this is the conditioned response in this experiment.

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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses

What do these examples of classical conditioning have in common? In other words what are the
general characteristics of situations in which conditioned responses are acquired, or learned? In
classical conditioning two stimuli are presented to the learner. (The term stimulus comes from the
Latin word for ‘goad’ , or ‘prod’; and thus, in psychology the term is sometimes used to refer to
events which evoke, or call forth, a response - the individual is ‘goaded into action’. A more general
meaning of the term stimulus is anything in the environment that can be detected by the senses).
One of the stimuli in classical conditioning is called the ‘conditioned stimulus’ (CS). It is also known
as a ‘neutral stimulus’ because except for an alerting, or attentional, response the first few times it is
presented, it does not evoke a specific response. Almost any stimulus which is detectable can serve
as a CS. The bell and the light was the CSs in the two examples. The other stimulus is known as
‘unconditioned stimulus’ (US). This stimulus consistently evokes a response or is reliably followed by
one. The response that reliably follows the unconditioned stimulus is known as the ‘unconditioned
response’ (UR).

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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses

What were the USs and the URs in the example? The two stimuli - the CS and the US – are paired in
classical conditioning so that the conditioned stimulus comes a short time - say from half second to
several seconds - before the unconditioned stimulus is presented. After the stimuli have been paired
a number of times (each pairing is called a trial), presentation of the originally neutral conditioned
stimulus evokes a response. This response is what is learned or in classical conditioning; it is termed
the ‘conditioned response’ (CR).

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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses

The acquisition of a conditioned response is usually gradual; as more and more trials (CS-US
pairings) are given, conditioned responses grows stronger and stronger or are more and more likely
to occur. For example, in figure, the left-hand curve shows the course of acquisition, or learning,
typical in an experiment on salivary conditioning. (It is drawn without specifying the amount of saliva
or the number of trials, but this values would be plotted on a graph in an actual experiment). Figure
illustrates the course of acquisition of a conditioned eye-blink response. These are both examples of
acquisition, or learning, curves in which the course of learning is followed over trials or time. Learning
curves typically have the shape shown in these two examples; the rate of learning is rapid at first but
gradually decreases, as shown by the flattening of the curve. Such curves are said to be negatively
accelerated. In other words, the increase in learning on later trials is less than was the increase on
earlier trials. This is probably because there is a limit on the strength, or magnitude, of a conditioned
response in a given experiment; after all, in the saliva conditioning experiment, the dog could only
drool so much. Increases can be great on the early trials, but there is less and less to be added to the
magnitude of the response as conditioning proceeds.

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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Acquisition, or Learning of Condition Responses

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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
THEORIES

Theories of classical conditioning try to describe and give order to the results of the many, many
conditioning experiments that have been done; they are often mathematical in form (Rescorla and
Wagner, 1972). These theories are also concerned with the processes occurring when a conditioned
response is acquired. In other words, they speculate about the nature of the learning that takes place
in classical conditioning. One older theory about the nature of classical conditioning is the theory of
stimulus substitution; more recent and current ideas are the information an expectation theories.

Stimulus Substitution

This theory, which originated with Pavlov and was influential for many years relies on the idea that the
CS, simply as a result of pairing in the US, acquires the capacity to substitute for the US in invoking a
response. In other words, an association - a link of a bond - is formed between the CS and the US so
that the CS becomes the equivalent of the US in eliciting a response. Pavlov thought this link up, or
association, took place in the brain.
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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
THEORIES

Stimulus Substitution

He thought the two areas of the brain, one for the CS and one for the US, became activated during the
conditioning procedure and that activation of the US area resulted in a reflex, or automatic, response.
As a result of the CS-US pairings during the conditioning procedure, he theorized, the CS acquired the
ability to excite US area, thus leading to the reflex response.
While the idea of stimulus substitution is appealingly simple, it is not currently accepted by most
learning theorists. A major difficulty with the theory is that it says the conditioned response (CR)
should be the same as, or at least very similar to, the unconditioned response (UR). According to this
theory, all that has happened is that the CS has acquired the ability to evoke the response after
conditioning. The response has not changed; the change is in the stimulus that elicits it. However, it is
clear that the CR may not be at all like the UR. For instance, when using a mild foot shock as the US
and a tone as the CS, the unconditioned response of rats to the shock is an increase in running and
activity, but the conditioned response to the tone is a decrease in activity - a response known as
‘freezing’.
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CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
THEORIES

Information and Expectation

Other theories of the conditioning process take the viewpoint that the CS becomes a signal for the
US. Thus, when the CS is presented, the US is expected, and the learner responds in accordance
with this expectation.
How does the CS become a signal for the US? A number of experiments have led to the view that
this happened because the US is a surprising, or novel, event. The surprising US induces the
learner to look back through recent memory. The CS is the event consistently found in memory on
each trial before the US. An association, or link, is thus said to be formed between the memory trace
of the CS and the US. Now when the CS occurs, the US is expected. The conditioned response is
made in anticipation of the US. The form of the conditioned response often indicates that the learner
expects the US. For example, if food is the US for a dog’s, salivation and many other responses
associated with eating, such as running to the place where the food is kept if the dog is not confined,
will occur. Thus, in this view conditioned responses are not automatically stamped in by CS-US
pairings. Rather, they are behaviors, or actions, engaged in by the learner in expectation of a future
event - the US.
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EXTINCTION AND SPONTANEOUS RECOVERY IN CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

In classical conditioning, extinction occurs when the CS is presented alone without the US for a
number of trials. When this is done, the strength, or magnitude, of the CR gradually decreases as
shown in figure. For example, the number of drops of saliva decreases over unpaired trials; or blinks
to a light CS gradually becomes less frequent. Note that the process of extinction is not ‘forgetting’.
A response is set to be forgotten over time when there is no explicit procedure involved. The
process of extinction, however, involves a specific procedure - presentation of the CS by itself.

Just as with acquisition, there are several views concerning why the extinction process works.
Pavlov thought of conditioning in terms of two opposing tendencies; extinction and inhibition. During
acquisition the excitatory tendency has the upper hand; but during extinction, inhibition builds up to
suppress conditioned responding. Another view of extinction process stems from the information-
expectation theory of conditioning described before. Because, during extinction, the CS is no longer
paired with the US, the CS ceases to be a signal for the US; the CS becomes a neutral stimulus, as
it was before conditioning occurred, and little attention is paid to it.

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EXTINCTION AND SPONTANEOUS RECOVERY IN CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

The decrease in conditioned-response magnitude resulting from extinction need not be permanent.
Suppose, the day after extinction of a saliva reconditioned response, a dog is brought back into the
laboratory and the tone CS is presented. The magnitude of the dog's condition response will
probably be much greater than it was at the end of extinction the day before. Such an increase in
the magnitude of a conditioned response after a period of time with no explicit training is known as
‘spontaneous recovery’. The phenomenon of spontaneous recovery shows that the extinction
procedure, while decreasing the magnitude of a conditioned response, does not entirely remove the
tendency to respond to the CS. The extinction does not completely erase conditioning is also shown
by the fact that reconditioning is usually more rapid than was the original conditioning. To recondition
after extinction, the experimenter again pairs the CS and the US from the original condition. When
Pavlov did this, he got the general result shown by the right-hand curve of Figure; reconditioning
following extinction occurred more rapidly then did the first conditioning. Thus, some learning was
left, after extinction, from the original conditioning. Indeed, an experimenter can condition and
extinguish up to a point, and learning will be a little faster each time.

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EXTINCTION AND SPONTANEOUS RECOVERY IN CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Pavlov used the phenomenon of spontaneous recovery and faster reconditioning to support his
inhibition idea of extinction. He assumed that inhibition from the extinction process gradually decays
with time and thus the excitatory tendency is less suppressed after an interval of a few hours or a
day. On the other hand, the information-expectation view of spontaneous recovery stresses the
attention paid to the CS by the learner. Remember that this theory says that the CS loses its
excitatory value in extinction because the learner no longer pays attention to it; it is as if the CS
becomes part of the background as it is presented over and over in the extinction situation. But the
passage of time changes the situation, and then the CS now comes on it are novel again, the
learner pays attention to it, and the CS is once more excitatory. Reconditioning is said to occur
rapidly because the signal value of the CS has already been acquired during the original
conditioning, and the learner simply carries this over to the reconditioning trials.

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STIMULUS GENERALIZATION AND DISCRIMINATION IN CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Pavlov discovered very early in his work that if he conditioned an animal to salivate at the sound of a
bell, it would also salivate, though not quite so much, at the sound of a buzzer or the beat of a
metronome. In other words, the animal tended to generalize the conditioned response to other
stimuli that were somewhat similar to the original condition stimulus. Subsequent conditioning
experiments have demonstrated this phenomena of ‘stimulus generalization’ over and over. The
amount of generalization follows this rough rule of thumb: The greater the similarity the greater the
generalization among conditioned stimuli.

‘Generalization’ means that conditioned responses occur to stimuli that have never been paired with
a specific unconditioned stimulus. It broadens the scope of classical conditioning. Consider the
development of irrational fears, or phobias, by children. Insofar, as conditioning and generalization
plays a role, the process might go something like this: A child is conditioned, accidentally perhaps,
to fear something by its being paired with a fear producing unconditioned stimulus. The fear
becomes irrational when it generalizes, or spreads, to similar but harmless objects.

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STIMULUS GENERALIZATION AND DISCRIMINATION IN CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

For example, the original conditioning might have involved conditioned fear response to a white
fluffy dog that bit the child. If this fear generalized too many white, fluffy things - other white animals,
white blankets, white birds, and so forth, we would have an example of an irrational fear of white
fluffy things, or a phobia. This child might be afraid of Santa Claus or Uncle Mike, who happens to
have a white beard; because of generalization, the fear has spread a long way from the original
conditioning.
The generalization of fear may make tracing it back to its conditioned origin difficult. But even
though the specific conditioning that has led to some phobias cannot be discovered, this irrational
fears can sometimes be eliminated by conditioning procedures that involve extinction and the
learning of condition responses, such as relaxation, that are incompatible with being afraid.
‘Discrimination’ is the process of learning to make one response to one stimulus and a different
response, or no response to another stimulus. Although many kinds of discriminations are possible,
a typical discrimination experiment in classical conditioning involves learning to respond to one
stimulus and not to respond to another. When we learn to respond to one stimulus and not to
another, the range of stimuli that are capable of calling forth a conditioned response is narrowed. In
a sense, then, this kind of discrimination is the opposite of generalization, or the tendency for a
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SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

Many of our subjective feelings - from our violent emotions to the subtle nuances of our moods - are
probably conditioned responses. A face, a scene, or a voice maybe the condition stimulus for an
emotional response. Generalization and the fact that we learned many of these responses before
we could talk and thus label them make it difficult to trace such feelings back to their conditioned
beginnings. No wonder we're not always able to identify the origins of our emotional responses.

Since some emotional responses to stimuli are learned, perhaps they can be unlearned. Or perhaps
other, less disturbing responses can be associated with the stimuli that produce unpleasant
emotional responses. The extinction and alteration of disturbing emotional responses by classical
conditioning is one form of ‘behavior therapy’, or as it is called, ‘behavior modification’.

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2. INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING

Suppose your friend, who knows you are taking a psychology course, asks for advice on how to
teach her young children to behave politely at dinner, watch less television, and do their household
course without constant prodding. What can you tell her that will be helpful? You know about
classical conditioning, but that is not going to help much. For instance, how could the children be
classically conditioned to say ‘thank you’ when appropriate? What is the unconditioned stimulus for
this or for other social behaviors? You need another form of learning to shape, or mold, such
behavior. To make the desired response more likely and the undesired one less likely, you need a
set of techniques that can be applied to the ongoing behavior of the children. The techniques of
instrumental conditioning will help do just that.

Instrumental conditioning is called instrumental because, as we will describe in detail, the key
feature of this form of learning is that some action (some behavior) of the learner is instrumental in
bringing about a change in the environment that makes the action more or less likely to occur again
in the future. For example, if the environmental change is a reward, the instrumental behavior that
brings about the reward will be more likely to occur in the future. In other words, if the behavior pays
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INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING

Instrumental conditioning is sometimes also, roughly speaking, known as ‘operant conditioning’.

This term was coined by B.F. Skinner to indicate that when a response operates on the
environment, it may have consequences that can affect the likelihood that the response will occur
again. We will use this term when describing the work of Skinner and others who used the method
pioneered by him.

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REINFORCERS AND PUNISHERS

An environmental event that is the consequence of an instrumental response and that makes that
response more likely to occur again is known as ‘reinforcer’ or ‘reinforcement’. A positive reinforcer is
a stimulus or event which, when it follows a response, increases the likelihood that the response will
be made again. It is important to note that the reinforcer is contingent upon the instrumental
response. In other words, the response results in the occurrence of the reinforcer. This should not be
a strange idea to you; responses which pay off in some way or are likely to be repeated. For instance,
food for a hungry animal, water for a thirsty one, praise for a parent, a price, and many, many other
stimuli or events will show as positive reinforcers when they are contingent on some behavior.

Negative reinforcement is another tool in the kit of the instrumental conditioner. A ‘negative reinforcer’
is a stimulus or event which, when its cessation or termination is contingent on a response, increases
the likelihood that the response will occur again. The word negative refers to the fact that the
response causes the termination of an event. Again, this concept should not be strange to you.
Negative reinforcers are often but not necessarily painful, or noxious, events - an electric shock, for
example, or a shouting from the boss. The payoff is that the response, when made, stops the noxious
event (the shock or the boss’s abuse). We tend to repeat responses that pay off in this way.
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REINFORCERS AND PUNISHERS

Another technique that can be used In instrumental conditioning is ‘punishment’. A punisher is a

stimulus or event which, when its onset is contingent on a response, decreases the likelihood that the
response will occur again. Note that a punisher is quite different from a negative reinforcer. While both
are often noxious events, it is the ending of the event that is contingent on the response in negative
reinforcement, but it is the onset of the event that is contingent on the response in punishment.
Responses followed by punishers tend not to be repeated, while those followed by negative reinforces
tend to become more likely. The idea of punishment is probably all too familiar. Traffic fines, de-merits,
spankings, and the like can act as punishers when they are contingent upon particular behaviors.

A fourth response consequence sometimes used in the instrumental conditioning is known as

‘omission of reinforcement’. In omission of reinforcement, or ‘omission training’ as it is often called,
positive reinforcement is withdrawn following a response. The effect of the omission of the
reinforcement is to decrease the likelihood of the response that led to the removal of the positive
reinforcement. An example of this is parents’ turning off the television set (a positive reinforcer) and
sending a child to his or her room following some behavior. In everyday speech, this is sometimes
referred to as ‘punishment’, but from the different definitions given here, you can see that technically
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REINFORCERS AND PUNISHERS

So instrumental, or operant, conditioning has quite a few ways of changing behavior. When you have
mastered these ideas, you should have something useful to say to the hypothetical friend in the
opening paragraph of this section. We will not go into the omission of reinforcement, but we will use
the concept of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment to organize the rest of
this section on instrumental conditioning.

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A POSITIVE REINFORCER

It is a stimulus or event which, when it is contingent on a response, increases the likelihood that
the response will be made again. A negative reinforcer is a stimulus or event which, when its
session or termination is contingent on a response, increases the likelihood that the response will
occur again. A punisher is a stimulus or event which, when its onset is contingent on a response,
decreases the likelihood that the response will occur again. In omission of reinforcement, or
omission training, positive reinforcement is withdrawn following a response; this has the effect of
decreasing the likelihood of the behaviour leading to the removal of positive reinforcement.
In instrumental, or operant, conditioning, the term shaping refers to the process of learning a
complex response by first learning a number of simple responses leading up to the complex one.
Each step is learned by the application of contingent positive reinforcement, and each step builds
on the one before it until the complex response occurs and is reinforced. Shaping is also called
the method of successive approximations. Classical conditioning also seems to contribute to the
shaping of responses through the process known as auto-shaping.
In instrumental, or operant, conditioning, the procedure of not reinforcing a response is called
extinction. If after learning, reinforcement is no longer contingent on a response, the response will
become less likely to occur.
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POSITIVE REINFORCER

Primary reinforces in instrumental conditioning are reinforcers that are effective without any
previous special training; they work ‘naturally’ to increase the likelihood of a response when they
are made contingent on it. On the other hand the ability of conditioned, or secondary, reinforcers to
influence the likelihood of a response depends upon learning; stimuli become conditioned
reinforcers by being paired with primary reinforcers.

In instrumental, or apparent, conditioning, reinforcement following every occurrence of a particular

response is called continuous reinforcement (CRF). But reinforcement in operant conditioning is
often given according to certain schedules, not every occurrence of the response is reinforced.
Fixed-ratio (FR), Fixed-interval (FI), Variable-ratio (VR), and Variable-interval (VI) schedules are
described to illustrate the concept of reinforcement schedules. In general schedules of
reinforcement have different patterns of behaviour associated with them and resistance to
extinction can be increased by scheduling reinforcements.

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Some examples of positive reinforcement are:
Awarding good grades for work that is well done.
Allowing students to watch a video for finishing an assignment.
Verbally rewarding students for their effort and hard work.
Giving students a 'punch' in their punch card each time they do something well. When the punch
card is full, the student receives a reward.
By using positive reinforcement, teachers can condition students to associate good work and good
behavior with a reward. On the other hand, negative reinforcement can be used to punish students
for poor behavior.

Some examples of negative reinforcement are:

Removing recess from students who 'act out' in class.
Taking points off of work that is turned in late.
Not allowing a student who is misbehaving to sit with his friends.
Using a chart to document the number of times a student has misbehaved (using stickers). When
the chart line is full, the student loses a classroom privilege.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRdCowYEtAg
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THE GIFT OF FEAR by Gavin de Becker

‘Like every creature, you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of
a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guides you through
risky situations.’

‘Though we want to believe that violence is a matter of cause and effect, it is actually a process,
a chain in which the violent outcome is only one link.’

‘For men like this, rejection is a threat to the identity, the persona, to the entire self, and in this
sense their crimes could be called murder in defense of the self.’

In a nutshell: Trust your intuitions, rather than technology, to protect you from violence.

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The book outlines real life stories of people who became victims, or almost became victims, of
violence; in each case the person either listened to their intuition and survived or did not and pay
the consequences.

We normally think of fear as something bad, but de Becker tries to show how it is a gift that may
protect us from harm. ‘The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence’ is about
getting into other people's mind so that their actions do not come as a terrible surprise.

‘The Gift of Fear’ may not just change your life - it could actually save it.

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Intuitive Security

In the modern world, de Becker observes, we have forgotten to rely on our instincts to look after
ourselves. Most of us leave the issues of violence up to the police and criminal justice system,
believing that they will protect us, but often by the time we involve the authorities it is too late.
Alternatively, we believe that better technology will protect us from danger; the more alarms and
high fences we have, the safer we feel.
But there is a more reliable source of protection - our intuition or gut feeling. Usually, we have all
the information we need to warn us of certain people or situations; like other animals, we have an
inbuilt warning system for danger. Dogs’ intuition is much exaggerated, but de Becker argues
that in fact human beings have better intuition; the problem is that we are less prepared to trust it.
De Becker suggests that there is a universal code of violence that most of us can automatically
sense, yet modern life often has the effect of deadening our sensitivity. We either don't see the
signal at all or we won't admit them. ‘Trusting intuition is the exact opposite of living in fear.’ Real
fear does not paralyze you, it energizes you, enabling you to do things you normally could not.

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A Violent streak in everyone

De Becker debunks the idea that there is a criminal mind separating certain people from the rest
of us. Most of us would say that we can never kill another person, but then you usually hear the
caveat: ‘unless I was having to protect a loved one.’ We are all capable of criminal thoughts and
even actions. Many murderers are described as ‘inhuman’, but surely, de Becker observes, they
can't be anything but human. If one person is capable of a particular act under certain
circumstances, he may also be capable of the attack. In his work, de Becker does not have the
luxury of making distinctions like ‘human’ and ‘monster’. Instead, he looks for whether a person
may have the intent or ability to harm. He concludes, ‘the resource of violence is in everyone; all
that changes is our view of the justification.’

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A chain, not an isolated act

Why do people commit violence De Becker boils it down to four elements:

Justification - the person makes a judgment that they have been intentionally wronged.
Alternatives - violence seems like the only way forward to seek redress or justice.
Consequences - they decide they can live with the probable outcome of their violent act. For
instance, a stalker may not mind going to a jail as long as he gets his victim.
Ability - they have confidence in their ability to use their body or bullets or a bomb to achieve
their ends.

De Becker’s team check through this ‘pre-incident indicators’ when they have to predict the
likelihood of violence from someone threatening a client. If we pay attention he says, ‘violence
never comes from nowhere.’ It is actually not very common for people to ‘snap’ before they
commit murder. Generally, de Becker remarks, violence is as predictable as water coming to a
boil. What also helps in predicting violence is to understand it as a process, ‘in which the violent
outcome is only one link.’ Three quarters of spousal murders happen after the woman leaves the
marriage.

SVKM’s NMIMS; SDSOS

Knowing how to pick a psychopath

The features of predatory criminals usually include:

Recklessness and bravado.
Single-mindedness.
Not being shocked at things that would shock other people.
Being weirdly calm in conflict.
The need to be in control.

What is the best predicator of violent criminality? De Becker's experience is that a troubled or
abusive childhood is an important factor. In a study into serial killers, 100% were found to have
suffered violence themselves, been humiliated, or simply neglected as children.
Violent people can be very good at hiding the signals that they are psychopaths. They may
studiously model normality so that they can at first appear to be ‘regular guys.’

SVKM’s NMIMS; SDSOS

Warning signals include:

They are too nice.

They talk too much and give us unnecessary details to distract us.
They approach us, never the other way round.
They typecast us or mildly insult us, in order to have us respond and engage with them.
They use the technique of ‘forced teaming,’ using the word we to make them and their victim
seem like they are all in the same boat.
They find a way to help us so we feel in their debt (called ‘loan sharking’).
They ignore or discount are ‘no.’ Never let someone talk you out of a refusal, because then they
know they are in charge.

We don't have to lead paranoid lives - most of the things we worry about never happen - yet it is
foolish to trust our home or office security system or the police absolutely. As it is people who
harm, de Becker notes, it is people we must understand.

SVKM’s NMIMS; SDSOS

Inside the mind of a stalker

‘The Gift of Fear’ remarks, the common factor is a desperate hunger for recognition.
All of us want recognition, glory, significance to some extent, and in killing someone famous,
stalkers themselves become famous. To such people assassination makes perfect sense; it is a
shortcut to fame, and psychotic people do not really care whether the attention they gain is
positive or negative.

Final comments

In writing The Gift of Fear de Becker was influenced by three books in particular: FBI behavioral
scientists Robert Ressler’s ‘Whoever Fights Monsters; Psychologist John Monahan’s ‘Predicting
Violent Behavior’; and Robert D. Hare’s Without Conscience’; which takes the reader into the
minds of psychopaths. There is now a large literature on the psychology of violence, but de
Becker's book is still a great place to start.

Gavin de Becker is considered a pioneer in the field of threat assessment and the prediction and
management of violence. His other books include Protecting the Gift, on the safety of children,
and Fear Less: Real Truth About Risk, Safety and Security in a Time of Terrorism.

SVKM’s NMIMS; SDSOS

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED TODAY – IN A NUTSHELL

About Learning

Classical Conditioning

Instrumental Conditioning

Reinforcers

Punishment

Gift Of Fear – A Book

SVKM’s NMIMS; SDSOS