The Biography of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the “patriarch of Physiology,” whose groundbreaking experiments on classical conditioning formed the basis of modern behavioral science, was born in Ryazan, Russia on  September 14th, 1849.  Ivan was expected to become a Russian Orthodox priest, as had the previous six generations of Pavlov men. At the age of 20, he announced to his father that he would not be finishing his theological studies, but instead would move to St. Petersburg, to study physiology at the prestigious Saint Petersburg University. In 1890, after years of graduate and medical schooling, Pavlov, began work in a large lab, studying the nervous and digestive systems of dogs. He theorized that it was the nervous system that controlled digestion. He pioneered chronic experiments, where, instead of killing the animals and analyzing their organs, the dogs were surgically altered but kept alive for long periods of time. This type of experimentation on living animals was crucial for his experiments, which were designed to reveal how the animals’ digestive systems responded to food. In 1904, the already world-renowned Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for his discoveries and experiments on the digestive system.  During his acceptance speech, Pavlov stunned the crowd by introducing them to his almost accidental discovery that animals could be trained to respond consistently to a neutral outside stimulus. This principle, which he would spend the rest of his career studying, came to be called Pavlovian or classical conditioning and is the basis for his reputation as one of the great scientists of the Twentieth Century.  Pavlov’s many years of work on conditioned responses was interrupted in 1917 by the Russian Revolution.  Many scientists like Pavlov who worked in government sponsored labs were put out of a job due to the regime change.  Pavlov, even though he had lost his government sponsored lab, was virulently anti-Bolshevik, openly criticizing the government.  Despite the scientists protests, he famously walked out of a meeting with Lenin at government headquarters saying, “I shall never set my foot in this building again,” the Russian government had such great pride in having one of the worlds most renowned scientists that Lenin himself promoted the scientist’s work, provided him state-of-the-art equipment, ensured the publication of his works, and endowed him with large research grants. The Soviet government even built him a scientific village outside of Leningrad in a town called Koltushi to continue his research on conditioning.  Lenin was also one of the earliest leaders to grasp the political implications of Pavlov’s work on conditioned responses. Pavlov’s criticisms of the government while he was receiving large sums of money earned him the nickname, “the only free man in Russia.” Ivan Pavlov died on February 27, 1936 at the age of 86, as one of the most respected men in  Russia and the most renowned physiologist in the world. As the New York Times wrote in his obituary, "To say that Pavlov is the leader in research on conditioned reflexes...is to indicate but superficially his services to thought and science."

Pavlov’s Major Ideas

Ivan Pavlov’s discovery of the principle of classical conditioning or conditioned reflexes  is the reason he is a household name today. A physiologist by training, Pavlov discovered conditioning during his experiments on the digestive systems of dogs, when he observed that gastric juices are produced even if food never reaches the stomach.  In the course of his research, Pavlov noticed that when the lab worker who normally fed the dogs entered the kennel, the dogs would begin to salivate, even if the technician was not bringing food into the room. Pavlov demonstrated that there are two basic types of responses, conditioned and unconditioned. In dogs, an unconditioned, or innate, response is salivating at the smell or sight of  food. A conditioned response occurred when the lab technician who normally fed the dogs entered the room and caused the dogs to salivate. The technician became the stimulus instead of the smell or sight of the food, such that the dogs began to associate his presence with feeding time. Pavlov spent the rest of his life experimenting with these responses, testing them with variables such as the use of a metronome to measure the passage of time, and of course using other audio cues in his famous bell experiments. By pairing an unconditioned stimulus (meat), with a conditioned stimulus (a bell), he discovered that he was able to produce the same salivary response with both stimuli.

Pavlov’s research on the digestive system, although influential at the time, is far eclipsed today by his work on classical conditioning.  He was the first to discover and study behavior modification using stimuli, a principle which gained him international acclaim and secured him a place as one of history's most important scientists.  Although he did grasp the implications of conditioning on humans, it was his successors who extended his ideas into the fields of psychology, education, and politics.

Short Term Impact: Scientific and Political

Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned responses had a profound and almost immediate impact on psychology and the political actions of totalitarian leaders.  Pavlov’s chief scientific follower was John B. Watson, an American psychologist who was the first to apply Pavlovian conditioning to human beings.  John Watson pioneered behaviorism, which theorizes that complex human behavior can be observed through scientific experimentation and changed using conditioning. As he put it in his famous 1913 article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” “[B]ehaviorism['s] theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior”(Watson). The infamous “Little Albert” experiment, conducted by Dr. Watson in 1920 (where he conditioned a small boy to be afraid of harmless pet rat) is one of the first attempts at human conditioning.  Watson’s belief in the malleability of human beings extended far beyond simple experiments with rats.  In his book Behaviorism, Watson boasted “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors”(Watson). 

       It was not only the scientific community that embraced Pavlov’s work, but also political leaders.  Most important among these politicians was Lenin, the leader of the Soviet Union.  Lenin, in 1921, was one of the earliest politicians to grasp the political implications of Pavlov’s work. Lenin believed that he could condition the masses to embrace communism through propaganda, and the creation of a cult-like atmosphere surrounding the Communist leaders.  Later leaders of the Soviet Union, as well as other totalitarian rulers attempted to use the principles of conditioning, such as reward and punishment, as a means of controlling the masses.

The Long Term Effect of Pavlov's Ideas

While Pavlov and his followers' scientific experiments on conditioning and behaviorism in psychology are still widely accepted, the political ideologies that are derived from his work have been rejected.  In the later part of the 20th century, Pavlov’s most famous follower was B.F. Skinner, an American psychologist. Skinner pioneered what was known as operant conditioning which differs from classical conditioning in that it utilizes the principle of rewarding good behavior with positive reinforcement and punishing incorrect behavior with negative reinforcement.  The most famous example of this is the "Skinner Box,” a large rat cage containing with levers that delivered either food or an electric shock.  
Skinner translated these experiments into a political theory, which he advanced through a series of popular books, most importantly Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. In Walden Two, Skinner presents a utopian society based on his principles of conditioning. Heavily influenced by the horrors of World War II and the use by the Nazis of conditioning techniques for the promotion of their racist ideology, Skinner believed that free will, freedom, and dignity were concepts to be transcended and the root of man’s problems.  He wrote in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, there exists “the physical, biological, and behavioral technologies needed ‘to save ourselves’; the problem is how to get people to use them” (Skinner 158).

Renowned linguist Noam Chomsky was the most famous opponent of Skinner’s theories.  Chomsky attacked Skinner’s science as false and his methods as immoral.  In his article “The Case Against B.F. Skinner” Chomsky argues that “At the moment  [1971] we have virtually no scientific evidence and not even the germs of an interesting hypothesis of how human behavior is determined”(Chomsky). Chomsky also argued that Skinner’s writings could be used to justify totalitarianism.  Chomsky writes, “There is little doubt that a theory of human malleability might be put to the service of totalitarian doctrine"(Chomsky).  Chomsky reaffirms that freedom and dignity are not "merely the relics of outdated mystical beliefs"(Chomsky).  British novelist Anthony Burgess was also a strong critic of Skinner. His novel A Clockwork Orange is the story of Alex a violent criminal who is arrested and reprogrammed using a thinly veiled form of operant conditioning, known as the Ludovico Technique.  However, by the end of the story, the treatment proves ineffective, and in Burgess' view immoral.  Chomsky and Burgess were at the forefront of the cognitive revolution, a movement that ultimately discredited the work of behaviorists like Watson and Skinner.  Pavlov still remains one of the world's most respected and important scientific figures, and his bell experiment is ubiquitous even to this day.  However, the broad political theories that his experiment spawned have been widely rejected in favor of liberalism and the free will of man.

 

A Clockwork Pavlov

by Nathan P

Pavlov's Quotes

"When observing carefully it appears that the activity of the salivary gland is always excited by some external phenomenon, i.e. that it is induced by external stimuli like the usual physiological salivary reflex…The difference between the two reflexes is firstly that our old physiological reflex is constant, unconditioned, while the new reflex continually fluctuates and, hence, is conditioned."

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1904/pavlov-lecture.html

"With the progress of our research, I am deeply convinced that along this path will be found the final triumph of the human mind over its uttermost and supreme problem-the knowledge of the mechanism and the laws of human nature."

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0911F63E55127A93C2AA178DD85F4D8285F9&scp=1&sq=a%20man%20who%20speaks%20his%20mind%20in%20russia&st=cse

"Only science and the most sincere approach to it by the aid of the omnipotent scientific method will deliver man from his present gloom and purge him from his contemporary shame in the sphere of human relations."

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0911F63E55127A93C2AA178DD85F4D8285F9&scp=1&sq=a%20man%20who%20speaks%20his%20mind%20in%20russia&st=cse

Ivan Pavlov

A Portrait of Ivan Pavlov

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ivan_Pavlov_LIFE.jpg

One of Pavlov's Dogs

An image of one of Pavlov's taxidermied dogs.

Notice the saliva collector hanging from its mouth.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/One_of_Pavlov%27s_dogs.jpg