How to get an elephant to give you a pedicure? Learn from Pavlov

Almost all students who have worked with various instruments and equipment in the laboratory will call themselves "laboratory dogs". All "laboratory dogs" like to conduct scientific experiments with materialistic dialectical thinking to explore the truth in the objective world, while at the same time they pray every day that their research results will be better - at least better than those of their seniors in the same group, and pray that they will be lucky enough to make a splash in academic history.

The joys and sorrows of experimental dogs are always linked to the experimental results: The picture shows a bacterial transformation experiment. The culture medium in the upper picture is contaminated, and the transformation is successful in the lower picture | Picture from the Internet

Unfortunately, it is not easy to become a famous experimental dog in history, but in this regard, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov can be said to have completed the task very well - as an experimental dog, he himself won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to the field of digestive physiology. At the same time, as his experimental dog, "Pavlov's dog" also became famous with him.

Minimalist Experimental Dog | Winged Wolf

What is a conditioned reflex?

Of course, as a scientist studying digestive physiology, Pavlov used so many experimental dogs in his research career that it is hard to count them all, and the most well-known of them are definitely the ones that "drooled at the sound." By tying sound signals to feeding actions, Pavlov proved that higher-level neural reflexes are involved in animal behavior, and proposed the concept of "conditioned reflexes," proving that we can tie some external stimuli to certain specific behaviors and actions, and after repeated training and reinforcement, establish connections between different neural signals.

Pavlov | Wikimedia Commons

In his classic experiment, the stimulus signal of "sound" was tied to the behavior of "feeding", and the association relationship of "hearing sound means eating" was established. It may seem difficult to understand, but we can use an example closer to life: for example, when you fail an exam, your buttocks will start to hurt when you get the test paper - this is the conditioned reflex of "failure will lead to spanking".

Pavlov observing his lab dogs | Wikimedia Commons

Application of conditioned reflex

Modern zoos also use the conditioned reflex theory proposed by Pavlov when managing animal behavior. For example, when we need a giant panda to cooperate with us for a blood test, persuasion is obviously useless; if we want to hold it down with brute force, it may take three Dwayne Johnsons. At this time, Pavlov's idea is needed: first use food to attract the giant panda to sit at a specific blood collection point and let it stretch out its arm. If the action is done well, give it a food reward to reward this information.

Animal breeding also requires the establishment of conditioned reflexes | Agência Brasília / Wikimedia Commons

Then, while the panda is doing the right action, the keeper will hit a clicker or blow a whistle to give a sound signal of "Wow, you are awesome!" Finally, the keeper will also need to hold a syringe and pretend to poke its arm to give a tactile signal. Then, the whole set of actions will be repeated until the panda has established a complex conditioned reflex of "sit down - stretch out your hand - hear the whistle - poke twice - get something delicious", and the adaptive training of blood collection is completed.

A veterinarian trims an elephant's nails | Buffalo Zoo

This "action-sound-reward" conditioned reflex can be applied to almost all animal behavior training, including the relocation of gibbons, the pedicure of elephants, and the prevention of dogs from urinating and defecating anywhere. Compared with the "old method" of always using whipping, nailing, restraint, oppression and other methods to inflict pain on animals, the behavioral training method of establishing conditioned reflexes through rewards can be more conducive to establishing a relationship between animals and keepers, and can also reduce animals' resistance to some unnatural but necessary actions in captivity, reduce animals' stress, and is quite beneficial to maintaining animals' physical and mental health.

Good conditioning helps build relationships between animals and keepers | Loïc Ventre / Wikimedia Commons

However, the theory of conditioned reflex can also be reversely applied to some bad psychological manipulation tricks, such as brainwashing by pyramid schemes and the abominable PUA. So once we find someone trying to force some irrelevant information to establish a connection in your impression, we really have to be more careful.

At this point, I wonder if you, the "experimental dogs" who are still working hard in the laboratory for tomorrow's experimental data, have noticed that every time you finish your hard work, there may be a sentence of "thank you for your hard work" or "I'll treat you to a meal" waiting for you? Maybe that is also a process of establishing a conditioned reflex~