The Learning Experience
PSY/103

The Learning Experience
Bruce Lee (1970) was quoted as saying, “A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer”. Asking questions to working with our hands or in a classroom environment. The point is there are different types of learning be it hands on or from learned experience from a situation. This paper is going to describe a single informal learning experience that I have had broccoli. It will discuss three types of conditioning or learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and cognitive-social learning. This paper will show how each type of conditioning could have been the reason for the response that shaped view of broccoli to this day.
As a young child I was never one to eat too many vegetables. My mother would make meals with some type of vegetable on the side because as we all well aware of is that we need a good diet that includes vegetables. However this is something that is hard to enforce into young children and in my case I was no different. One evening my mother cooked a meal with broccoli as the vegetable of choice. Just like most vegetables I did not want to eat it. The smell, color, taste, and texture was not something I enjoyed. After sitting for a long time starring at this frightful food my mother forced me to eat it. What happened next would forever shape my thinking on broccoli, I threw it all up. Fast forward 36 years and to this day I cannot smell broccoli without my stomach turning. Broccoli and I from that one day are as incompatible as oil and water.
Classic conditioning according to Carpenter and Huffman (2010) is learning that occurs when neutral stimulus (NS) becomes paired (associated) with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) to elicit a conditioned response (CR). The learned response to the broccoli episode from above could have been through