Social conditioning begins when we’re just a small baby, and it’s most acute throughout our childhood and adolescence, but it goes on our entire life. It’s carried out by parents, teachers, peers and people in your community, by the novels you read, the media, the church and the ads you see. Social conditioning often works by rewarding certain behaviors, thus reinforcing them, and punishing other behaviors. In this case it’s mostly a societal form of classical conditioning, which unsurprisingly, is a tool also used to train dogs, pigeons, laboratory rats, and so on. But the most noteworthy mechanism of social conditioning is the repetition of the same simple messages, sometimes thousands of times over long periods, especially by perceived authority figures, until the mind gives in and absorbs them. These messages can take explicit forms, like when a parent tells you plainly that you should do that or you shouldn’t do this, or implicit, like when a TV commercial shows you a well-dressed guy that girls swoon all over, thus suggesting indirectly that if you dress well, girls will swoon all over you too. And the result of all this is a person who conforms to the ideals, big and small, of the society and community they live in” (Ezeanu,
Social conditioning begins when we’re just a small baby, and it’s most acute throughout our childhood and adolescence, but it goes on our entire life. It’s carried out by parents, teachers, peers and people in your community, by the novels you read, the media, the church and the ads you see. Social conditioning often works by rewarding certain behaviors, thus reinforcing them, and punishing other behaviors. In this case it’s mostly a societal form of classical conditioning, which unsurprisingly, is a tool also used to train dogs, pigeons, laboratory rats, and so on. But the most noteworthy mechanism of social conditioning is the repetition of the same simple messages, sometimes thousands of times over long periods, especially by perceived authority figures, until the mind gives in and absorbs them. These messages can take explicit forms, like when a parent tells you plainly that you should do that or you shouldn’t do this, or implicit, like when a TV commercial shows you a well-dressed guy that girls swoon all over, thus suggesting indirectly that if you dress well, girls will swoon all over you too. And the result of all this is a person who conforms to the ideals, big and small, of the society and community they live in” (Ezeanu,