4 - Brave New World: learning and habit models

Summary

In Aldous Huxley's fictional 22nd-century Britain, children of the Delta caste are presented with books and flowers, but when they touch either, alarm bells sound and the floor delivers painful electric shocks. Unsurprisingly they soon become frightened of both books and flowers. Why, asks one of a class of visiting Alphas, make it impossible for them to like flowers? ‘He could see quite well why you couldn't have lower caste people wasting the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of them reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes’, but why flowers? On grounds of high economic policy, comes the answer. Once upon a time, Deltas, Gammas, and even Epsilons has been conditioned to like flowers and nature, so they travelled to the countryside at every opportunity and consumed a lot of transport. ‘And didn't they consume transport?’ asks the student. ‘Quite a lot’ replies the director, ‘but nothing else.’

Huxley's psychology is all wrong, for he proposes 200 pairings of flowers, books and shock; modern research on traumatic avoidance learning suggests one might be quite sufficient. But what of the basic idea – is it feasible? Some psychologists at the time certainly thought so, and others since have devised techniques intended to control behaviour and shape personality. Huxley had heard of Pavlov, for the scene is set in the ‘Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms’. Pavlov's conditioning research had inspired some of his followers to propose general models for explaining and controlling human behaviour. Behaviourism's founder, John B. Watson, who saw the newborn child as a blank slate on which only learning could write, had issued his famous challenge:

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 into beggarman and thief.

(Watson, 1925)