As the world turns, we are back to another edition of Erik Looking At Books. I see one kind of interesting. We got Theories of Personality. That one looks kind of interesting. What do you guys think? Let’s take it out. What year is this? We got… Yup, by Calvin Hall, University of Cali, Santa Cruz. Gardener Lindzey, University of Texas. And then the teachers. How old is this? Wow, look. Look, this is pretty old, 1970. I wonder how long John Wiley & Sons? You’d think it would probably be great grandson just by now. I’m sorry. That was a dumb inside joke.
Okay. Let’s see what they got here. Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory. Jung’s Analytic Theory. Social Psychological Theories. Murray’s… Okay. Okay. So they’re all just different people’s theories. What else do we got in this book? That’s just about it. Look at that. Nope, we got Roger’s Self Theory, Personality Theory & Perspective, Skinner’s Operant… Oh, this is going to be a great… I’m going to break every chapter down eventually, but that’s going to be great because everyone always wants to talk about personality tests and this and that and bluesy blousy. So now we got a book and an old one, right, that got all these different people. I’ve never heard of half of these people. I’ve heard Sigmund Freud, but that’s Lewin. That’s about it. What do we see? Stimulus Responsive Theory, 417.
Okay. So what they’re… I mean the first one, that’s a pretty good introduction. You can read it and I’ll read it out loud for you. “We shall present here the personality theory that is the most elegant, most economical, and shows the closest link to its natural science forebears. Stimulus response theory, at least in its origins, can accurately be labeled a laboratory theory in contrast to the other theories with which we have dealt with the role of clinical or naturalistic observations have been much more important.”
All right, let’s see if we got any little golden nuggets because obviously I already read the chapter. So we got this Russians whatever Ivan Pavlov. He was able to demonstrate that through the simple simultaneous presentation of unconditioned stimuli, meat paste, and the condition stimuli, sound from a tuning fork, the condition stimulus would eventually elicit a response, salvation, which originally could be elicited only by the unconditional stimulus. Unconditioned. Salivated to the sound of the tuning fork was referred to conditioned response.
I’m sorry. It got pretty interesting. He seized the same types of objective techniques… He seized upon Pavlov’s principle of condition and combining this with ideas he had already developed.
All right. Yeah. This is really interesting because you got a subchapter of the reinforcement theory. So yeah man, this is going to be really interesting and I’m going to be very glad to read it for you and go through it. So kind of that first little bit is… Well, it’s all stimulus response. So meat paste and the fork turning. You hearing it, right, you start to salivate. The stimulus is creating a response, right? At least that’s what I got so far. Whoa, this is a much larger chapter than I thought. Oh whoa. You’ve got to be kidding me. So this is a 40 page chapter, maybe 30. I doubt I’m going to be able to break it all the way down for you guys just because I only have 400 words. So what I’m going to do when I write the little paper is kind of give the maximum value that I find out in here. Now again, I won’t be able to give it all to you, but it’ll be as an action packed as I possibly can make it for you. All right.