Six theories that use animals to explain their meanings
Animals are often used by scientists and psychologists to illustrate or prove theoretical ideas. Naomi Alderman has been looking at the story of Pavlov’s dogs in Science Stories.
But have you heard about the theories involving hedgehogs and white bears? And what do they all really mean? Read on for our explanations of six of the most interesting animal-based theories.
1) Pavlov’s dogs
The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov stumbled on the theory of classical conditioning (or the ‘Pavlovian response’) entirely by accident while researching dogs’ digestive secretions. Pavlov noticed that his canine subjects would start to drool whenever they saw the lab technician who usually fed them. He realised that the dogs had come to associate the handler with eating, and so started to salivate when they saw him because they expected to be fed.
To prove his theory, Pavlov carried out a series of experiments in which he played a sound, such as a buzzer, a harmonium or a metronome, whenever the dogs were given food. In each case, he found that the dogs began to unconsciously connect the new noise with eating and so started to salivate as soon as they heard it, even when food wasn’t present.
Pavlov reasoned that human responses could be conditioned in a similar way, and the phrase ‘Pavlovian response’ is now commonly used to describe an involuntary learned reaction.
2) Schrödinger’s cat
Quantum physics explains how the subatomic elements that make up our world behave, and at this scale some pretty odd things happen. In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger set out to illustrate the absurdity of applying quantum theory to larger objects by linking the behaviour of a radioactive atom to the fate of a cat.
Quantum theory states that subatomic particles can be in two states at once until they’re observed. Similarly, since the cat’s life depends on what’s happening inside the radioactive atom, until we look in the box the cat is theoretically both alive and dead.
For Schrödinger, this thought experiment highlighted a paradox at the heart of quantum mechanics: while a particle may be able to exist in two states, the cat must be either alive or dead regardless of whether it’s being observed – it can’t be both.
3) The infinite monkey theorem
The infinite monkey theorem is all about probability: it states that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare.
Schrödinger’s cat was a thought experiment – no cats were harmed.
While this is a theoretical near-certainty, the odds on it happening in reality are infinitesimally tiny. Many trillions of monkeys typing from the dawn of time to the end of the universe would be highly unlikely to manage even a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
That’s not to say people haven’t tried, though. In 2002, arts students and lecturers at Plymouth University installed a computer in an enclosure with six macaque monkeys to see what they could come up with. After a month, the primates had written five pages of unreadable text consisting largely of the letter ‘s’. They had also hit the keyboard with a stone and used it as a toilet.
4) The butterfly effect
The butterfly effect is based on the idea that within complex systems, a tiny event or change in conditions can ultimately have major consequences. To illustrate this concept, American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz gave the example that a butterfly flapping its wings in the rainforest could result in a tornado thousands of miles away a few weeks later.
Lorenz encountered this idea in the 1960s while running weather modeling data through a computer. When he repeated a previous calculation using numbers that were rounded to slightly fewer decimal places, the resulting weather forecast ended up looking wildly different. A miniscule change in the original conditions had led to an entirely new predicted weather pattern less than two months ahead.
The butterfly effect may offer a neat metaphor to explain the unpredictability of chaotic systems, but it’s not likely to be literally true. Scientists say the actual impact of a butterfly flapping its wings would be so tiny as to be quickly absorbed by the surrounding air pressure.
5) The hedgehog’s dilemma
First set out as a parable by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, this less well known psychological theory describes the difficulties of human intimacy through the metaphor of hedgehogs huddling together for warmth in winter.
Also called the porcupine problem, it illustrates how – like hedgehogs coated in sharp spines – the closer we get to each other emotionally, the more likely we are to be hurt. Yet at the same time, if we opt to keep our distance we’ll end up cold and alone, so we need to find a comfortable middle ground.
This hedgehog has no dilemma and knows exactly how to find the comfortable middle ground…
6) The white bear problem
The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” What Dostoevsky describes is a psychological scenario now known as ‘ironic process theory’, which was first studied by psychologist Daniel Wegner in 1987.
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