Learning

Learning is the process by which life experience causes change in the behavior or thinking of an organism. Everyone learns but in different ways and at different rates, for some they learn easily and quickly while other have a harder time learning and take longer. This is because everyone goes through life differently. Many times someone is learning because they experienced something and that experience caused them to learn something about someone or a certain situation and that changes how they react when a similar situation occurs. Learning has to do with a lot more than just school or sports or anything like that, sometimes it involves social situations and just recognizing different social cues with different people. For example when you have a group of friends you
recognize that one friend is more sensitive than the others or that one is more blunt and wants things straight up you learn internally that you have to be more emotionally sensitive for one and not the other.
This introduces the topic of conditioning and the affects of positive and negative reinforcement when it comes to certain situations. The example used in the book for conditioning was an experiment done by Pavlov. He used dogs to see what made them salivate and conditioning them to react to the sound of a bell instead of just salivating when food comes. This applies to learning as well because conditioning is also a learned skill because of positive and negative reinforcement. When someone is positively reinforced they are given something that they like when they do something specific. This reinforcement makes people want them to do it again each time because they get a positive outcome. Not all learning is done because of something positive, sometime you are conditioned due to a negative response to something and it teaches you not to do that specific thing again.

For me the one thing that I remember getting taught was if I worked hard in my soccer games and played well I would be rewarded with a slushy from sonic. I always wanted to play well because it made my parents happy  and that was something that I wanted. Many kids simply want to make they're parents happy as a child and I happen to be one of them and as a kid I loved playing soccer and wanted to be successful at it. I think the real positive reinforcement was making my parents happy and the slushy was just an added bonus. As a kid I was a pretty fast learner and could pick up on social cues pretty quickly, however, I wasn't very in tune with my own emotions so in turn I wasn't very in tune with those around me. I had and still have a hard time picking up on other peoples emotions and knowing when to be sensitive and when not to be.

I learned in the reading that a lot of things are considered social learning not just the most obvious learning situations. That even the little and slight changes when talking to certain people are considered learning in social situations. A lot of every day things are learned behaviors and I didn't realize that as a child all you really do is socially learn how to interact with those around you acceptably. I think that this kind of learning is really interesting and something that I could see myself going into more detail in studying it. I think that it's a part of psychology that not a lot of people go in depth about it even though to me it's one of the most interesting.