In the movie Clockwork Orange, the main character Alex is convicted of rape and a brutal murder. While in jail Alex makes friends with the resident priest at the prison seems to value his faith in God. When the minister of the interior comes to visit the prison, Alex speaks out amongst all the other prisoners and ends up being chosen as the prisoner who gets to be sent to the Ludovico medical center in order for the doctors to test a new treatment that they hope will succeed in curing criminals.
The test that Alex undergoes is a perfect example of the concept of Classical Conditioning. In order to free Alex from jail and the possibility of returning to jail, the doctors force an association to occur in Alex’s mind between violence in sickness. They force him to watch videos containing raw violence immediately after he is given a shot that makes him sick to his stomach. The shot that Alex receives is the unconditioned stimulus, while the sickness that he feels is the unconditioned response. Over periods of time and repeated viewings of these violent videos (neutral stimulus), the sickness that Alex feels becomes a conditioned response to the conditioned stimulus, which is the violence. After this association has been strongly formed within Alex’s brain, he is conditioned to stay away from violence because he associates with that sick feeling that he does not want to experience. This lasts until Alex experiences extinction, which is the weakening and eventual disappearance of a conditioned response as a result of the repeated presentation of the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus.
The link below provides a more humorous example of Pavlov's concept of Classical Conditioning.
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