Meaning
Automatic, conditioned, triggered rather than chosen - the response that arrives before thought does, like salivation at a dinner bell. The word applies to dogs, humans, and the reflexes of institutions alike. Technical in psychology, jokey-but-apt elsewhere; strictly the dogs were real and the bell, famously, was usually a metronome or buzzer - the bell is the legend's own conditioning. Regional use: General English; Russian scientific origin.
Origin
Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist studying digestion, noticed his laboratory dogs salivating not at food but at the technician who usually fed them - what he called psychic secretion - and formalized it: pair a neutral stimulus such as a metronome with food, and after repetitions the dog salivates to the metronome alone, the conditioned stimulus calling out the conditioned response. He published the conditioning results in 1897 - Edwin Twitmyer had related findings a year earlier - and the procedure now carries his name as Pavlovian conditioning, classical conditioning's synonym. The eponym escaped the laboratory long ago: reviewers reach for Pavlovian giggles, commuters for the Pavlovian glance at the departure board, and every institution knows its own bell. Wiktionary's record runs from a 2005 almanack on Pavlov's later stress research to a 2012 critic's Pavlovian giggle fits at a Simpsons episode title.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a Pavlovian reflex
- Pavlovian conditioning
- Pavlovian response
Usage Examples
- The doorbell at 3 p.m. produced a Pavlovian migration of the entire newsroom toward biscuits.
- Years after leaving, she still felt a Pavlovian dread at the sound of a fax machine.
- Campaign managers rely on the Pavlovian clause of the party broadcast: anthem, flag, applause.