A Clock Work Orange essays

A Clock Work Orange essays This Stanley Kubrick film A Clock Work Orange is a multifaceted work of art with many different layers. One of the most prominent layers of this film is the one that relates to Behavior Modification. It shows quite colorfully the basic components of respondent conditioning such as; neutral stimulus (NS) unconditioned stimulus (US), unconditioned response (UR), conditioned stimulus (CS), and the conditioned response (CR). As well as higher order conditioning, discrimination and generalization. This movie expresses many of these aspects of behavior modification. Which is often portrayed in an obvious and over the top manner to prove a greater point. In doing so they have also illustrated some of the many misconceptions people have about behavior modification. In the beginning of this movie we are introduced to Alex, a young boy with a quick wit and a flare for Ultra Violence. The evil we see him indulged in before his "conditioning", starts with him and his gang maliciously beating an old homeless veteran and ends with him brutally killing a middle age well-to-do women. This last act of deviance lands him in jail and on the path to respondent conditioning. Respondent conditioning starts with the understanding that certain type of stimuli elicits a certain natural response. This is referred to as the US and the UR. In respondent conditioning we use these in conjunction with a neutral stimulus to get a CS and a CR. I will now identify the US, CS, UR, and CR as it pertains to the film. The behavior that was trying to be manipulated in this movie was Alexs evil tendencies towards sex and violence. The unconditioned stimulus the government used was the toxins they injected into Alex. This caused an unconditioned response of paralyzing nausea and dry heaving. They paired the dry heaving and nausea with videos of explicit violent sex scenes. There by making violence and sex the c ...