BA: Weaknesses of Pavlov's Research

• Ethical issues - there is a lack of informed consent; the animals cannot consent. Also you have to be careful with the use of animals in research, the dogs were heavily subject to a distressing environment, and they were kept underweight so they would want to eat. So did the costs outweigh the benefits?

  Counter-argument: Aversion Therapy was developed.
• There is extremely low ecological validity in Pavlov's research. This is because the classically conditioning the dogs to associate the sounds of a bell/metronome with food causing them to salivate does not happen in everyday life in humans, therefore we can not generalise to real life scenarios.
• Generalisability

  The classical conditioning theory assumes humans and animals learn in the same way, which could be untrue. However, the existence of the little Albert study proves classical conditioning happens in a similar way in both humans and animals.
• Assumes all behaviour is learnt.