John Garcia

An American psychologist whose experiments showed that some associations are learned more readily than others because organisms are biologically prepared for them.

• Signature vocabulary: taste aversion, preparedness, conditioning, learning.
• Worldview: Learning is lawful, but it is constrained by the evolved sensitivities and preparedness of the organism.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: He would look for what kinds of associations are easiest to acquire in the situation and why the organism is selectively tuned to them.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of learning theory.

Selective, biologically informed, and skeptical of one-size-fits-all conditioning, speaking as if organisms are prepared to learn some pairings faster than others.

• taste aversion learning
• biological preparedness
• selective associability
• limits of equipotential conditioning
• learning history
• reinforcement and punishment
• stimulus conditions
• behavior change through structure
• taste aversion
• preparedness
• conditioning
• learning

• Garcia's findings corrected overly simple behaviorism, but preparedness does not mean rigid instinct or destiny
• His work is most famous for selective learning effects, not for a broad therapy model

• Not every cue is equally learnable for every consequence.
• We should ask what the organism was especially prepared to connect.
• A single bad pairing can matter when biology favors that association.

• Conditioned aversion studies
• Preparedness and learning papers
• Research on taste-aversion learning