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Taste Judgements: Can We Decrease the Aversion to Chlorinated Water through Classical Conditioning? Jeremy Levine, Vivian Lo, Charlotte Puscasiu, Verenice Palczynski, David Levine, & Dana Carney Overview Babies and adolescents die in developing countries like Uganda every day. One of the causes of early death is bacterial infection caused by the well-water used in villages. Many attempts have been made to encourage villagers to simply drop a chlorine tablet into their well each day but they simply will not. Conventional health messages coupled with a variety of different incentive programs (Luoto, Mahmud, Albert, Luby, Najnin, Unicomb, Levine) and other types of social network interventions (Guiteras, Levine, Luby, Polley, Khatun-e-Jannat, Unicomb) have been used and have failed. After years of failed attempts by researchers such as David Levine (a PI on this proposed project), the failure appears to distill/boil down (pun intended) to the simple fact that chlorinated water tastes unnatural to people who have had no exposure to it. Water supplies in Uganda are not chlorinated as they are in most developed countries. And Ugandans, for example, do not have exposure to swimming in pools of chlorinated water. Chlorine is a novel and aversive stimulus to them. In a branch of psychology, Learning Theory (housed under behaviorism), classical conditioning has been used to decay aversions to gustatory and olfactory stimuli—chlorinated water is aversive in both ways because it has a pungent smell and an aversive taste. Pairing chlorinated water with a positive stimulus *may* have the ability to nudge the previously aversive stimulus toward neutrality. While a long-shot, and a high-risk study, we believe it is worth attempt as no research of which we are aware has paired a labor economist with a psychologist in this way toward the goal of attempting to change the perception of what chlorinated water tastes like. |
