Information about B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990), Ph.D. was a highly influential American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform ^[1][2][3][4] and poet.^[5] He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until retirement in 1974.^[6] He invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research psychology — the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in interest experimentally and in applied settings.^[7] He discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement.^{[8] [9]} In a recent survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.^[10] He was an incredibly prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles.^{[11] [12]}

Biography

Skinner was born on March 20 1904, in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to Grace and Moses Skinner. His father was a lawyer. His brother Edward, two and a half years his junior, died at sixteen of a cerebral aneurysm.

He attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. While attending, he joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, and eventually received a B.A in English literature in 1926. After graduation, he spent a year at his parents' home in Scranton, attempting to become a writer of fiction. But he soon became disillusioned with his literary skills and concluded that he had little world experience, and no strong personal perspective from which to write. During this time, which Skinner later called "the dark year," he chanced upon a copy of Bertrand Russell's recently published book An Outline of Philosophy, in which Russell discusses the behaviorist philosophy of psychologist John B. Watson. At the time, Skinner had begun to take more interest in the actions and behaviors of those around him, and some of his short stories had taken a "psychological" slant. He decided to abandon literature and seek admission as a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University. While a graduate student, he invented the operant conditioning chamber and cumulative recorder, developed the rate of response as a critical dependent variable in psychological research, and developed a powerful, inductive, data-driven method of experimental research.

Skinner received a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1931 and remained at that institution as a researcher until 1936. He then taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University, where he was chair of the Psychology Department from 1946-1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained there for the rest of his career.

In 1936 Skinner married Yvonne Blue (1911-1997); the couple had two daughters, Julie (m. Vargas) and Deborah (m. Buzan).

Skinner was granted numerous awards in his lifetime. In 1968, he received the National Medal of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson. Three years later, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation, and in 1972, he was given the Humanist of the Year Award of the American Humanist Association. Just eight days before his death, he received the first Citation for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology by the American Psychological Association (Epstein, 1997).

He died of leukemia and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Theory

He conducted pioneering work in psychology and innovated his own school of Radical Behaviorism, which seeks to understand behavior as a function of environmental histories of reinforcing consequences. He is known as the inventor of the operant conditioning chamber (or Skinner box), a research tool used to examine the orderly relations of the behavior of organisms (such as rats, pigeons and humans) to their environment. He is the author of Walden Two, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Verbal Behavior and numerous other books and articles. He discovered what is now called operant conditioning and articulated the now widely accepted term reinforcement as a scientific principle of behavior. His position reflects the extension of the influence of physicist Ernst Mach's The Science of Mechanics to the subject of psychology.^[13] Skinner's pioneering research reflected the dual influence of whole organism research in Ivan Pavlov and Jacques Loeb.^[14]

Operant Conditioning Chamber

While at Harvard, B. F. Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber to measure organismic responses and their orderly interactions with the environment. This device was an example of his lifelong ability to design and invent useful devices, which included whimsical devices in his childhood ^[15] to the cumulative recorder to measure the rate of response of organisms in an operant chamber. Even in old age, Skinner invented a Thinking Aid to assist in writing.^[16]

Radical Behaviorism

Finding the Behaviorism of his time to be problematic, Skinner branched off his own version he called Radical Behaviorism^[17] which unlike methodological behaviorism did not require truth by consensus so it could accept private events such as thinking, perception and emotion in its account. Also, unlike all of the other Behaviorisms - Tolman, Hull, Clark and others - Skinner's version radically rejected mediating constructs and the hypothetico-deductive method, ^[18][13] instead offering a strongly inductive, data driven approach that has proven to be successful in dozens of areas from behavioral pharmacology to language therapy in the developmentally delayed.

Verbal Behavior

Challenged by Alfred North Whitehead during a casual discussion while at Harvard to provide an account of a randomly provided piece of verbal behavior^[19] Skinner set about attempting to extend his then-new functional, inductive, approach to the complexity of human verbal behavior. Developed over two decades, his work appeared as the culmination of the William James lectures in the book, Verbal Behavior. Chomsky himself conceded that it was the "most careful and thoroughgoing presentation of such speculations" ^[20] as a reason for giving it "a review." After a slow reception, perhaps due to its lack of experimental evidence typical of Skinner's previous work ^[21] Skinner's functional analysis of verbal behavior has seen a resurgence of interest in applied settings.

Walden Two & Beyond Freedom And Dignity

Skinner is popularly known mainly for his books Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Walden Two describes a visit to an imaginary utopian commune in the 1940s United States, where the productivity and happiness of the citizens is far in advance of that in the outside world due to their practice of scientific social planning and the use of operant conditioning in the raising of children.

Walden Two, like Thoreau's Walden, champions a lifestyle that does not support war, foster competition or social strife. It encourages a lifestyle of minimal consumption, rich social relationships, personal happiness, satisfying work and leisure.

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner suggests that a technology of behavior could help make a better society. However, we would have to accept that an autonomous agent was not the driving force for our actions. Skinner offered alternatives to punishment and challenged his readers to use modern technology for more than just war. Instead science might be used to build a better society.

Schedules of Reinforcement

Part of Skinner's analysis of behavior involved not only the power of a single instance of reinforcement, but the effects of particular schedules of reinforcement over time.

Skinner's types of schedules of reinforcement involved: continuous, interval (fixed or variable), and ratio (fixed or variable).

• Continuous reinforcement — constant delivery of reinforcement for an action; every time a specific action was performed the subject instantly and always received a reinforcement. This method is prone to extinction and is very hard to enforce.
• Interval (fixed/variable) reinforcement (Fixed) — reinforcement is set for certain times. (Variable) — times between reinforcement are not set, and often differ.
• Ratio (fixed or variable) reinforcement (Fixed) — deals with a set amount of work needed to be completed before there is reinforcement. (Variable) — amount of work needed for the reinforcement differs from the last.

Political Views

Skinner's political writings emphasized his hopes that an effective and humane science of behavioral control - a technology of human behavior- could help problems unsolved by earlier approaches or aggravated by advances in technology such as the atomic bomb. One of Skinner's stated goals was to prevent humanity from destroying itself ^[22]

Skinner saw the problems of political control not as a battle of domination versus freedom, but as choices of what kinds of control were used for what purposes.^[2] Skinner opposed the use of coercion, punishment and fear and supported the use of positive reinforcement.^[1] good science applied correctly would help society^[2], and we would all be better off if we cooperated with each other peacefully.^[1] Skinner's novel has been described by Skinner as "my New Atlantis" referring to Bacon's utopia. He opposed spanking in the school and wrote a letter to the California Senate that helped lead it to banning spanking.

"When Milton's Satan falls from heaven, he ends in hell. And what does he say to reassure himself? 'Here, at least, we shall be free.' And that, I think, is the fate of the old-fashioned liberal. He's going to be free, but he's going to find himself in hell." – B. F. Skinner (William F. Buckley Jr, "On the Firing Line," 87.)

Air crib

In an effort to help his wife cope with the day to day tasks of child rearing, Skinner - a consummate inventor - thought he might be able to improve upon the standard crib. He invented the 'air-crib' to meet this challenge. An 'air-crib' ^{[24] [25]}(also known as a 'baby tender' or humorously as an 'heir conditioner') is an easily-cleaned, temperature and humidity-controlled box Skinner designed to assist in the raising of babies.

It was one of his more controversial inventions, and was extremely poorly received by the general public due to perceptions of its making child rearing cold and mechanical. It was designed to make the early childcare more simple (by greatly reducing laundry, diaper rash, cradle cap, etc.), while encouraging the baby to be more confident, mobile, comfortable, healthy and therefore less prone to cry. Reportedly it had some success in these goals.^[26] Air-cribs were later commercially manufactured by several companies. Air-cribs of some fashion are still used to this day, and publications continue to dispel myths about, and tout the progressive advantages of Skinner's original.

Urban Legends

One often-repeated but incorrect urban legend claims that Skinner ventured into human experiments by raising his daughter Deborah in a Skinner box (a reference to the Air Crib above), which led to life-long mental illness and a bitter resentment towards her father. Accounts of Deborah's supposed suicide in a bowling alley in Montana even made it to scholarly papers.

In 2004, psychologist and author Lauren Slater published a book, Opening Skinner's Box, which mentioned claims that Deborah Skinner (now Deborah Skinner Buzan) unsuccessfully sued her father for abuse, and later committed suicide. In response, Buzan herself came forward and denounced the story as nothing more than outrageous rumors.^[27] Buzan wrote, "there's the story that after my father 'let me out', I became psychotic. Well, I didn't. That I sued him in a court of law is also untrue. And, contrary to hearsay, I didn't shoot myself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. I have never even been to Billings, Montana."<ref name="snopes" />

This legend might be based on confusion of Skinner's daughter with behaviorist John Watson's granddaughter, Mariette Hartley. Hartley has had some personal problems which she traces to Watson's theories being used in her upbringing.

Superstition in the Pigeon

One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.

– B.F. Skinner, "'Superstition' in the Pigeon," Journal of Experimental Psychology #38, 1947 [1]

Skinner suggested that the pigeons believed that they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one's luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing -- or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

– Ibid

Modern behavioral psychologists have disputed Skinner's "superstition" explanation for the behaviors he recorded. Subsequent research (for instance, by Staddon and Simmelhag in 1971) while finding similar behavior failed to find support for Skinner's "adventitious reinforcement" explanation for it. By looking at the timing of different behaviors within the interval, Staddon and Simmelhag were able to distinguish two classes of behavior: the terminal response, which occurred in anticipation of food, and interim responses, that occurred earlier in the interfood interval and were rarely contiguous with food. Terminal responses seem to reflect classical (rather than operant) conditioning, rather than adventitious reinforcement, guided by a process like that observed in 1968 by Brown and Jenkins in their "autoshaping" procedures. The causation of interim activities (such as the schedule-induced polydipsia seen in a similar situation with rats) also cannot be traced to adventitious reinforcement and its details are still obscure (Staddon, 1977). Eduardo J. Fernandez of the Department of Psychology of Indiana University sought to follow up on Staddon and Simmelhag's debunking of Skinner's hypothesis and to "further contrast superstitious versus functional interpretations of behavior" in pigeons. In a 2004 paper titled "Superstition Re-revisited: An Examination of Niche-Related Mechanisms Underlying Schedule Produced Behavior in Pigeons," he demonstrated that what Skinner had seen as "superstitious" behavior was accounted for by the natural foraging behaviors of the species he used as test subjects.[2]

see also Timberlake & Lucas 1985 ^[28]

Organizational Behavior Management (OBM)

Dr. Thomas F. Gilbert, one of Skinner's Ph.D. students at Harvard, went on to apply Skinnerian theory and findings to improving performance in the world of work. His seminal book is titled Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. This book shows how optimal human performance is a function of a variety of factors which can be categorized as being either: 1) within the Environment (e.g., goal setting, performance feedback, incentives, equipment, organization design and work flow); or 2) within the Individual (e.g., motivation, knowledge, and skills). He goes on to outline an approach to systematically and cost-effectively develop these employee performance support systems to optimize employee and organizational performance. This is an important extension of Professor Skinner's work.

Critics & Criticisms

J.E.R. Staddon

As understood by Skinner, ascribing dignity to individuals involves giving them credit for their actions. To say "Skinner is brilliant" means that Skinner is an originating force. If Skinner's determinist theory is right, he is merely the focus of his environment. He is not an originating force and he had no choice in saying the things he said or doing the things he did. Skinner's environment and genetics both allowed and compelled him to write his book. Similarly, the environment and genetic potentials of the advocates of freedom and dignity cause them to resist the reality that their own activities are deterministically grounded. J. E. R. Staddon (The New Behaviorism, 2001) has argued the compatibilist position, that Skinner's determinism is not in any way contradictory to traditional notions of reward and punishment, as he believed .

Noam Chomsky

Perhaps Skinner's best known critic, Noam Chomsky published his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior soon after it was published.^[20] The review became better known than the book it purported to review.^[5] It has been credited with launching the cognitive movement in psychology and other disciplines.

Chomsky also 'reviewed' Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity utilizing the same basic motifs as his Verbal Behavior review. Among Chomsky's critiques were that Skinner's laboratory work could not be extended to humans, that when it was extended to humans it represented 'scientistic' behavior attempting to emulate science but which was not scientific, that Skinner was not a scientist because he rejected the hypothetico-deductive method of theory testing, that Skinner had no science of behavior, and that Skinner's works were highly conducive to justifying or advancing totalitarianism.^[29]

Others

Skinner has often been associated with political and social positions he never espoused and even explicitly objected to ^[30].

Written Works

• The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, 1938. ISBN 1-58390-007-1, ISBN 0-87411-487-X.
• Walden Two, 1948. ISBN 0-02-411510-X.
• Science and Human Behavior, 1953. ISBN 0-02-929040-6.
• Schedules of Reinforcement, with C. B. Ferster, 1957. ISBN 0-13-792309-0.
• Verbal Behavior, 1957. ISBN 1-58390-021-7.
• The Analysis of Behavior: A Program for Self Instruction, with James G. Holland, 1961. This self-instruction book is no longer in print, but the B.F. Skinner Foundation web site has an interactive version. ISBN 0-07-029565-4.
• The Technology of Teaching, 1968.
• Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis, 1969. ISBN 0-390-81280-3.
• Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1971. ISBN 0-394-42555-3.
• About Behaviorism, 1974. ISBN 0-394-49201-3, ISBN 0-394-71618-3.
• Particulars of My Life: Part One of an Autobiography, 1976. ISBN 0-394-40071-2.
• Reflections on Behaviorism and Society, 1978. ISBN 0-13-770057-1.
• The Shaping of a Behaviorist: Part Two of an Autobiography, 1979. ISBN 0-394-50581-6.
• Notebooks, edited by Robert Epstein, 1980. ISBN 0-13-624106-9.
• Skinner for the Classroom, edited by R. Epstein, 1982. ISBN 0-87822-261-8.
• Enjoy Old Age: A Program of Self-Management, with M. E. Vaughan, 1983.
• A Matter of Consequences: Part Three of an Autobiography, 1983. ISBN 0-394-53226-0, ISBN 0-8147-7845-3.
• Upon Further Reflection, 1987. ISBN 0-13-938986-5.
• Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior, 1989. ISBN 0-675-20674-X.
• Cumulative Record: A Selection of Papers, 1959, 1961, 1972 and 1999 as Cumulative Record: Definitive Edition. This book includes a reprint of Skinner's October 1945 Ladies' Home Journal article, "Baby in a Box," Skinner's original, personal account of the much-misrepresented "Baby in a box" device. ISBN 0-87411-969-3 (paperback)

See also

• Applied behavior analysis
• Project Pigeon
• Radical behaviorism
• Shaping (psychology)

Authors On Skinner

• Bjork, D. W. (1993) B.F. Skinner: a life
• Dews, P. B. (Ed.)(1970) Festschrift For B. F. Skinner.New York : Appleton-Century-Crofts.
• Evans, R. I. (1968) B. F. Skinner: the man and his ideas
• Nye, Robert D. (1979) What Is B. F. Skinner Really Saying?. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall.
• Sagal, P. T. (1981) Skinner's Philosophy. Washington, D.C. : University Press of America.
• Smith, D.L. (2002). On Prediction and Control. B.F. Skinner and the Technological Ideal of Science. In W.E. Pickren & D.A. Dewsbury, (Eds.), Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
• Wiener, D. N. (1996) B.F. Skinner: benign anarchist

References

External links

• The Analysis of Behavior: A Program for Self-Instruction, in software (Win32).
• National Academy of Sciences biography.
• The B. F. Skinner Foundation.
• B.F. Skinner profile, NNDB.
• Los Horcones Walden Two Community.
• I was not a lab rat, response by Skinner's daughter about the "baby box."
• Audio Recordings Society for Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Articles by B.F. Skinner

• Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo Type (1935), Journal of General Psychology, 12, 66-77.
• "Superstition" in the Pigeon (1947), Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172.
• Are Theories of Learning Necessary?, Psychological Review, 57, 193-216, 1950.

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