Background

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on March 20, 1904, in Pennsylvania to a lawyer father William and his wife Grace. He had a comfortable childhood and loved to invent things.

Education

Burrhus dreamed of becoming a writer and attended Hamilton College in New York with this goal in mind. However, he could not fit in at the college due to his intellectual attitude. He completed his B. A. in English literature in 1926. He then went to Harvard University where he obtained a Ph. D. in psychology.

Career

In 1936 Burrhus began teaching at the University of Minnesota. In Skinner's first book, Behavior of Organisms (1938), he "clung doggedly to the term reflex, thus allowing his immediate psychological roots in classical or early behaviorism." A Guggenheim fellowship enabled him to begin writing Verbal Behavior in 1941. He continued on the fellowship through 1945, finishing most of the manuscript. In 1947 he gave a course at Columbia University and the William James Lecture at Harvard, both based on Verbal Behavior, which, however, he put off publishing for 20 years. Walden Two (1948) described his notions on a feasible design for (utopian) community living.

In 1954 Skinner became chairman of the Department of Psychology at Indiana University and published "Are Theories of Learning Necessary?" Conferences begun at Indiana culminated in 1958 in a new journal, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

Toward the end of World War II, with the birth of his second child, Skinner built an air crib for baby care in which the infant, instead of staying in a tight crib wrapped in layers of cloth, can lie with only a diaper on in an enclosed space which is temperature-controlled and plastic-sheeted, thus allowing the child greater freedom of movement. Many babies are now raised in this way.

During the 1950, stimulated by an interest in psychopharmacology, Skinner studied operant behavior of psychotics at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, Massachussets. For his systematic experiments on this type of behavior, Skinner designed his famous Skinner box, a compartment in which a rat, by pressing a bar, learns to repeat the act because each time he does so a pellet of food is received as a reward. Skinner demonstrated that when these reinforcements accompany or follow certain specific behavior, learning occurs in the experimental animal. Such a response, reinforced by food or other means, is called operant behavior and is distinguished from respondent behavior, which is elicited by a stimulus.

Skinner's main concern in studying operant behavior and its parameters was neither "with the causal continuity between stimulus and response, nor with the intervening variables, but simply with the correlation between stimulus (S) and response (R)."

Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (1957), while omitting the citation of experimental evidence for its assertions, gives a highly objective functional account of language, with the basic unit of analysis being the verbal operant. He explains how differential social reinforcement from other members of the speech community forms, strengthens, or weakens dependency relations between stimulus variables and verbal responses. Included also are discussions of how listener "belief" is fortified by reinforced responses to a speaker's words; how the metaphorical expressions of a speaker reflect the kinds of stimuli which control his behavior; how and why it is that we cease verbalizing; suggestions regarding the nature of aphasia; and logical and scientific verbal behavior. In the book In Schedules of Reinforcement (1957) Skinner and his coauthors reported on a research program that was "designed to evaluate the extent to which an organism's own behavior enters into the determination of its subsequent behavior." They demonstrated that response rates, temporal patterns of rates, and patterning of rate in the temporal vicinity of the reinforcer are dependent upon the schedule of reinforcement. No detailed quantitative laws emerge, however, from their 70, 000 hours of data gathering. Schedules is suggestive regarding the power of the operant as a tool to investigate psychopharmacological and neurophysiological problems.

Critics of operationism maintained that it disregarded problems such as motives, personality, thought, and purpose or greatly diminished their relevance or importance. Although Skinner dealt with complex psychological problems, his mode of treatment of these problems was criticized as having been seriously limited. His basic behaviorist viewpoint itself has been questioned recently, in part because it rejects consciousness. The concept of consciousness cannot be omitted from psychology without a serious loss in explaining much that man does-since the viewpoint is completely indifferent to introspection.

Burrhus left behind many distinctive awards and achievements. Skinner continued to write throughout his later years, authoring such works as Enjoy Old Age (1983), Upon Further Reflection (1986), and Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior.

Achievements

• Skinner developed behavior analysis, the philosophy of that science he called radical behaviorism, and founded a school of experimental research psychology - the experimental analysis of behavior. He imagined the application of his ideas to the design of a human community in his utopian novel, Walden Two, and his analysis of human behavior culminated in his work, Verbal Behavior.
  
  He received a gold medal from the American Psychological Foundation in 1971.
  
  He was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Psychology Association for his tremendous contribution to the field of psychology in 1990.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Beyond Freedom and Dignity
  • Psychology Classics: Superstition in the Pigeon
  • About Behaviorism
  • Walden Two
  • Enjoy Old Age: A Practical Guide
  • Science And Human Behavior
  • Verbal Behavior

Religion

He became an atheist at a young age.

Politics

Skinner's political writings emphasized his hopes that an effective and human science of behavioral control a technology of human behavior could help with problems as yet unsolved and often aggravated by advances in technology such as the atomic bomb. Indeed, one of Skinner's goals was to prevent humanity from destroying itself. He saw political activity as the use of aversive or non-aversive means to control a population.

Views

Skinner acknowledged Roger Bacon as an influence on his thinking and formulating. Skinner said that he emulated him because Bacon rejected verbal authority; studied and asked questions of phenomena rather than of those who had studied the phenomena; classified in order to reveal properties; recognized that experimentation included all contingencies, whereas mere observation overstresses stimuli; and realized that if nature can be commanded, it must also be obeyed.

Quotations: "A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying."

"A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment."

"The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience."

Connections

Burrhus married Yvonne Blue in 1936. The couple had two daughters, Julie and Deborah. His daughter Julie is an author and educator.

Father:

William

Mother:

Grace Skinner

Spouse:

Yvonne Blue

child:

Julie

child:

Deborah

sibling:

Edward

References

• B. F. Skinner: The Man and His Ideas
• B.f. Skinner: A Life