B.F. Skinner

B.F. Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviourist, and social philosopher who developed the theory of the operant conditioning. He was one of the most influential of the psychologists of the twentieth century.

Early Life and Education

Skinner was born in 1904 in Susquehanna Depot, Pennsylvania. His father was a lawyer and the family was of the modest means.

He studied English literature at Hamilton College and hoped to become a writer. He abandoned the literary ambition and turned to the psychology.

He took his doctorate at Harvard University in 1931. He taught at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University before returning to Harvard.

The Operant Conditioning

Skinner developed the theory of the operant conditioning. He showed that the behaviour is shaped by its consequences.

He designed the experimental chamber known as the Skinner box. The apparatus allowed the precise control of the environment and the measurement of the behaviour.

He distinguished the operant behaviour from the respondent behaviour. The operant behaviour is controlled by the reinforcement and the punishment.

He developed the concept of the schedules of the reinforcement. The schedules determine the rate and the pattern of the behaviour.

The Social Philosophy

Skinner wrote the novel Walden Two in 1948. The novel describes a utopian community based on the behavioural engineering.

He wrote the book Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971. The book argues for the scientific control of the behaviour.

He developed the teaching machines and the programmed instruction. The methods influenced the development of the education technology.

He argued that the behaviour could be explained without the reference to the inner states. The radical behaviourism became his position.

The Legacy

Skinner received the National Medal of Science in 1968 and the gold medal of the American Psychological Association. He was one of the most cited of the psychologists.

He died in 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The theory of the operant conditioning remains central to the psychology.

His work influenced the education and the therapy and the animal training. The applied behaviour analysis developed from his ideas.

He is regarded as one of the most important and the most controversial of the psychologists. The debate over the behaviourism continues.

Operant Behaviour and the Skinner Box

The central innovation of Skinner's system is the distinction between respondent behaviour, which is elicited by a known stimulus, and operant behaviour, which is emitted by the organism and controlled by its consequences. Operants are defined by their effects on the environment rather than by the stimuli that precede them, and they are strengthened or weakened by the reinforcement that follows. To study them precisely, Skinner built the operant conditioning chamber, universally known as the Skinner box, which records an animal's rate of responding automatically and without the presence of an experimenter.

Skinner showed that the schedule of reinforcement is as important as the reinforcement itself. Continuous reinforcement produces rapid learning that extinguishes quickly, whereas intermittent schedules — fixed ratio, variable ratio, fixed interval and variable interval — generate distinctive response patterns with differing resistance to extinction. The variable-ratio schedule, which rewards an unpredictable number of responses, produces the highest and steadiest rates of all and explains the persistence of gambling and other forms of compulsive behaviour.

In The Behavior of Organisms (1938), Skinner presented the results of years of such work as the foundation of a new science. He argued that a small number of principles — reinforcement, punishment, extinction and stimulus control — suffice to describe the behaviour of any organism, and he coined the term operant to mark the departure from the Pavlovian tradition. Over the following decades his empirical programme produced thousands of carefully controlled studies.

Applied Behaviour Analysis

Skinner's principles were rapidly applied in practical settings. During the Second World War he trained pigeons to guide missiles by pecking at a target image, a project he pursued on his own initiative. He also invented the air crib, a temperature- and humidity-controlled sleeping compartment for infants, which critics misunderstood as an experiment in child-rearing. His novel Walden Two (1948) described a fictional community governed by positive reinforcement, and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) provoked wide public debate by arguing that behavioural science could be used deliberately to design better cultures.

The most consequential application came in clinical and educational settings. In the 1960s Ivar Lovaas and others used operant methods to teach language and social skills to autistic children, an approach that led to the discipline of applied behaviour analysis. Teaching machines and programmed instruction, which Skinner advocated from the 1950s, anticipated modern computer-assisted learning and the idea of immediate feedback. Token economies, used in hospitals, schools and prisons, translate his schedules of reinforcement into institutional practice.

Behaviour modification and its modern descendant, applied behaviour analysis, remain among the most rigorously validated interventions in psychology. Controlled studies show that intensive early behavioural intervention produces measurable gains in language and adaptive functioning for many children with developmental disabilities. Although controversy surrounds the intensity and ethics of some programmes, the methodological contribution — the functional analysis of behaviour in terms of its antecedents and consequences — is universally accepted.

Radical Behaviourism and Legacy

Skinner's radical behaviourism is a philosophical position as much as a research programme. He denied that private events such as thoughts or feelings are causes of behaviour, describing them instead as covert responses subject to the same laws as overt action. Inner states, he argued, are not explanations but more behaviour to be explained. This stance brought him into sustained conflict with cognitive psychologists, who insisted that internal representations mediate learning; Skinner replied that such fictions only postpone the search for environmental causes.

Separately, Skinner rejected the concept of free will as a prescientific illusion, holding that choice is itself a form of behaviour determined by its reinforcement history. This claim, more than any technical aspect of his work, fuelled public controversy and made him the most famous and most criticised psychologist of the twentieth century. Many humanists saw in his philosophy a threat to personal dignity, while his defenders pointed out that he advocated positive reinforcement precisely to reduce coercion and punishment.

Whatever the merits of the philosophical dispute, Skinner's empirical legacy is secure. He was a prolific author of books and scientific papers, received the National Medal of Science, and was one of the most cited psychologists of his era. His concepts of reinforcement, shaping, chaining and schedules of reinforcement are embedded in behaviour therapy, education, and economics through behavioural economics and the concept of reinforcement learning in artificial intelligence.

See also

• Operant conditioning
• Behaviourism
• Reinforcement
• Applied behaviour analysis