http://www.wideopendoors.net/teaching/behaviorism.html
wideopendoors.net

Behaviorism is an approach to psychology based on the proposition that behavior can be researched scientifically without recourse to inner mental states. It is a form of materialism, denying any independent significance for mind. Its significance for psychological treatment has been profound, making it one of the pillars of pharmacological therapy.

One of the assumptions of behaviorist thought is that free will is illusory, and that all behaviour is determined by the environment either through association or reinforcement.

The behaviorist school of thought ran concurrent with the psychoanalysis movement in psychology in the 20th century. Its main influences were Ivan Pavlov, who investigated classical conditioning, John B. Watson (1878-1958) who rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to experimental laboratory methods. B.F. Skinner, sought to give ethical grounding to behaviorism, relating it to pragmatism.

Within that broad approach, there are different emphases. Some behaviorists argue simply that the observation of behavior is the best or most convenient way of investigating psychological and mental processes. Others believe that it is in fact the only way of investigating such processes, while still others argue that behavior itself is the only appropriate subject of psychology, and that common psychological terms (belief, goals, etc.) have no referents and/or only refer to behavior. Those taking this point of view sometimes refer to their field of study as behavior analysis or behavioral science rather than psychology.

Versions

There is no generally agreed classification, and some would add to or modify this list.

Classical: The behaviorism of Watson; the objective study of behavior; no mental life, no internal states; thought is covert speech. Methodological: The objective study of third-person behavior; the data of psychology must be inter-subjectively verifiable; no theoretical prescriptions. Has been absorbed into general experimental and cognitive psychology. Two popular subtypes are Neo-: Hullian and post-Hullian, theoretical, group data, not dynamic, physiological, and Purposive: Tolman’s behavioristic anticipation of cognitive psychology. Radical: Skinnerian behaviorism; includes behavioral approach to ‘mental life;’ not mechanistic; internal states not permitted. Teleological: Post-Skinnerian, purposive, close to microeconomics. Theoretical: Post-Skinnerian, accepts internal states (the skin makes a difference); dynamic, but eclectic in choice of theoretical structures, emphasizes parsimony.
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J. B. Watson

Early in the 20th century, John B. Watson argued in his book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist for the value of a psychology which concerned itself with behavior in and of itself, not as a method of studying consciousness. This was a substantial break from the structuralist psychology of the time, which used the method of introspection and considered the study of behavior valueless. Watson, in contrast, studied the adjustment of organisms to their environments, more specifically the particular stimuli leading organisms to make their responses. Most of Watson’s work was comparative, i.e., he studied the behavior of animals. Watson’s approach was much influenced by the work of Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who had stumbled upon the phenomenon of classical conditioning (learned reflexes) in his study of the digestive system of the dog, and subsequently investigated the phenomena in detail. Watson’s approach emphasized physiology and the role of stimuli in producing conditioned responses – assimilating most or all function to reflex. For this reason, Watson may be described as an S-R (stimulus-response) psychologist.
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Methodological behaviorism

Watson’s behaviorist manifesto persuaded most academic researchers in experimental psychology of the importance of studying behavior. In the field of comparative psychology in particular, it was consistent with the warning note that had been struck by Lloyd Morgan’s canon, against some of the more anthropomorphic work such as that of George Romanes, in which mental states had been freely attributed to animals. It was eagerly seized on by researchers such as Edward L. Thorndike (who had been studying cats’ abilities to escape from puzzle boxes). However, most psychologists took up a position that is now called methodological behaviorism: they acknowledged that behavior was either the only or the easiest method of observation in psychology, but held that it could be used to draw conclusions about mental states. Among well-known twentieth-century behaviorists taking this kind of position were Clark L. Hull, who described his position as neo-behaviorism, and Edward C. Tolman, who developed much of what would later become the cognitivist program. Tolman argued that rats constructed cognitive maps of the mazes they learned even in the absence of reward, and that the connection between stimulus and response (S->R) was mediated by a third term – the organism (S->O->R). His approach has been called, among other things, purposive behaviorism.

Methodological behaviorism remains the position of most experimental psychologists today, including the vast majority of those who work in cognitive psychology – so long as behavior is defined as including speech, at least non-introspective speech. With the rise of interest in animal cognition since the 1980s, and the more unorthodox views of Donald Griffin among others, mentalistic language including discussion of consciousness is increasingly used even in discussion of animal psychology, in both comparative psychology and ethology; however this is in no way inconsistent with the position of methodological behaviorism.
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Politics

Behaviorism relates to a school of politics that developed in the 50s and 60s in the USA. This school represented a revolt against institutional practices in the study of politics and called for political analysis to be modeled upon the natural sciences. That is to say that only information that could be quantified and tested empirically could be regarded as ‘true’ and that other normative concepts such as ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ should be rejected as they are not falsifiable. This is a version of what has been called scientific empiricism, the view that all beliefs can, at least in principle, be proved scientifically. Skinner has been roundly criticized for his political/social pronouncements, which many perceive as based on serious philosophical errors. His recommendations thus reflect not science, but his own covert preferences.

Behaviourism has been criticised within politics as it threatens to reduce the discipline of political analysis to little more than the study of voting and the behaviour of legislatures. A virtual obsession with the observation of data, although providing interesting findings in these fields deprives the field of politics of other important viewpoints.

Other criticisms have been leveled at the behaviorist claims to be Value Free. This is impossible (it is argued) because every theory is tainted with an ideological premise that led to its formation in the first place and subsequently the observable facts are studied for a reason. An example of this ‘value bias’ would be that through this discipline the term ‘democracy’ has become the competition between elites for election ‘a la’ the western conception rather than an essentially contested term concerning literally rule by the people (the demos). In this manner behaviourism is inherently biased and reduces the scope of political analysis. Nevertheless it has still managed to introduce a new scientific rigour into political analysis and bequeathed a wealth of new information.
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B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism

B.F. Skinner, who carried out experimental work mainly in comparative psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s, but remained behaviorism’s best known theorist and exponent virtually until his death in 1990, developed a distinct kind of behaviorist philosophy, which came to be called radical behaviorism. He also claimed to have found a new version of psychological science, which he called behavior analysis or the experimental analysis of behavior.
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Definition

Skinner was influential in defining radical behaviorism, a philosophy codifying the basis of his school of research (named the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, or EAB.) While EAB differs from other approaches to behavioral research on numerous methodological and theoretical points, radical behaviorism departs from methodological behaviorism most notably in accepting treatment of feelings, states of mind and introspection as existent and scientifically treatable. This is done by identifying them as something non-dualistic, and here Skinner takes a divide-and-conquer approach, with some instances being identified with bodily conditions or behavior, and others getting a more extended ‘analysis’ in terms of behavior. However, radical behaviorism stops short of identifying feelings as causes of behavior. Among other points of difference were a rejection of the reflex as a model of all behavior and a defense of a science of behavior complementary to but independent of physiology.
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Experimental and conceptual innovations

This essentially philosophical position gained strength from the success of Skinner’s early experimental work with rats and pigeons, summarised in his books The Behavior of Organisms (1938) and Schedules of Reinforcement (1957, with C. B. Ferster). Of particular importance was his concept of the operant response, of which the canonical example was the rat’s lever-press. In contrast with the idea of a physiological or reflex response, an operant is a class of structurally distinct but functionally equivalent responses. For example, while a rat might press a lever with its left paw or its right paw or its tail, all of these responses operate on the world in the same way and have a common consequence. Operants are often thought of as species of responses, where the individuals differ but the class coheres in its function–shared consequences with operants and reproductive success with species. This is a clear distinction between Skinner’s theory and S-R theory.

Skinner’s empirical work expanded on earlier research on trial-and-error learning by researchers such as Thorndike and Guthrie with both conceptual reformulations – Thorndike’s notion of a stimulus-response ‘association’ or ‘connection’ was abandoned – and methodological ones – the use of the ‘free operant’, so called because the animal was now permitted to respond at its own rate rather than in a series of trials determined by the experimenter procedures. With this method, Skinner carried out substantial experimental work on the effects of different schedules and rates of reinforcement on the rates of operant responses made by rats and pigeons. He achieved remarkable success in training animals to perform unexpected responses, and to emit large numbers of responses, and to demonstrate many empirical regularities at the purely behavioural level. This lent some credibility to his conceptual analysis.
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Relation to language

As Skinner turned from experimental work to concentrate on the philosophical underpinnings of a science of behavior, his attention naturally turned to human language. His book Verbal Behavior (1957) laid out a vocabulary and theory for functional analysis of verbal behavior. This was famously attacked by the linguist Noam Chomsky, who presented arguments for the bankruptcy of Skinner’s approach in the domain of language and in general. Skinner did not rebut the review, later saying that it was clear to him that Chomsky had not read his book (though subsequent rebuttals have been provided by Kenneth MacCorquodale and David Palmer, among others). Skinner’s supporters claim Chomsky’s consideration of the approach was superficial in several respects, but the appropriate subject for a study of language was a major point of disagreement. Chomsky (like many linguists) emphasized the structural properties of behavior, while Skinner emphasized its controlling variables.

What was important for a behaviorist analysis of human behavior was not language acquisition so much as the interaction between language and overt behavior. In an essay republished in his 1969 book Contingencies of Reinforcement, Skinner took the view that humans could construct linguistic stimuli that would then acquire control over their behavior in the same way that external stimuli could. The possibility of such instructional control over behavior meant that contingencies of reinforcement would not always produce the same effects on human behavior as they reliably do in other animals. The focus of a radical behaviorist analysis of human behavior therefore shifted to an attempt to understand the interaction between instructional control and contingency control, and also to understand the behavioral processes that determine what instructions are constructed and what control they acquire over behavior. Important figures in this effort have been A. Charles Catania, C. Fergus Lowe, and Steven C. Hayes.
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Molar versus molecular behaviorism

Skinner’s view of behavior is most often characterized as a “molecular” view of behavior, that is each behavior can be decomposed in atomistic parts or molecules. This view is inaccurate when one considers his complete description of behavior as delineated in the 1981 article, “Selection by Consequences” and many other works. Skinner claims that a complete account of behavior involves an understanding of selection history at three levels: biology (the natural selection or phylogeny of the animal); behavior (the reinforcement history or ontogeny of the behavioral repertoire of the animal); and for some species, culture (the cultural practices of the social group to which the animal belongs). This whole organism, with all those histories, then interacts with its environment. He often described even his own behavior as a product of his phylogenetic history, his reinforcement history (which includes the learning of cultural practices)interacting with the environment at the moment. Molar behaviorists (e.g. Howard Rachlin) argue that behavior can not be understood by focusing on events in the moment. That is, they argue that a behavior can be understood best in terms of the ultimate cause of history and that molecular behaviorist are committing a fallacy by inventing a ficticious proximal cause for behavior. Molar behaviorists argue that standard molecular constructs such as “associative strength” are such fictitious proximal causes that simply take the place of molar variables such as rate of reinforcement. Thus, a molar behaviorist would define a behavior such as loving someone as a exhibiting a pattern of loving behavior over time, there is no known proximal cause of loving behavior (i.e. love) only a history of behaviors (of which the current behavior might be an example of) that can be summarized as love.

Recent experimental work (see The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes– 2004 and later) shows quite clearly that behavior is affected both by molar variables (i.e., average rates of reinforcement) and molecular ones (e.g., time, preceding responses). What is needed is an understanding of the real-time dynamics of operant behavior, which will involve processes at both short and long time scales.
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Behaviorism in philosophy

Behaviorism is both a psychological movement and a philosophy. The basic premise of radical behaviorism is that the study of behavior should be a natural science, such as chemistry or physics, without any reference to hypothetical inner states of organisms. Other varieties, such as theoretical behaviorism, permit internal states, but do not require them to be mental or have any relation to subjective experience. Behaviorism takes a functional view of behavior.

There are points of view within analytic philosophy that have called themselves, or have been called by others, behaviorist. In logical behaviorism (as held, e.g., by Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel), psychological statements meant their verification conditions, which consisted of performed overt behavior. W. V. Quine made use of a variety of behaviorism, influenced by some of Skinner’s ideas, in his own work on language. Gilbert Ryle defended a distinct strain of philosophical behaviorism, sketched in his book The Concept of Mind. Ryle’s central claim was that instances of dualism frequently represented ‘category mistakes,’ and hence that they were really misunderstandings of the use of ordinary language.

It is sometimes argued that Ludwig Wittgenstein defended a behaviorist position, and there are important areas of overlap between his philosophy, logical behaviorism, and radical behaviorism (e.g., the beetle in a box argument). However, Wittgenstein was not a behaviorist, and his style of writing is sufficiently elliptical to admit of a range of interpretations. Mathematician Alan Turing is also sometimes considered a behaviorist, but he himself did not make this identification.
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Behaviorists

Leading developers of behaviorism (in rough chronological order):

* C. Lloyd Morgan
* Ivan Pavlov
* Edward Thorndike
* John B. Watson
* Edward C. Tolman
* Clark L. Hull

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0497_DeMar_-_Behaviorism.html
forerunner.com
By Gary DeMar

Behaviorism originated with the work of John B. Watson, an American psychologist. Watson claimed that psychology was not concerned with the mind or with human consciousness. Instead, psychology would be concerned only with behavior. In this way, men could be studied objectively, like rats and apes.

Watson’s work was based on the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who had studied animals’ responses to conditioning. In Pavlov’s best-known experiment, he rang a bell as he fed some dogs several meals. Each time the dogs heard the bell they knew that a meal was coming, and they would begin to salivate. Pavlov then rang the bell without bringing food, but the dogs still salivated. They had been “conditioned” to salivate at the sound of a bell. Pavlov believed, as Watson was later to emphasize, that humans react to stimuli in the same way.

Behaviorism is associated today with the name of B.F. Skinner, who made his reputation by testing Watson’s theories in the laboratory. Skinner’s studies led him to reject Watson’s almost exclusive emphasis on reflexes and conditioning. People respond to their environment, he argued, but they also operate on the environment to produce certain consequences.

Skinner developed the theory of “operant conditioning,” the idea that we behave the way we do because this kind of behavior has had certain consequences in the past. For example, if your girlfriend gives you a kiss when you give her flowers, you will be likely to give her flowers when you want a kiss. You will be acting in expectation of a certain reward. Like Watson, however, Skinner denied that the mind or feelings play any part in determining behavior. Instead, our experience of reinforcements determines our behavior.

Behaviorism originated in the field of psychology, but it has had a much wider influence. Its concepts and methods are used in education, and many education courses at college are based on the same assumptions about man as behaviorism. Behaviorism has infiltrated sociology, in the form of sociobiology, the belief that moral values are rooted in biology. What are the presuppositions of behaviorism?

1. Behaviorism is naturalistic. This means that the material world is the ultimate reality, and everything can be explained in terms of natural laws. Man has no soul and no mind, only a brain that responds to external stimuli.

2. Behaviorism teaches that man is nothing more than a machine that responds to conditioning. One writer has summarized behaviorism in this way: “The central tenet of behaviorism is that thoughts, feelings, and intentions, mental processes all, do not determine what we do. Our behavior is the product of our conditioning. We are biological machines and do not consciously act; rather we react to stimuli.“1

The idea that men are “biological machines” whose minds do not have any influence on their actions is contrary to the biblical view that man is the very image of God – the image of a creative, planning, thinking God. In fact, Skinner goes so far as to say that the mind and mental processes are “metaphors and fictions” and that “behavior is simply part of the biology of the organism.“2 Skinner also recognizes that his view strips man of his “freedom and dignity,” but insists that man as a spiritual being does not exist.

3. Consistently, behaviorism teaches that we are not responsible for our actions. If we are mere machines, without minds or souls, reacting to stimuli and operating on our environment to attain certain ends, then anything we do is inevitable. Sociobiology, a type of behaviorism, compares man to a computer: Garbage in, garbage out.

This also conflicts with a Christian worldview. Our past experiences and our environment do affect the way we act, of course, but these factors cannot account for everything we do. The Bible teaches that we are basically covenantal creatures, not biological creatures. Our nearest environment is God Himself, and we respond most fundamentally to Him. We respond either in obedience to or rebellion against His Word.

4. Behaviorism is manipulative. It seeks not merely to understand human behavior, but to predict and control it. From his theories, Skinner developed the idea of “shaping.” By controlling rewards and punishments, you can shape the behavior of another person.

As a psychiatrist, one of Skinner’s goals is to shape his patients’ behavior so that he or she will react in more socially acceptable ways. Skinner is quite clear that his theories should be used to guide behavior: “The experimental analysis of behavior has led to an effective technology, applicable to education, psychotherapy, and the design of cultural practices in general, which will be more effective when it is not competing with practices that have had the unwarranted support of mentalistic theories.“3

In other words, Skinner wants behaviorism to be the basis for manipulating patients, students, and whole societies.

The obvious questions, of course, are: Who will use the tools? Who will pull the strings? Who will manipulate the technology? No doubt, Skinner would say that only someone trained in behavioral theory and practice would be qualified to “shape” the behavior of other persons. But this is contrary to the biblical view, which commands us to love our neighbor, not to manipulate him.

In summary, the ethical consequences of behaviorism are great. Man is stripped of his responsibility, freedom, and dignity, and is reduced to a purely biological being, to be “shaped” by those who are able to use the tools of behaviorism effectively.

1 David Cohen, “Behaviorism,” in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Richard L. Gregory, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 71.
2 B.F. Skinner, “Skinner on Behaviorism,” in Ibid., p. 75.
3 Ibid.

Excerpt used from Surviving College Successfully: A Complete Manual for the Rigors of Academic Combat by Gary DeMar, 1988 by Primero Resources, used by permission of Wolgemuth & Hyatt Publishers, Inc. Available from your local Christian bookstore.

http://www.behavior.org/animals/index.cfm?page=http%3A//www.behavior.org/animals/animals_worlds_first.cfm
behavior.org
Gail B. Peterson

Last summer I told the story of B.F. Skinner’s discovery of shaping (Peterson, 2000). This summer I have a follow-up story about the first photographic demonstration of shaping to the American public and, indeed, to the English-speaking people of the world at large. Included here are some pictures which, to my knowledge, have appeared only once before, almost a half-century ago, in LOOK magazine. I suspect that there are few people on the planet today under the age of 50 who have seen these pictures, and probably very few over 50 who have seen them (or remember having seen them). But what I hope will be found of greater interest is the story behind these pictures and the glimpse it gives us of B.F. Skinner’s bold ingenuity and downright good luck.

Let me begin by giving a brief recap of last summer’s story. It appears that none of the operant behavior Skinner had so carefully studied and written about prior to 1943 had been hand-shaped. The lever pressing by rats described in The Behavior of Organisms (Skinner, 1938) involved no hand-shaping, nor had hand-shaping been used in training the behavior chain performed by the celebrated Pliny (Life magazine, 1937). Although Skinner had built, programmed, and adjusted the equipment by hand, as the animal behaved in the experimental space, the consequences of its behavior were delivered with no hands, being totally controlled by the apparatus instead.

As noted in the earlier article, Skinner clearly had a pretty good hunch, very early on, that new and elaborate forms of behavior could be effectively brought out or “differentiated” from even the most inert original behavioral material by an astute human observer who hand-actuated reinforcement according to the method of successive approximations.

Nevertheless, he evidently never actually tried it until one day in 1943 on the top floor of a flour mill near downtown Minneapolis. The behavior shaped that day was even more unlikely than the geographic location: Skinner, with the help of grad students Keller Breland and Norman Guttman, shaped a pigeon to bowl. The pigeon was trained to swat a little wooden bowling ball with its beak, propelling it down a miniature bowling alley into some tiny bowling pins. As strange as it may sound, the successful hand-shaping of this behavior was a genuine eureka experience for Skinner and his students. Skinner refers to it repeatedly in his memoirs and autobiographies as a very illuminating moment in his career (cf., Skinner, 1958, 1972, 1979).

Why was the discovery of hand-shaping so important? It was important to Skinner at the time, in my opinion, because of the impact it had on his thinking about social behavior, human social behavior in particular, and especially human verbal behavior. But putting theoretical issues aside, history has shown the discovery of hand-shaping to be of monumental practical significance because of the impact it has had on the actual practices of people who need or want to change behavior. It was Skinner’s shaping that pigeon to bowl that got the ball rolling, if you will, in our modern day fields of Applied Behavior Analysis (cf., Cooper, Heron, & Heward, 1990; Chance, 1999), behavior modification (cf., Kazdin, 2000; Martin & Pear, 1996; Sarafino, 2000), biofeedback (cf., Olton & Noonberg, 1980; Schwartz, 1995), Precision Teaching (cf., Lindsley, 1971, 1972, 1990, 1992), performance management (cf., Daniels, 2000, 2001), and all the other practical applications of operant conditioning principles. And though it took 40 or 50 years to catch hold, the current revolution we are seeing in the field of practical animal training can also be traced directly to that fateful day in 1943 (cf., Breland & Breland, 1951, 1966; Donaldson, 1996; Pryor, 1994, 1995, 1999; Ramirez, 1999; Reid, 1996).

Throughout his life and career, B.F. Skinner was a man of great self-confidence, with strong personal convictions about the essential correctness of his view on the determinants of behavior. He was so sure of himself and his views, in fact, that he would occasionally give rather glib accounts that, frankly, may have gone a bit beyond the established facts of the matter. I alluded to an example of this above: he described, quite convincingly, the process of hand-shaping several years before he or anyone else had actually ever done it. In his important 1937 “Reply to Konorski and Miller” paper, Skinner gave the distinct impression that he had hand-shaped rats to lever press, an observation which was of central theoretical significance to the point at issue in that historic academic exchange. However, in discussing the matter some 40 years later, Skinner, to his everlasting credit, came clean and fessed up that he had not actually ever shaped lever pressing that way, but “I was sure it could be done” (Skinner, 1979, p. 185). Thus, paragon of empirical science virtue though he most definitely was, this “Reply to K & M” episode shows that he was not above venturing beyond the strict empirical facts from time to time, sticking his theoretical neck out a little and engaging in flat-out speculation – - but doing it in a way that didn’t sound the least bit like speculation.1 He appears to have done a similar thing again in his 1951 Scientific American article on “How to Teach Animals”. This time, however, he soon got called on it.

That 1951 paper is a landmark article in the history of practical animal training. This was the article in which the term shaping was used, at least in print, for the very first time. It was also the article in which the use of a clicker as a conditioned reinforcer was first described (again, in print).2 Skinner also described in that paper something very much like our modern practice of target training, although he didn’t call it that and didn’t expand upon how a target can be used to prompt other behavior which can then be strengthened by reinforcement. That short four-page article is probably the most concise tutorial one could ever find on the basic principles of operant conditioning. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the field.

Also contained within that neat little 1951 article is a confident speculation (once again, not sounding at all like speculation) which could have proved quite embarrassing to Skinner, and on a fairly grand scale at that. Without having had any experience actually doing it himself beforehand and probably without having seen anyone else do it either3, Skinner confidently described how easy it is, via shaping with positive reinforcement, to train a dog to do tricks. In particular, he gave the example of how easy it is to train a dog to lift its head, turn a little pirouette, and dance.

As a second test, let us say, you want to teach the dog to lift its head in the air and turn around to the right. The general procedure is the same, but you may need some help in sharpening your observation of the behavior to be reinforced. As a guide to the height to which the dog’s head is to be raised, sight some horizontal line on the wall across the room. Whenever the dog, in its random movements, lifts its head above this line, reinforce immediately. You will soon see the head rising above the line more and more frequently. Now raise your sights slightly and reinforce only when the dog’s head rises above the new level. By a series of gradual steps you can get the dog to hold its head much higher than usual. After this you can begin to emphasize any turning movement in a clockwise direction while the head is high. Eventually the dog should execute a kind of dance step. If you use available food carefully, a single session should suffice for setting up this behavior. (Skinner, 1951, p. 27)

When Skinner’s article came out in Scientific American, it was read by a writer for LOOK magazine4 who must also have been something of a skeptic. Joseph Roddy promptly paid Skinner a visit at Harvard, and essentially told him that if this method of training dogs was as slick as he claimed, then LOOK wanted pictures of it for their magazine. Skinner later wrote, “As a poker player might have put it, LOOK was calling me.” (Skinner, 1983, p. 42) Skinner unhesitatingly took up the challenge; I think it was a rather gutsy gamble.

Accordingly, Mr. Roddy acquired a dog, a young Dalmatian (registered name “Roadcoach Cheerful”, call name “Agnes”), and brought her to Skinner. In the resulting magazine article, Roddy wrote:

At Skinner’s workshop, the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge, the feeling is that a man can have a dog doing anything reasonable he could want a dog to do within twenty minutes of their first encounter. We doubted that, and visited Skinner with a camera on our hip and Agnes on our leash. Dog and psychologist were introduced to each other. Skinner asked us what we would have the dog do, and we said, “Run up the wall.” Twenty minutes later, we were convinced. (LOOK magazine, May 20, 1952, p. 17)

How did Skinner do it? He was darn clever: First of all, he realized that the taking of photographs would, obviously, be a very high priority feature of this whole LOOK magazine enterprise, and it was therefore important that Agnes be at ease with flash bulbs. Also, for the pictures to be fair, accurate, and meaningful, it would be best if each photo corresponded to a progressive step in the shaping process. The answer was to use the flash of the photographer’s strobe light itself as the conditioned reinforcer (instead of a clicker). Accordingly, Agnes was given pretraining in which the flash of the strobe was immediately followed by a small cube of beef. This training served both to countercondition any unwanted adverse reactions Agnes might have had to the flash, and to establish the flash as a marker, a bridge, a conditioned reinforcer. So, when the time came to put up or shut up, both Skinner and Agnes were ready. Yes – darn clever5.

The actual training and photo shoot took place in the apartment of Skinner’s graduate student, Charlie Ferster. Skinner set things up (for real this time) in much the way he had described one might do in the Scientific American piece (see pictures above): he attached some horizontal stripes to the wall which he then used to gauge the dog’s responses of lifting its head higher and higher. Then, he simply set about shaping a jumping response by flashing the strobe (and simultaneously taking a picture), followed by giving a meat treat, each time the dog satisfied the criterion for reinforcement. The result of this process is shown above, as it was in LOOK magazine, in terms of the pictures taken at different points in the shaping process. Within 20 minutes, Skinner had Agnes “running up the wall”, just as Roddy had requested.

That first demonstration went so well that Skinner and company evidently decided to go for a “twofer”. The Fersters had one of those covered kitchen wastebaskets that can be opened by stepping on a pedal at its base, and so for the second shaping demonstration, Charlie trained Agnes to press the pedal and pop the top on the wastebasket. Again, the photographer’s flash served as the conditioned reinforcer, and each step in the process was photographed. The results are shown below.

Skinner’s gutsy gamble paid off. Things worked out exactly as he had bet they would.

The word “luck” often comes up in discussions of betting and gambling. Was luck involved here? Dare we use that word in connection with the work of a scientist? Yes, I think luck was involved here, and yes, I think we can use that word in the context of science, as long as we don’t start getting all mystical and magical about it. Indeed, Skinner himself once acknowledged luck as one of the factors important in scientific discovery (Skinner, 1959, p. 366), so I don’t think he would be offended if we explored the role luck might have played in his winning this gutsy gamble. How might it have been involved?

I think it was a sheer stroke of good luck that, of all the possible breeds of dogs he might have chosen, Roddy brought Skinner a Dalmatian and asked him to train it, in essence, to jump. Dalmatians jump. In fact, Gewirtz (2000) has recently described “jumping up” as an almost incorrigible breed characteristic in Dalmatians. It is empirical question, but I doubt if all dogs of all breeds could be trained, in a mere 20 minutes, to “run up the wall” as high as Agnes did. Skinner was lucky that Agnes was a Dalmatian.

I think it was also a stroke of good fortune that Skinner put those stripes on the wall. A modern Skinnerian dog trainer would, ironically, do things a little differently than Skinner himself did back then in 1952. Today, we would most likely begin by training the dog to approach and touch a target, and then we’d simply move the target higher and higher up the wall. If Skinner had done this explicitly, he could probably have had old Agnes running up that wall in 5 or10 minutes instead of 20. But he didn’t do it explicitly; he did it accidentally. By lucky accident, Skinner did something that was pretty close to this modern target training approach anyway: he taped black stripes on the wall and shaped jumps to successively higher stripes. Although Skinner had intended the stripes to serve purely as stimulus aids to his behavior, i.e., stimulus support for his behavior of sighting higher and higher movements of the dog’s head, the photographs clearly suggest that the stripes may also have turned out to provide very important stimulus support for the dog’s behavior. Yes, Agnes can be described as “running up the wall”, but she can also be described as “running up the stripes on the wall”, or jumping at the highest stripes. I think those stripes on the wall were exerting every bit as much stimulus control over Agnes’ jumping behavior as they were over Skinner’s sighting behavior, even though their intended purpose was strictly for the latter. In this connection, it is interesting to note that, following this 1952 episode with Agnes, the very next report that Skinner published was an experimental study of the powerful control that stimuli which are accidentally present when reinforcement occurs can acquire over behavior (Morse and Skinner, 1957). In this paper Skinner noted that “Accidental, but nevertheless effective, relationships may arise in the sensory control of operant behavior” (p. 308, original italics). “Pending an investigation of these parameters, it may at least be said that incidental stimuli adventitiously related to reinforcement may acquire marked discriminative functions.” (ibid, p. 311) One can’t help but wonder if this insight wasn’t prompted by Skinner’s appreciating his good luck when those stripes on the wall, there deliberately with respect to his behavior but accidentally with respect to Agnes’, acquired strong control over Agnes’ behavior nevertheless.

In any event, it was good fortune for us all that Skinner’s gutsy gamble paid off. All the elements came together to make the demonstration work, whether by deliberate ingenuity or accidental good luck. Skinner’s faith in shaping was vindicated and reinforced, and the field of operant conditioning continued to evolve.

(1)Or, as Gary Wilkes once put it: “I would say your research leaves little doubt that there may have been a touch of heifer dust in some of Skinner’s earlier pronouncements.” (Wilkes, pers. comm, September 2000). To be fair to BFS, however, it is totally appropriate, in an inductive science, to predict what will occur in the general case based on observations of a specific case. It’s just that most scientists would note that the inductive process has led them to predict or expect some result, rather than to imply with apparent 100% confidence that this already has been or undoubtedly would be the result.

(2)In the context of the original “no hands” approach to “differentiation of a response”, it is interesting to note that human hands loom large in David Stone’s 1951 illustrations for the article “How to Teach Animals”. On one page we see a pair of hands, with the right hand holding a clicker and the left hand holding a treat. On the next page we see a hand poised to pull the chain on an electric light, the flashing of which is being used to reinforce a baby’s response of lifting her arm. These illustrations help convey the message that this is a practical way of changing behavior that can be done “by hand”.

(3)There is a chance that Skinner may have seen it done, although he doesn’t mention having seen it in his autobiographies. But by the time Skinner’s 1951 article was written, Keller and Marian Breland had already done much of their pioneering work in practical animal training, including work with dogs. Thus, Skinner may have actually seen the Brelands do this, or perhaps they told him how well it worked.

(4)I have been amazed at the number of people today who say they have never heard of LOOK magazine. This was one of the premier popular magazines of the mid-century 1900’s. It came out weekly and was widely read in the USA and around the world as well. It consisted primarily of photo essays.

(5)We will never know to what extent, if at all, Skinner’s clever use of the photographer’s flash and camera operation as a response consequence may have been influenced by the classic work of Guthrie and Horton, which had been published just a few years earlier (1946). For entirely different reasons, they had made the operation of a camera (click!) contingent upon the performance of an instrumental pole-pushing response by cats. Although this fact is seldom included in the descriptions of their work given in secondary sources, they also used this method to train a dog (cf., Guthrie and Horton, 1946, p. 67). Certainly, Skinner must have read the Guthrie and Horton monograph, and his analysis of their interesting results would no doubt have rested on attributing conditioned reinforcement properties to the click of the camera.
References

Breland, K., & Breland, M. (1951). A field of applied animal psychology. American Psychologist, 6, 202-204.

Breland, K., & Breland, M. (1966). Animal behavior. The Macmillan Company.

Chance, P. (1998). First Course in Applied Behavior Analysis. Brooks/Cole.

Cooper, J.C., Heron, T.E., and Heward, W.L. (1990). Applied Behavior Analysis. Prentice Hall.

Daniels, A.C. (2000). Bringing out the best in people: How to apply the astonishing power of positive reinforcement. McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Daniels, A.C. (2001). Other people’s habits: How to use positive reinforcement to bring out the best in people around you. McGraw-Hill, Inc.

Donaldson, J. (1996). The Culture Clash. James & Kenneth Publishers.

Gewirtz, E.W. (2000) By leaps and bounds. AKC Gazette, September 2000, 83-84.

Guthrie, E.R., and Horton, G.P. (1946). Cats in a puzzle box. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc.

Harvard-trained dog. (1952, May 20). LOOK, pp. 17-20.

Kazdin, A. E. (2000). Behavior Modification in Applied Settings (6 th Ed). Wadsworth.

Lindsley, O.R. (1971) Precision teaching in perspective: An interview. Teaching Exceptional Children, 2, 114-119.

Lindsley, O.R. (1972) From Skinner to precision teaching: The child knows best. In J.B. Jordan & L. S. Robbins (Eds.), Let’s try doing something else kind of thing (pp. 1-11), Arlington, VA: Council on Exceptional Children.

Lindsley, O.R. (1990) Precision Teaching: By Teachers for Children. Teaching Exceptional Children, Spring, 10-15.

Lindsley, O.R. (1992) Precision teaching: Discoveries and effects. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 24, 51-57.

Martin, G. and Pear, J. (1996) Behavior Modification: What it is and how to do it (5th Ed). Prentice Hall.

Morse, W.H., and Skinner, B.F. (1957). A second type of superstition in the pigeon. American Journal of Psychology, 70, 308-311.

Olton, D.S. and Noonberg, A.R. (1980). Biofeedback: Clinical applications in behavioral medicine. Prentice-Hall.

Peterson, G.B. (2000). The discovery of shaping, or B.F. Skinner’s big surprise. The Clicker Journal: The Magazine for Animal Trainers, No.43 (July/August), 6-13.

Pryor, K. 1994). Lads Before The Wind: Diary of a dolphin trainer. (3 rd Ed). Sunshine Books.

Pryor, K. (1995). On Behavior: Essays and Research. Sunshine Books.

Pryor, K. (1999). Don’t Shoot the Dog! The new art of teaching and training. (revised edition). Bantam.

Ramirez, K. (1999). Animal Training: Successful Animal Management Through Positive Reinforcement. Shedd Aquarium Press.

Reid, P.J. (1996). Excel-erated Learning. James & Kenneth Publishers.

Sarafino, E.P. (2000). Behavior Modification: Principles of Behavior Change (Second Edition). Mayfield Publishing Company.

Schwartz, M.S. (Ed.). (1995). Biofeedback: A practitioner’s guide (2 nd ed.). Guilford.

Skinner, B. F. (1937). Two types of conditioned reflex: A reply to Konorski and Miller. The Journal of General Psychology, 16, 272-279.

Skinner, B.F. (1938). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Skinner, B.F. (1951). How to teach animals. Scientific American, 185, 26-29.

Skinner, B.F. (1958). Reinforcement today. American Psychologist, 13, 94-99.

Skinner, B.F. (1959). A case history in the scientific method. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science. Study I. Conceptual and Systematic. Volume 2. General systematic formulations, learning, and special processes. (Pp. 359-379). New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.

Skinner, B. F. (1972). Some relations between behavior modification and basic research. In S.W. Bijou & E. Ribes-Inesta (Eds.), Behavior modification: Issues and extensions (Pp. 1-6). New York: Academic Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1979). The Shaping of a Behaviorist: Part Two of an Autobiography. New York: New York University Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1983). A Matter of Consequences: Part Three of an Autobiography. New York: New York University Press.

This smart University of Minnesota rat works slot machine for a living. (1937, May 31). Life, Pp. 80-81.

http://www.trinity.edu/cbrown/mind/behaviorism.html
trinity.edu
Philosophy of Mind
Curtis Brown

Skinner’s main target in  Science and Human Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1953), and also elsewhere, e.g. in  Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), is what he calls “mentalism,” namely the appeal to inner psychological phenomena in the explanation of human behavior. What is wrong with mental notions in the explanation of behavior? Many things, according to Skinner, among them these:

1. We cannot directly observe mental phenomena. As a result they are “inferential.” On Skinner’s view, this disqualifies them as scientific explanations of behavior. Skinner appeals to this point at several places in our reading. In a discussion of psychoanalytic theory, he writes: “any mental event which is unconscious is necessarily inferential, and the explanation [which makes use of it] is therefore not based upon independent observations of a valid cause” (30 [39]; bracketed page references are to the excerpt from Science and Human Behavior in Ned Block, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980). Later he makes a similar criticism of commonsense psychological explanation, e.g. explaining why someone drinks water by saying he is thirsty. Skinner writes, of this “explanation,” that: “if it means that he drinks because of a state of thirst, an inner causal event is invoked. If this state is purely inferential–if no dimensions are assigned to it which would make direct observation possible–it cannot serve as an explanation” (33 [41]). At one point, Skinner even seems to identify “inferential” with “fictional” (28 [38]).

Now, there is surely something valuable and important about this. Invoking phenomena which we cannot directly observe in explanations of things we can observe is always risky. I do not mean risky in the sense that we may turn out to be wrong; virtually any scientific claim is risky in that sense, including claims about things we can directly observe. The more serious risk is that we will make claims which are really not testable at all, which empirical evidence can never show to be mistaken because we can always fudge the theory a bit to explain why the evidence was to be expected after all. To use Karl Popper’s term, the danger of “inferential” states is that theories making use of them may not be falsifiable. (Popper himself wrote of psychoanalysis: “those ‘clinical observations’ which analysts naively believe confirm their theory cannot do this any more than the daily confirmations which astrologers find in their practice.” Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1962), pp. 37-38.) So we can read Skinner as making the important point that when we invoke theoretical entities or phenomena we need to do so in such a way that the theory making use of them makes predictions about observable phenomena which can be falsified.

But Skinner seems to take himself to have shown something much stronger than this, namely that a scientific theory should not make use of inferred entities or phenomena at all. And this seems much too strong a claim. If we restricted physics, or even archeology or paleontology, to making use only of things that can be directly observed, we would deprive ourselves of most of their most interesting results–and also of a good deal of their predictive power. It often happens that the best theory which accounts for observed phenomena and makes predictions about unobserved but observable phenomena makes use of a good deal of theoretical apparatus for which our only evidence is inferential. An analogy may be helpful in seeing this point. Imagine typing things into the keyboard of a computer, observing the computer’s responses, and trying to formulate hypotheses about how the machine will respond to various future stimuli. Conceivably we could do this without appealing to any hypotheses about how the machine is programmed, so that our theory simply took the form of correlations between inputs and outputs. But it seems quite clear that it will be far more useful to hypothesize about the machine’s (internal, not directly observable) program, using hypotheses about the program together with information about inputs to formulate predictions about the machine’s output. Now we may not be quite like computers, but presumably the principles which govern our behavior are at least as complex as those that govern a computer, so we may reasonably expect that formulating hypotheses about our own internal states and processes will turn out to be the most effective way of explaining and predicting our behavior. At the very least, it seems clear that it would be a mistake to rule out a priori any theory which made use of such hypotheses.

2. Mentalistic accounts are not genuinely explanatory. Skinner argues that many supposed explanations are really just made up on the spot and do not provide a genuine account of one’s behavior. After giving a number of examples (e.g. one is confused because his mind is failing; one is disorganized because his ideas are confused), he writes: “in all this it is obvious that the mind and the ideas . . . are being invented on the spot to provide spurious explanations” (30 [39]).

Again, Skinner seems to be providing a useful warning: it would be a mistake to take such offhand remarks as having much explanatory power. (But, for a defense of the view that commonsense psychology does provide a fairly powerful explanatory account of a good deal of our behavior, see the writings of Jerry Fodor, e.g. his Psychosemantics (MIT Press, 1987), Chapter One.) On the other hand, most such remarks are not even supposed to be explanations of behavior; often they are just casual ways of describing it. The explanatory emptiness of much of our ordinary talk about mental events is not evidence that mentalistic notions can find no place in a genuinely scientific account of human behavior.

3. Mentalistic explanations are typically redundant. Skinner claims that mentalistic explanations really just restate the facts of behavior in more obscure language. He writes, for example, that: “A single set of facts is described by the two statements: ‘He eats’ and ‘He is hungry.’ . . . A single set of facts is described by the two statements: ‘He plays well’ and ‘He has musical ability.’” (31 [39]). Here there seems to be at least a trace of the linguistic thesis of philosophical behaviorism as exemplified by Carnap and, at one time, Hempel. The idea seems to be that the mentalistic statements have the same meaning as the behaviors that count as evidence for them. But ‘He eats’ and ‘He is hungry’ don’t mean quite the same thing (either could be true without the other being true), and in cases where mentalistic notions are doing more theoretical work it will be even clearer that there is no straightforward translation from mentalistic talk into behavioristic talk.

4. The “middle link” argument. Skinner suggests that, since the inner mental states which are supposed to explain behavior are themselves determined by external stimuli, they can safely be ignored: we can leave out the middleman and simply study the relations between stimuli and behavior. “Unless there is a weak spot in our causal chain so that the second link is not lawfully determined by the first, or the third by the second, then the first and third links must be lawfully related. If we must always go back beyond the second link for prediction and control, we may avoid many tiresome and exhausting digressions by examining the third link as a function of the first” (35 [42]).

At first sight, this looks very reasonable. If S determines M and M determines R, then S indirectly determines R: why not just consider the relationship between S and R, ignoring M? Dennett’s computer analogy, which I mentioned above, is helpful here. It may be that the most effective way of explaining the relationship between S and R is by way of hypotheses about the nature of M. What is “hard-wired” in aside (this is comparable to human genetic makeup), how the machine is programmed is determined by inputs to the machine and, together with current inputs, determines the machine’s output: but trying to predict output on the basis of input alone, without hypotheses about the machine’s internal states and processes, is likely to be a disaster. It is worth mentioning Noam Chomsky’s discussion of this point early in his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (in Language vol. 35 no. 1, 1959; reprinted in Ned Block, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology Volume 1 (Harvard, 1980)): “Anyone who sets himself the problem of analyzing the causation of behavior will . . . concern himself with . . . the record of inputs to the organism and the organism’s present response, and will try to describe the function specifying the response in terms of the history of inputs. . . . The differences that arise between those who affirm and those who deny the importance of the specific ‘contribution of the organism’ to learning and performance concern the particular character and complexity of this function” (49).

5. Mentalistic explanations are homuncular. Skinner in a number of places objects to mentalistic explanations that they in effect invoke a little person or homunculus with all the same abilities that the ordinary person has. “The inner man is regarded as driving the body very much as the man at the steering wheel drives a car” (29 [38]). Explaining the behavior of a person by appealing to a little person inside the head, “driving” the body, clearly does not accomplish anything, since the actions of the homunculus are just as much in need of explanation as the actions of the person were originally. This is the criticism Dennett takes most seriously; Dennett’s version is: “Since psychology’s task is to account for the intelligence or rationality of men and animals, it cannot fulfill its task if anywhere along the line it presupposes intelligence or rationality” (Dennett, “Skinner Skinned,” in Dennett, Brainstorms, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978, p. 58).

All right. There’s clearly something to this. But notice two things. (1) It clearly doesn’t accomplish anything to “explain” someone’s behavior by reference to a “homunculus” just as smart as the original person. But it doesn’t follow that homunculi are useless. They may nevertheless accomplish something if they are dumber than the original person. We might be able to understand the capacities of a person in terms of the interactions of a number of agents each of which has simpler capacities than the original person; we might then explain each of these dumber agents in terms of a system of still dumber agents, and so on until at the very bottom level we have something so simple it can be understood in terms of neurons firing or something of the sort. This kind of explanation is familiar from computer science: a big complicated program may have a number of subroutines which can be thought of as agents dumber than the original program; these subroutines may themselves be decomposed into more basic routines, and so on, until at the bottom we reach circuits opening and closing. For the view that something like this is the best way to understand the human mind, see e.g. Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind; see also some of Dennett’s essays in Brainstorms, especially “Artificial Intelligence as Psychology and as Philosophy.”

(2) The second thing to notice is that even if we must ultimately explain intelligence or rationality in terms that don’t presuppose intelligence or rationality, it doesn’t necessarily follow that intelligence and rationality should not be appealed to at all, or that they are ultimately unreal. Rather than showing that we aren’t really rational, such an explanation might instead show what rationality consists in, might show what it is to be rational. This is Dennett’s main point in “Skinner Skinned.” Dennett argues that there is a crucial difference between explaining and explaining away (65). If our explanation of apparently rational behavior turns out to be extremely simple, we may want to say that the behavior was not really rational after all. But if the explanation is very complex and intricate, we may want to say not that the behavior is not rational, but that we now have a better understanding of what rationality consists in. (Compare: if we find out how a computer program solves problems in linear algebra, we don’t say it’s not really solving them, we just say we know how it does it. On the other hand, in cases like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program, the explanation of how the computer carries on a conversation is so simple that the right thing to say seems to be that the machine isn’t really carrying on a conversation, it’s just a trick.)

http://knol.google.com/k/b-f-skinner#
knol.google.com

Can we as educators use “bribery” to improve behavior in our classrooms? When thisquestion first ran across my mind I automatically thought “Well, sure!” Most of us hear of it quite frequently and have even witnessed it first hand. I, personally, didn’t necessarily think of using bribery as a “bad” thing, until I began to read the articles and further my research on this subject. I suppose I approached it with the thought of “whatever works.” Trying to manage classroom behavior can be very difficult and overwhelming for many teachers. I asked a close friend of mine, who is a 3rd grade teacher, if she ever uses any form of bribery in her classroom. She immediately said “yes.” She went on to speak about giving out stickers, pencils, certificates, and even allowing students to skip certain assignments if they were “good.” I didn’t think any of this sounded harmful to the child or situation in any way, but the information that I came across was very interesting and has me contemplating my view on the use of bribery in the classroom.

For many years teachers have been using behaviorism in the form of punishments and rewards to gain control of their classrooms. When reading Skinner’s articles about behaviorism and also some material about Pavlov and his dogs, it brought about the thought of how bribing humans is very similar to how these men bribed their animals. So, if humans were merely viewed as animals, would it be absurd to assume that we can train our students in the same way that we train our house pets?

In the article, Skinner demonstrates operant conditioning. In this process, the consequences we administer, based on a behavior, are the teaching tool. A student who behaves well or gets a good grade, in return receives a sticker or pencil. A rat that pulls a certain lever is given food. At the root of these processes is the belief that humans are biologically motivated. We will naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain; we try to keep our senses activated, and maintain homeostasis by eating, drinking, or staying warm. We are then motivated to obtain pleasant consequences, or rewards, and to avoid unpleasant consequences, or punishments (Bourbon, 1997).

Bourbon (1997) also goes on to speak about how the theory goes. He says, “We are born as clean slates or tabula rasa. As we grow, we react to stimuli our environment provides. The result is a series of learned behaviors, which help us to survive and function as living organisms. We are, in short, stimulus-response machines that are motivated entirely by outside factors. If this is the case, education is easy as pie!”

It is evident that teachers all over use behavior-learning theory to manage their classrooms. It is easy to notice these teachers because their students’ behavior is usually encouraged with some type of reward or discouraged through punishment or taking away that reward. It seems that the goal for the student is now to receive the reward, not to behave properly or learn. This is where my view has now changed from not thinking bribery is harmful to now thinking that just maybe it is. By bribing students and giving them rewards for learning or good behavior, are we now teaching them to rely on other people and things for motivation and success? If we are causing these children to become dependent on a reward, then what does this do to them when that reward is no longer existent? The extinction of a reward can be very harmful alone. It could cause a loss of motivation or even cause a child to have self-doubt and wonder why that reward is no longer present, maybe even leading them to believe they are “bad” and so that’s why they aren’t rewarded. Skinner states, “When reinforcement is no longer forthcoming, behavior undergoes “extinction” and appears rarely, if at all.” The use of bribery is now something that I will personally look at more carefully when implementing. We need to question our own motives. Perhaps behaviorism, or the use of bribes in education, has a place as a teaching tool in severe situations, but at best only as a temporary tool.

Bourbon (1997) speaks about how educators are depriving students when they bribe them because “you must deprive students of whatever they plan to use as a reinforcer.” Skinner describes deprivation as “necessary” when a person wants to use reinforcers to control another. For example, a teacher cannot use attention to reinforce a student’s behavior if that student already has all the attention they need and want. There is no deprivation, so no control of behavior. With no control over behavior, there is no discipline program. I don’t think it’s necessary to deprive a child of anything. Is that our right?
It is most importantly at the common interest of our educators, and as school psychologists, to develop a better understanding of motivation and what will motivate our children to learn. Good things happen when we act immediately, when we are specific, and most importantly, consistent. As stated in the article “Not all positive consequences are reinforcers. What students find reinforcing is unique for each student and ever changing.” What motivates one child will not necessarily motivate the next child. It is our duty to provide motivation for all students somehow, some way.

In conclusion, I will end quoting a passage from the article that I feel is very powerful:

“The things which make us happy are the things which reinforce us, but it is

the things, not the feelings, which must be identified and used in prediction,

control, and interpretation. Pursuit suggests purpose: we act to achieve

happiness. But pursuit, like search, is simply behavior, which has been

reinforced by achieving something. Behavior becomes pursuit only after

reinforcement. It has been said that pursuit of happiness cannot be an

explanation of behavior because nothing proves that men in modern societies

are happier than men in archaic societies, but operant reinforcement is

effective quite apart from any ultimate gain, as the negative utility of

gambling abundantly demonstrates.”
References

Bourbon, T. (1997). Perceptual control theory, reinforcement theory,

countercontrol, and the responsible thinking process. Retrieved on June 7, 2007, from www.responsiblethinking.com.

Skinner, B. (1974). About behaviorism. New York:  Knopf.

http://www.essortment.com/all/bfskinner_rgjj.htm
essortment.com

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a well-known and controversial 20th century researcher and teacher who is associated with a school
of psychology known as behaviorism.

Fred, as his family called him, was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, a small railroad town just south of the New York state border.

His parents were Grace and William Skinner, a couple quite concerned with outward appearances and social respectability. William was an attorney for the Erie Railroad. Grace was actively involved with numerous civic organizations, primarily to promote the family image. According to her son, she derived little pleasure from them.

Of the couple’s two sons, Fred’s younger brother Edward was the more obedient, charming and socially adept. Edward’s misdeeds were often overlooked, while Fred’s were always punished.

Despite this apparent favoritism, Fred enjoyed great freedom to wander about doing whatever he liked. He was resourceful, creating imaginative gizmos as playthings or as solutions to his youthful problems. One such gadget helped him avoid his mother’s displeasure, making a sign pop up when he forgot to hang up his pajamas.

In later years, Fred would have opposed the use of words like “curiosity”, “intelligence”, or “creativity”, to characterize his childhood ingenuity. Fred believed that his resourcefulness was an acquired behavior “shaped” gradually by the environment around him. Accidental successes and discoveries “reinforced” his continued experimentation.

In 1922, Fred graduated as salutatorian from Susquehanna High School and was admitted to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York in 1922. The liberal arts college placed a great emphasis on writing skills, and Fred felt that he would like to become a writer.

He continued to be socially awkward, often appearing aloof and pretentious to his classmates. He was uncomfortably aware of his inability to fit in with the other students, and later remarked that he had turned his entire freshman class against him with a critical remark. Adding to his difficulties adjusting to school, Fred’s younger brother Edward suddenly died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Fred graduated from Hamilton in 1926, again as salutatorian of his class. At about the same time, his grandfather passed away. Fred wrote a dispassionate, clinical account of his grandfather’s death. He was unable to involve his emotions in his writing, – a profound handicap for a would-be author. He found himself questioning his life philosophy, and casting about for new answers to his questions about life and death.

In August, he read about the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson, for the first time. Behaviorism was the late 19th century’s answer to the criticism that psychology was not a true science.

Watson eliminated the study of motivation, mental processes and emotions from behavioral psychology, focusing instead on the study of observable, measurable behavior.

Fred Skinner’s mind was primed for a change. Increasingly, the perspective put forth by behaviorists made sense to him.

In the fall of 1928, Skinner returned to school, this time entering Harvard University for graduate studies in psychology. In the informal atmosphere at Harvard, Skinner at last began to come into his own.

There he built a device capable of precisely measuring and recording the number of times a rat pressed a bar to receive a food pellet. This box, along with the attached recording equipment, provided a way to collect more objective data about behavior than scientists had been able to gather before. The device came to be known as the “Skinner box”

Skinner’s innovations were viewed with both admiration and suspicion by Harvard faculty. Introspective psychology was dominant at Harvard, and behaviorism appeared to belittle studies of the inner workings of the mind. The head of the Harvard psychology department, Edwin Boring, was uncomfortable with the direction in which Skinner’s studies were going. To Boring’s credit, he consciously tried not to be an obstacle to Skinner’s advancement.

In 1931, Skinner received his PhD from Harvard. He remained there for several more years, conducting research. In 1937, he was offered a teaching/research position at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. He had met Yvonne Blue, his future wife, the previous year. In November of 1937, shortly before moving to Minneapolis to begin his new career, the two were married.

Skinner’s brand of behaviorism was becoming more radical with time. It was fortunate that the University of Minnesota was not dominated by any particular school of psychology, and was therefore somewhat open to his brand of behaviorism.

Basically, Skinner modified the tenets of behaviorism to fit his own discoveries, which involved what he called “operant conditioning.” “Conditioning” is the scientific term for learning. “Operant” refers to Skinner’s idea that any organism “operates” on his environment – that is, performs actions that change the environment around it for better or for worse. Operant psychology is based on the idea that an action taken by a person or an animal often has consequences that occur naturally in the environment. This principal is called “operant conditioning”. Reinforcement is something that makes it more likely that a given behavior will be repeated. The consequences of a given action either reinforce the behavior or do not.

For example, if a child makes faces at the teacher in school, the laughter of the other children may serve to reinforce his behavior. If the teacher punishes him by making him write, “I will not make faces” one hundred times on the chalkboard, the child may avoid such antics in the future. Thus, the child initiates the behavior, and factors in the environment either reward or punish his behavior.

Skinner did not worry much about which consequence was the stronger one. He believed that if a behavior was reinforced, it was apt to be repeated. Skinner believed that positive reinforcement was more effective than punishment. He also believed that the reinforcement must come swiftly.

Experimenters using Skinner’s techniques have taught birds and animals to perform any number of unnatural actions. We have all seen chickens playing toy pianos or dogs climbing ladders, acting like firemen. These peculiar behaviors are taught through a process called “shaping.”

For example, a chicken is at first rewarded if it turns slightly in the direction of the piano. As it begins to turn toward the piano more frequently, it begins to be rewarded only when it looks directly at the piano or moves toward it. Eventually it is rewarded only when it touches the piano, and so forth.

This shaping of behavior, or “successive approximation” has proven to be a very successful teaching technique. It has been adapted to teach people to overcome phobias or other disruptive behaviors.

Skinner’s beliefs and techniques were not radical enough in themselves to cause the storm of controversy that eventually began to swirl around him. One factor contributing to this storm was the “baby tender”.

The baby tender was a device Skinner invented to keep his second daughter, Deborah in a safe, thermostatically controlled environment while he worked. It was the high-tech equivalent of a playpen, but was misunderstood and construed as a diabolical device that Skinner was using to experiment upon his hapless child. He was accused of keeping Deborah, who became known as “the baby in the box” inside the baby tender for three years, depriving her of fresh air and human companionship. Although this was far from the truth, magazine articles painted Skinner as an unfeeling, inhumane parent.

In 1971, Skinner published a book that would prove to be even more shocking to the American public. In “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”, Skinner challenged the very foundation of the American belief system. He dismissed the notion that individual freedom existed. Man’s actions were nothing more than a set of behaviors that were shaped by his environment, over which he had no control.

Such views, even if they had been completely understood in the context of Skinner’s work, flew in the face of what most Americans held dear. They removed admired attributes from man — free will, dignity, and conscious thought — and replaced them with behaviors that were shaped by an environment over which individual man had little or no control.

Skinner’s penchant for substituting his own special vocabulary for words that he felt might be misunderstood probably contributed to the controvesies that flared up around him. Since most people had no idea what he was talking about, these words did not clarify his ideas, but rather confused his listeners.

When he advocated the use of operant conditioning techniques to control and engineer human behavior, the idea smacked of tyranny and abuse of power. Skinner responded that all behavior is already controlled by factors in the environment, and that society needed to manage some of those factors.

Therapists have taken Skinner’s ideas and used them to help people overcome phobias and other maladaptive behavior. They are helping people control their actions without using the emotionally charged language that got Skinner into so much hot water.

Psychologists have disproven the idea that a cat can always be trained to perform the same tasks as a pigeon. Instead, certain species seem to be pre-wired to perform certain types of tasks, while other species may be unable to learn them, despite their physical ability to do so.

Immediate rewards are no longer considered to be the best reinforcers under all conditions, although they play an important role in many types of learning. Today, scientists acknowledge that learning involves more complicated combinations of factors. Sometimes a delayed reward is more effective than an immediate one. A combination of reward and punishment can also speed learning.

Programmed teaching materials providing immediate feedback to students’ responses are utilized in today’s classrooms to effectively teach certain types of material. Skinner’s ideas have also been adopted to teach mentally retarded and autistic children, are used in industry to reduce job accidents, and are used in numerous applications in health-related fields.

B. F. Skinner died of leukemia on August 18, 1990, at the age of 86.

In spite of some flaws in B.F. Skinner’s views, the principles of operant conditioning still play an important role in the way we approach learning and behavior modification today.

Bibliography:

Carpenter, Finley. The Skinner Primer: Behind Freedom and Dignity. New York: The Free Press, a Division of Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1974:

Bjork, Daniel W. B. F. Skinner: A Life. New York: BasicBooks, a Division of Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1993

Hunt, Morton. The Story of Psychology. New York: Doubleday, 1993.