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The Origins of Cognitive Thought (1989)

December 30th, 2009

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B. F. Skinner (1989)

1904 – 1990

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife. His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working. Burrhus was an active, out-going boy who loved the outdoors and building things, and actually enjoyed school. His life was not without its tragedies, however. In particular, his brother died at the age of 16 of a cerebral aneurysm.
Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He didn’t fit in very well, not enjoying the fraternity parties or the football games. He wrote for school paper, including articles critical of the school, the faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa! To top it off, he was an atheist — in a school that required daily chapel attendance. He wanted to be a writer and did try, sending off poetry and short stories. When he graduated, he built a study in his parents’ attic to concentrate, but it just wasn’t working for him. Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.” After some traveling, he decided to go back to school, this time at Harvard. He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayedthere to do research until 1936. Also in that year, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota. There he met and soon married Yvonne Blue. They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. Although it was nothing more than a combination crib and playpen with glass sides and air conditioning, it looked too much like keeping a baby in an aquarium to catch on. In 1945, he became the chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University. In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life. He was a very active man, doing research and guiding hundreds of doctoral candidates as well as writing many books. While not successful as a writer of fiction and poetry, he became one of our best psychology writers, including the book Walden II, which is a fictional account of a community run by his behaviorist principles.
August 18, 1990, B. F. Skinner died of leukemia after becoming perhaps the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud –
Dr. C. George Boeree Dr. C. George Boeree
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.

B. F. Skinner
–Contingencies of Reinforcement His Life

“A Theory of Personality Without Personality”

Skinner developed a psychology that concentrates not on the person but solely on those variables and forces in the environment that influence a person and that may be directly observed, presenting behaviourism and learning theory in its purest and most extreme form. Skinner chose to describe variables and forces in the environment that shape overt behaviour rather than to develop a theory of personality because he believes that the term “personality” and concepts of internal structure are ultimately superfluous. Behaviour is best understood in terms of responses to the environment.

Operant conditioning involves reinforcing and shaping spontaneous responses. It differs from classical conditioning in terms of the nature of the behaviour (which is freely made rather than elicited by a stimulus) and the nature of the reinforcement (which follows rather than precedes the behaviour).

Skinner distinguishes three different schedules of reinforcement – continuous, interval, and ratio reinforcement – and describes their effectiveness. A continuous schedule is more effective for initially developing a behaviour but a variable ratio schedule is more effective for maintaining it.

Skinner observed that punishment is the most common technique of behavioural control in our society. He felt that punishment may stop or block a behaviour but it does not necessarily eliminate it. The organism may seek other means of acquiring the same ends. Punishment creates fear but, if the fear is diminished, the behaviour will recur. It can also lead to undesired side effects: anger, hatred, or helplessness. Skinner then went on to emphasize that positive reinforcements are most effective in initiating and maintaining desired behaviour. By identifying our reinforcement patterns, we can strengthen those that are most effective and develop more efficient means of controlling behaviour.

Skinner’s behaviour modification therapy consists of restructuring the environment so that undesired behaviours are eliminated and more desired ones substituted. Skinner’s approach has been successful in situations where traditional insight methods are inapplicable. His methods have also been used in therapeutic communities, education and industry.

What is felt when one has a feeling is a condition of one’s body, and the word used to describe it almost always comes from the word for the cause of the condition felt. The evidence is to be found in the history of the language-in the etymology of the words that refer to feelings (see Chapter 1). Etymology is the archaeology of thought. The great authority in English is the Oxford English Dictionary (1928), but a smaller work such as Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1956) will usually suffice. We do not have all the facts we should like to have, because the earliest meanings of many words have been lost, but we have enough to make a plausible general case. To describe great pain, for example, we say agony. The word first meant struggling or wrestling, a familiar cause of great pain. When other things felt the same way, the same word was used.

A similar case is made here for the words we use to refer to states of mind or cognitive processes. They almost always began as references either to some aspect of behaviour or to the setting in which behaviour occurred. Only very slowly have they become the vocabulary of something called mind. Experience is a good example. As Raymond Williams (1976) has pointed out, the word was not used to refer to anything felt or introspectively observed until the 19th century. Before that time it meant, quite literally, something a person had “gone through” (from the Latin expiriri), or what we should now call an exposure to contingencies of reinforcement. This paper reviews about
80 other words for states of mind or cognitive processes. They are grouped according to the bodily conditions that prevail when we are doing things, sensing things, changing the way we do or sense things (learning), staying changed (remembering), wanting, waiting, thinking, and “using our minds.”

DOING

The word behave is a latecomer. The older word was do. As the very long entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (1928) shows, do has always emphasised consequences-the effect one has on the world. We describe much of what we ourselves do with the words we use to describe what others do. When asked, “What did you do?”, “What are you doing?”, or “What are you going to do?” we say, for example, “I wrote a letter,” “I am reading a good book,” or “I shall watch television.” But how can we describe what we feel or introspectively observe at the time?

There is often very little to observe. Behaviour often seems spontaneous; it simply happens. We say it “occurs” as in “It occurred to me to go for a walk.” We often replace “it” with “thought” or “idea” (”The thought-or idea-occurred to me to go for a walk”), but what, if anything, occurs is the walk. We also say that behaviour comes into our possession. We announce the happy appearance of the solution to a problem by saying “I have it!”

We report an early stage of behaving when we say, “I feel like going for a walk.” That may mean “I feel as I have felt in the past when I have set out for a walk.” What is felt may also include something of the present occasion, as if to say, “Under these conditions I often go for a walk” or it may include some state of deprivation or aversive stimulation, as if to say, “I need a breath of fresh air.”

The bodily condition associated with a high probability that we shall behave or do something is harder to pin down and we resort to metaphor. Since things often fall in the direction in which they lean, we say we are inclined to do something, or have an inclination to do it. If we are strongly inclined, we may even say we are bent on doing it. Since things also often move in the direction in which they are pulled, we say that we tend to do things (from the Latin tendere, to stretch or extend) or that our behaviour expresses an intention, a cognitive process widely favoured by philosophers at the present time.

We also use attitude to refer to probability. An attitude is the position, posture, or pose we take when we are about to do something. For example, the pose of actors suggests something of are engaged in doing or are likely to do in a moment. The same sense of pose is found in dispose and propose (”I am disposed to go for a walk…… I propose to go for a walk”). Originally a synonym of propose, purpose has caused a great deal of trouble. Like other words suggesting probable action, it seems to point to the future. The future cannot be acting now, however, and elsewhere in science purpose has given way to words referring to past consequences. When philosophers speak of intention, for example, they are almost always speaking of operant behaviour.

As an experimental analysis has shown, behaviour is shaped and maintained by its consequences, but only by consequences that lie in the past. We do what we do because of what has happened, not what will happen. Unfortunately, what has happened leaves few observable traces, and why we do what we do and how likely we are to do it are therefore largely beyond the reach of introspection. Perhaps that is why, as we shall see later, behaviour has so often been attributed to an initiating, originating, or creative act of will.

SENSING

To respond effectively to the world around us, we must see, hear, smell, taste, or feel it. The ways in which behaviour is brought under the control of stimuli can be analysed without too much trouble, but what we observe when we see ourselves seeing something is the source of a great misunderstanding. We say we perceive the world in the literal sense of taking it in (from the Latin per and capere, to take). (Comprehend is a close synonym, part of which comes from prehendere, to seize or grasp.) We say, “I take your meaning.” Since we cannot take in the world itself, it has been assumed that we must make a copy. Making a copy cannot be all there is to seeing, however, because we still have to see the copy. Copy theory involves an infinite regress. Some cognitive psychologists have tried to avoid it by saying that what is taken in is a representation perhaps a digital rather than an analog copy. When we recall (”call up an image of”) what we have seen, however, we see something that looks pretty much like what we saw in the first place, and that would be an analog copy. Another way to avoid the regress is to say that at some point we interpret the copy or representation. The origins of interpret are obscure, but the word seems to have had some connection with price; an interpreter was once a broker. Interpret seems to have meant evaluate. It can best be understood as something we do.

The metaphor of copy theory has obvious sources. When things reinforce our looking at them, we continue to look. We keep a few such things near us so that we can look at them whenever we like. If we cannot keep the things themselves, we make copies of them, such as paintings or photographs. Image, a word for an internal copy, comes from the Latin imago. It first meant a colored bust, rather like a wax-work museum effigy. Later it meant ghost. Effigy, by the way, is well chosen as a word for a copy, because it first meant something constructed-from the Latin fingere. There is no evidence, however, that we construct anything when we see the world around us or when we see that we are seeing it.

A behavioural account of sensing is simpler. Seeing is behaving and, like all behaving, is to be explained either by natural selection (many animals respond visually shortly after birth) or operant conditioning. We do not see the world by taking it in and processing it. The world takes control of behaviour when either survival or reinforcement has been contingent upon it. That can occur only when something is done about what is seen. Seeing is only part of behaving; it is behaving up to the point of action. Since behaviour analysts deal only with complete instances of behaviour, the sensing part is out of reach of their instruments and methods and must, as we shall see later, be left to physiologists.

CHANGING AND STAYING CHANGED

Learning is not doing; it is changing what we do. We may see that behaviour has changed, but we do not see the changing. We see reinforcing consequences but not how they cause a change. Since the observable effects of reinforcement are usually not immediate, we often overlook the connection. Behaviour is then often said -to grow or develop. Develop originally meant to unfold, as one unfolds a letter. We assume that what we see was there from the start. Like pre-Darwinian evolution (where to evolve meant to unroll as one unrolled a scroll), developmentalism is a form of creationism.

Copies or representations play an important part in cognitive theories of learning and memory, where they raise problems that do not arise in a behavioural analysis. When we must describe something that is no longer present, the traditional view is that we recall the copy we have stored. In a behavioural analysis, contingencies of reinforcement change the way we respond to stimuli. It is a changed person, not a memory, that has been “stored.”

Storage and retrieval become much more complicated when we learn and recall how something is done. It is easy to make copies of things we see, but how can we make copies of the things we do? We can model behaviour for someone to imitate, but a model cannot be stored. The traditional solution is to go digital. We say the organism learns and stores rules. When, for example, a hungry rat presses a lever and receives food and the rate of pressing immediately increases, cognitive psychologists want to say that the rat has learned a rule. It now knows and can remember that “pressing the lever produces food.” But “pressing the lever produces food” is our description of the contingencies we have built into the apparatus. We have no reason to suppose that the rat formulates and stores such a description. The contingencies change the rat, which then survives as a changed rat. As members of a verbal species we can describe contingencies of reinforcement, and we often do because the descriptions have many practical uses (for example, we can memorise them and say them again whenever circumstances demand it) but there is no introspective or other evidence that we verbally describe every contingency that affects our behaviour, and much evidence to the contrary.

Some of the words we use to describe subsequent occurrences of behaviour suggest storage. Recall-call back-is obviously one of them; recollect suggests “bringing together” stored pieces. Under the influence of the computer, cognitive psychologists have turned to retrieve-literally “to find again” (cf. the French trouver), presumably after a search. The etymology of remember, however, does not imply storage. From the Latin me or, it means to be “mindful of again” and that usually means to do again what we did before. To remember what something looks like is to do what we did when we saw it. We needed no copy then, and we need none now. We recognise things in the sense of “recognising” them responding to them now as we did in the past.) As a thing, a memory must be something stored, but as an action “memorising” simply means doing what we must do to ensure that we can behave again as we are behaving now.

WANTING

Many cognitive terms describe bodily states that arise when strong behaviour cannot be executed because a necessary condition is lacking. The source of a general word for states of that kind is obvious: when something is wanting, we say we want it. In dictionary terms, to want is to “suffer from the want of.” Suffer originally meant “to undergo,” but now it means “to be in pain,” and strong wanting can indeed be painful. We escape from it by doing anything that has been reinforced by the thing that is now wanting and wanted.

A near synonym of want is need. It, too, was firsied closely to suffering; to be in need was to be under restraint or duress. (Words tend to come into use when the conditions they describe are conspicuous.) Felt is often added: one has a felt need. We sometimes distinguish between want and need on the basis of the immediacy of the consequence. Thus, we want something to eat, but we need a taxi in order to do something that will have later consequences.

Wishing and hoping are also states of being unable to do something we are strongly inclined to do. The putted golf ball rolls across the green, but we can only wish or will it into the hole. (Wish is close to will. The Anglo-Saxon willan meant “wish,” and the would in “Would that it were so” is not close to the past tense of will.)

When something we need is missing, we say we miss it. When we want something for a long time, we say we long for it. We long to see someone we love who has long been absent.

When past consequences have been aversive, we do not hope, wish, or long for them. Instead, we worry or feel anxious about them. Worry first meant “choke” (a dog worries the rat it has caught), and anxious comes from another word for choke. We cannot do anything about things that have already happened, though we are still affected by them. We say we are sorry for a mistake we have made. Sorry is a weak form of sore. As the slang expression has it, we may be “sore about something.” We resent mistreatment, quite literally, by “feeling it again” (resent and sentiment share a root).

Sometimes we cannot act appropriately because we do not have the appropriate behaviour. When we have lost our way, for example, we say we feel lost. To be bewildered is like being in a wilderness. In such a case, we wander (”wend our way aimlessly”) or wonder what to do. The wonders of the world were so unusual that no one responded to them in normal ways. We stand in awe of such things, and awe comes from a Greek word that meant “anguish” or “terror.” Anguish, like anxiety, once meant “choked,” and terror was a violenrembling. A miracle, from the Latin admirare, is “something to be wondered at,” or about.

Sometimes we cannot respond because we are taken unawares; we are surprised (the second syllable of which comes from the Latin prehendere, “to seize or grasp”). The story of Dr. Johnson’s wife is a useful example. Finding the doctor kissing the maid, she is said to have exclaimed, “I am surprised!” “No,” said the doctor, “I am surprised; you are astonished!” Astonished, like astounded, first meant “to be alarmed by thunder.” Compare the French etonner and tonnere.

When we cannot easily do something because our behaviour has been mildly punished, we are embarrassed or barred. Conflicting responses find us perplexed: they are “interwoven” 6r “entangled.” When a response has been inconsistently reinforced, we are diffident, in the sense of not trusting. Trust comes from a Teutonic root suggesting consolation, which in turn has a distant Greek relative meaning “whole.” Trust is bred by consistency.

WAITING

Wanting, wishing, worrying, resenting, and the like are often called “feelings.” More likely to be called “states of mind” are the bodily conditions that result from certain special temporal arrangements of stimuli, responses, and reinforcers. The temporal arrangements are much easier to analyse than the states of mind that are said to result.

Watch is an example. It first meant “to be awake.” The night watch was someone who stayed awake. The word alert comes from the Italian for “a military watch.” We watch television until we fall asleep.

Those who are awake may be aware of are doing; aware is close to wary or cautious. (Cautious comes from a word familiar to us in caveat emptor) Psychologists have been especially interested in awareness, although they have generally used a synonym, consciousness.

One who watches may be waiting for something to happen, but waiting is more than watching. It is something we all do but may not think of as a state of mind. Consider waiting for a bus. Nothing we have ever done has made the bus arrive, but its arrival has reinforced many of the things we do while waiting. For example, we stand where we have most often stood and look in the direction in which we have most often looked when buses have appeared. Seeing a bus has also been strongly reinforced, and we may see one while we are waiting, either in the sense of “thinking what one would look like” or by mistaking a truck for a bus.

Waiting for something to happen is also called expecting, a more prestigious cognitive term. To expect is “to look forward to” (from the Latin expectare). To anticipate is “to do other things beforehand,” such as getting the bus fare ready. Part of the word comes from the Latin capere “to take.” Both expecting and anticipating are forms of behaviour that have been adventitiously reinforced by the appearance of something. (Much of what we do when we are waiting is public. Others can see us standing at a bus stop and looking in the direction from which buses come. An observant person may even see us take a step forward when a truck comes into view, or reach for a coin as the bus appears. We ourselves “see” something more, of course. The contingencies have worked private changes in us, to some of which we alone can respond.)

THINKING

It is widely believed that behaviour analysts cannot deal with the cognitive processes called thinking. We often use think to refer to weak behaviour. If we are not quite ready to say, “He is wrong,” we say, “I think he is wrong.” Think is often a weaker word for know; we say, “I think this is the way to do it” when we are not quite ready to say, “I know this is the way” or “This is the way.” We also say think when stronger behaviour is not feasible. Thus, we think of what something looks like when it is not there to see, and we think of doing something that we cannot at the moment do.

Many thought processes, however, have nothing to do with the distinction between weak and strong behaviour or between private and public, overt and covert. To think is to do something that makes other behaviour possible. Solving a problem is an example. A problem is a situation that does not evoke an effective response; we solve it by changing the situation until a response occurs. Telephoning a friend is a problem if we do not know the number, and we solve it by looking up the number. Etymologically, to solve is “to loosen or set free,” as sugar is dissolved in coffee. This is the sense in which thinking is responsible for doing. “It is how people think that determines how they act.” Hence, the hegemony of mind. But again the terms we use began as references to behaviour. Here are a few examples:

When no effective stimulus is available we sometimes expose one. We discover things by uncovering them. To detect a signal does not mean to respond to it; it means to remove something (the tegmen) that covers it.

When we cannot uncover a stimulus, we sometimes keep an accessible one in view until a response occurs. Observe and regard both come from words that meant “to hold or keep in view,” the latter from the French garder Consider once meant “to look steadily at the stars until something could be made of them” (consider and sidereal have a common root). Contemplate, another word for think, once meant “to look at a template or plan of the stars.” (In those days all one could do to make sense of the stars was to look at them.)

We not only look at things to see them better, we look for them. We search or explore. To look for a pen is to do what one has done in the past when a pen came into view.
(A pigeon that pecks a spot because doing so has been occasionally reinforced will “look for it” after it has been taken away by doing precisely what it did when the spot was there-moving its head in ways that brought the spot into view.) We search in order to find, and we do not avoid searching by contriving something to be seen, because contrive, like retrieve, is from the French trouver, “to find.”

We bring different things together to make a single response feasible when we concentrate, from an older word concentre, “to join in a center.”

We do the reverse when we separate things so that we can more easily deal with them in different ways. We sift them, as if we were putting them through a sieve. The cern in discern (Latin cernere) means “to separate or set apart.”

We mark things so that we shall be more likely to notice them again. Distinguish, a good cognitive term, once meant “to mark by pricking.” Mark is strongly associated with boundaries; animals mark the edges of their territories.

To define is literally “to mark the bounds or end” (finis) of something. We also determine what a word means by indicating where the referenerminates.

We compare things, literally, by “putting them side by side” so that we can more easily see whether they match. The par in compare means “equal.” Par value is equal value. In golf, par is the score to be matched.

We speculate about things in the sense of looking at them from different angles, as in a specula or mirror.

Cogitate, an old word for think, first meant “to shake up.” A conjecture is something “thrown out” for consideration. We accept or reject things that occur to us in the sense of taking or throwing them back, as if we were fishing.

Sometimes it helps to change one mode of stimulation into another. We do so when we convert the “heft” of an object into its weight, read on a scale. By weighing things we react more precisely to their weight. Ponder, deliberate, and examine, good cognitive processes, all once meant “to weigh.” Ponder is part of ponderous, the liber in deliberate is the Latin libra, “a scales,” and examine meant “the tongue of a balance.”

We react more precisely to the number of things in a group by counting. One way to count is to recite one, two, three, and soon, while ticking off (touching) each item. Before people learned to count, they recorded the number of things in a group by letting a pebble stand for each thing. The pebbles were called calculi and their use calculation. There is a long, but unbroken, road from pebbles to silicon chips.

After we have thought for some time, we may reach a decision. To decide once meant simply to cut off or bring to an end.

A better word for decide is conclude, “to close a discussion.” What we conclude about something is our last word.

It is certainly no accident that so many of the terms we now use to refer to cognitive processes once referred either to behaviour or to the occasions on which behaviour occurs. It could be objected, of course, that what a word once meant is not what it means now. Surely there is a difference between weighing a sack of potatoes and weighing the evidence in a court of law. When we speak of weighing evidence we are using a metaphor. But a metaphor is a word that is “carried over” from one refereno another on the basis of a common property. The common property in weighing is the conversion of one kind of thing (potatoes or evidence) into another (a number on a scale or a verdict). Once we have seen this weighing done with potatoes it is easier to see it done with evidence. Over the centuries human behaviour has grown steadily more complex as it has come under the control of more complex environments. The number and complexity of the bodily conditions felt or introspectively observed have grown accordingly, and with them has grown the vocabulary of cognitive thinking.

We could also say that weight becomes abstract when we move from potatoes to evidence. The word is indeed abstracted in the sense of its being drawn away from its original referent, but it continues to refer to a common property, and, as in the case of metaphor, in a possibly more decisive way. The testimony in a trial is much more complex than a sack of potatoes, and “guilty” probably implies more than “ten pounds.” But abstraction is not a matter of complexity. Quite the contrary Weight is only one aspect of a potato, and guilt is only one aspect of a person. Weight is as abstract as guilt. It is only under verbal contingencies of reinforcement that we respond to single properties of things or persons. In doing so we abstract the property from the thing or person.

One may still argue that at some point the term is abstracted and carried over, not to a slightly more complex case, but to something of a very different kind. Potatoes are weighed in the physical world; evidence is weighed in the mind, or with the help of the mind, or by the mind. And that brings us to the heart of the matter.

MIND

The battle cry of the cognitive revolution is “Mind is back!” A “great new science of mind” is born. Behaviourism nearly destroyed our concern for it, but behaviourism has been overthrown, and we can take up again where the philosophers and early psychologists left off.

Extraordinary things have certainly been said about the mind. The finest achievements of the species have been attributed to it; it is said to work at miraculous speeds in miraculous ways. But what it is and what it does are still far from clear. We all speak of the mind with little or no hesitation, but we pause when asked for a definition. Dictionaries are of no help. To understand what mind means we must first look up perception, idea, feeling, intention, and many other words we have just examined, and we shall find each of them defined with the help of the others. Perhaps from people who did not know precisely what we were talking about, and we have no sensory nerves going to the parts of the brain in which the most important events presumably occur. Many cognitive psychologists recognise these limitations and dismiss the words we have been examining as the language of “common sense psychology.” The mind that has made its comeback is therefore not the mind of Locke or Berkeley or of Wundt or William James. We do not observe it; we infer it. We do not see ourselves processing information, for example. We see the materials that we process and the product, but not the producing. We now treat mental processes like intelligence, personality, or character traits-as things no one ever claims to see through introspection. Whether or not the cognitive revolution has restored mind as the proper subject matter of psychology, it has not restored introspection as the proper way of looking at it. The behaviourists’ attack on introspection has been devastating.

Cognitive psychologists have therefore turned to brain science and computer science to confirm their theories. Brain science, they say, will eventually tell us what cognitive processes really are. They will answer, once and for all, the old questions about monism, dualism, and interactionism. By building machines that do what people do, computer science will demonstrate how the mind works.

What is wrong with all this is not what philosophers, psychologists, brain scientists, and computer scientists have found or will find; the error is the direction in which they are looking. No account of what is happening inside the human body, no matter how complete, will explain the origins of human behaviour. What happens inside the body is not a beginning. By looking at how a clock is built, we can explain why it keeps good time, but not why keeping time is important, or how the clock came to be builhat way. We must ask the same questions about a person. Why do people do do, and why do the bodies that do it have the structures they have? We can trace a small part of human behaviour, and a much larger part of the behaviour of other species, to natural selection and the evolution of the species, but the greater part of human behaviour must be traced to contingencies of reinforcement, especially to the very complex social contingencies we call cultures. Only when we take those histories into account can we explain why people behave as they do.

That position is sometimes characterised as treating a person as a black box and ignoring its contents. Behaviour analysts would study the invention and uses of clocks without asking how clocks are built. But nothing is being ignored. Behaviour analysts leave what is inside the black box to those who have the instruments and methods needed to study it properly. There are two unavoidable gaps in any behavioural account: one between the stimulating action of the environment and the response of the organism, and one between consequences and the resulting change in behaviour. Only brain science can fill those gaps. In doing so it completes the account; it does not give a different account of the same thing. Human behaviour will eventually be explained, because it can only be explained by the cooperative action of ethology, brain science, and behaviour analysis.

The analysis of behaviour need not wait until brain science has done its part. The behavioural facts will not be changed, and they suffice for both a science and a technology. Brain science may discover other kinds of variables affecting behaviour, but it will turn to a behavioural analysis for the clearest account of their effects.

CONCLUSION

Verbal contingencies of reinforcement explain why we report what we feel or introspectively observe. The verbal culture that arranges such contingencies would not have evolved if it had not been useful. Bodily conditions are not the causes of behaviour but they are collateral effects of the causes, and people’s answers to questions about how they feel or are thinking often tell us something about what has happened to them or have done. We can understand them better and are more likely to anticipate will do. The words they use are part of a living language that can be used without embarrassment by cognitive psychologists and behaviour analysts alike in their daily lives.

But not in their science! A few traditional terms may survive in the technical language of a science, but they are carefully defined and stripped by usage of their old connotations. Science requires a language. We seem to be giving up the effort to explain our behaviour by reporting what we feel or introspectively observe in our bodies, but we have only begun to construct a science needed to analyse the complex interactions between the environment and the body and the behaviour to which it gives rise.

Source: Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior (1989) publ. Merrill Publishing Company. One Chapter reproduced here.

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Operant conditioning

December 30th, 2009

http://encyclopedia.kids.net.au/page/op/Operant_conditioning
kids.net.au

Operant conditioning, so named by psychologist B. F. Skinner, is the modification of behavior (the reactions or actions of animals) brought about by the consequences that follow upon the occurrence of the behavior. In simple terms, behavior operates on the environment producing various effects. The phrase ‘operant conditioning’ draws out a crucial distinction from pavlovian conditioning, which Skinner termed ‘respondent’ – namely that respondent conditioning, like the dog’s salivation or the knee-jerk, has neither much effect on the environment, nor is its occurrence changed by its effectiveness or ineffectiveness in the environment. (This opens up a much-missed parallel with involuntary behavior or reflexes and voluntary behavior or acts. The former occur essentially no matter what given some stimulus and have nothing to ensure that they act on the rest of the world, while the latter are affected by how well or poorly they work and hence are much more likely to do work for the animal in the world.)

Operant conditioning, sometimes called “instrumental conditioning” or “instrumental learning”, was first extensively studied by Edwin L. Thorndike[?] (1874-1949). Thorndike’s most famous work investigated the behavior of cats trying to escape from various home-made puzzle boxes. When first constrained in the boxes the cats took a long time to escape from each. With experience however, ineffective responses occurred less frequently and successful responses occurred more quickly enabling the cats to escape in less and less time over successive trials. In his law of effect, Thorndike theorized that successful responses, those producing satisfying consequences were “stamped in” by the experience and thus occurred more frequently. Unsuccessful responses, those producing annoying consequences, were stamped out and subsequently occurred less frequently. In short, some consequence strengthened behavior and some consequences weakened behavior. This effect was (and sometimes still is) described as involving a strengthening of the association between the response and its effect, suggesting some kind of parallel to Pavlovian conditioning.

The same idea behind the Law of Effect is described in Skinner’s terms by the notion of reinforcers. These are just whatever events strengthen a response (e.g., whose rate controls the rate of that response). This neatly sidestepped Thorndike’s satisfaction, resulting in a term which was less theoretical and more simply descriptive: any event whose presences and absences control how often a response occurs are by definition reinforcers for that response. The problem became not what ’satisfying’ meant, but the better-defined question of what events would reinforce which responses of which animals in which conditions. Skinner also innovated in making new definitions of stimulus and response which were similarly to be adapted to the behavior actually observed. To Skinner, the discriminative stimulus (SD) was not a single physically defined kind of event, but an entire class of events (possibly quite physically different) which elicited the same response. (In contrast with the reflex notion of stimulus, a discriminative stimulus was held to increase the probability of response.) Skinner’s notion of the operant-conditioning response, called an operant, was similarly distinct from the physiologically defined reflex and classically conditioned responses, being a class of responses which shared a consequence – e.g., depressing a lever, which is commonly done by rats in several distinct but functionally equivalent ways. The relation between the discriminative stimulus, the operant response, and the reinforcer has often been called the ‘three-term contingency’ – under these (functional) conditions, this (functional) response will yield this reinforcer.

Skinner is most well known for his methodological advances and his laboratory inventions. In contrast to Thorndike’s puzzle boxes, Skinner introduced free operant[?] technique via the use of operant conditioning chamber. In this apparatus (as contrasted with earlier apparatus, which tended to emphasize experimenter-determined trials), rats could respond for food at their own pace. Skinner made much theoretical use of this new variable of response rate, which was recorded by a cumulative recorder – paper on a slowly rotating drum in contact with a pen which ticked over automatically each time the lever was pressed. This eliminated much labor and loss of precision.

Accident allowed Skinner to uncover one of his most important contributions, the intermittent reinforcement schedule. Initially, the free operant procedure involved the delivery of one food pellet per press of the lever. However, the food dispenser often broke down, allowing lever presses to occur unfollowed by food. Skinner found that the animals would continue working for some time before stopping. This technique was exploited both to save food pellets (which Skinner then made himself), and later to uncover now well-known properties of0

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What is a Skinner Box?

December 30th, 2009

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-skinner-box.htm
wisegeek.com

A Skinner box is a device invented around 1930 by behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner of Harvard University. The Skinner box is used in a laboratory setting to study classical conditioning and operant conditioning in animals. Skinner and other behaviorists object to the term “Skinner box” and more often call the device an operant conditioning chamber.

Behaviorism is a branch of psychology that has to do with learned behaviors. In classical conditioning, a conditioned stimulus is joined with an unconditioned stimulus, with the result that a natural unconditioned response becomes associated with the conditioned stimulus, thereby becoming a conditioned response. In the famous example of Pavlov’s dog, the dog heard a bell ring just before each meal and eventually came to salivate at the sound of a bell rather than at the appearance of food.

In operant conditioning, the subject’s behaviors are reinforced by desirable results, punished by undesirable results, or extinguished by having no result. Reinforced behaviors will occur more frequently, while punished and extinguished behaviors will be performed less often. An example of operant conditioning is a rat learning to navigate a maze more quickly and efficiently after a number of attempts.

A Skinner box, used to study these concepts, is a box that houses an animal and offers both unconditioned and conditioned stimuli — such as colored lights and food, respectively — and response levers or keys that serve to monitor the animal’s behavior. For example, a Skinner box may be used to test classical conditioning in a bird by associating a red light with each feeding, eventually causing the bird to peck not only at food, but upon seeing the red light. A Skinner box may be fairly simple, with only one lever or key, or it may be quite complex, with a variety of stimuli and ways of monitoring response. The Skinner box has received criticism because it does not capture every nuance of the animal’s behavior; pushing the lever with a nose or a paw registers as the same response, for example, and light touches of the lever may not be recorded.

B. F. Skinner has been accused, notably by author Lauren Slater and by the Church of Scientology, of raising his daughter in a Skinner box, leading to her mental illness and suicide, but this is untrue. Skinner designed a special air-crib intended to make childcare easier, but he did not conduct psychological experiments on his daughter or abuse her. Deborah Skinner Buzan, Skinner’s daughter, is still alive and has refuted every point of these rumors.

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Radical behaviourism

December 30th, 2009

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Radical-behaviourism
nationmaster.com

Radical behaviorism is the philosophy that underlies the approach to psychology known as the experimental analysis of behavior, and is a model developed by B. F. Skinner. The term ‘radical behaviorism’ has also been associated with Skinner’s theories of human behavior and his political ideas.

Acceptance of mental life and introspection

Radical behaviorism is radical because Skinner, in contrast with the original behaviorist, John B. Watson, accepted private life as behavior. This position can be contrasted with the dualistic position that the causes of behavior and the locus of private life are immaterial and unobservable mental objects, as well as the complementary methodological behaviorist position that private life is to be excluded from consideration on the grounds that it is not publicly observable. Instead, the locus of private life, and the objects of self-knowledge, are held to be within the body.

Political Views

Skinner’s political writings emphasized his hopes that an effective and humane science of behavioral control – a behavioral technology – could solve human problems which were not solved by earlier approaches or were actively aggravated by advances in physical technology such as the atomic bomb.

Skinner was often accused of being a totalitarian, and it is not difficult to see why. In addition to his aspirations to state design, Skinner was a determinist, believing that all of our behavior is profoundly determined and influenced by the environment. In light of this, Skinner saw the problems of political control not as a battle of control versus freedom, but as choices of what kinds of control were used for what purposes. Skinner opposed the use of coercion, punishment and fear and supported the use of reinforcement. His stated goal was to prevent humanity from destroying itself.

Skinner’s book Walden Two presents a vision of a decentralized, localized society which applies a practical, scientific approach and futuristically advanced behavioral expertise to peacefully deal with social problems. As in Brave New World, the reader is presented with a controversy over methods of control in light of their results. Skinner’s utopia, like every other utopia or dystopia, is both a thought experiment and a rhetorical work. However, as a utopian Skinner is remarkably bland, in the end asserting little more than that behavioral technology offers alternatives to coercion, that good science applied right will help society, and that we would all be better off if we cooperated with each other peacefully. Nonetheless, radical behaviorism is often identified with horrifying techniques and a systematic disregard for the worth and ability of human beings. As a consequence, the somewhat saccharine and naive humanism of Skinner’s political views is often missed.

Science

Radical behaviorism inherits from behaviorism the position that the science of behavior is natural science, a belief that animal behavior can be studied profitably and compared with human behavior, a strong emphasis on the environment as cause of behavior, a denial that ghostly causation is a relevant factor in behavior, and a penchant for operationalizing. Its principal differences are an emphasis on operant conditioning, use of idiosyncratic terminology, a tendency to apply notions of reinforcement etc. to philosophy and daily life to a thoroughgoing, even obsessive, degree, and, particularly, a distinctly positive position on private experience.

Importantly, radical behaviorism embraces the genetic and biological endowment and ultimately evolved nature of the organism, while simply asserting that behavior is a distinct field of study with its own value. From this two neglected points issue: radical behaviorism is thoroughly compatible with biological and evolutionary approaches to psychology – in fact, as a proper part of biology – and radical behaviorism does not involve the claim that organisms are ‘tabula rasa,’ homogenous mush or black boxes with no genetic or physiological endowment.

Skinner’s psychological work focused on operant conditioning, with emphasis on the schedule of reinforcement as independent variable, and the rate of responding as dependent variable. Operant techniques are a venerable part of the toolbox of the psychobiologist, and many neurobiological theories – particularly regarding drug addiction – have made extensive use of reinforcement. Operant methodology and terminology has been used in much research on animal perception and concept formation – with the same topics, such as stimulus generalization, bearing importantly on operant conditioning. Skinner’s emphasis on outcomes and response rates naturally lends itself topics typically left to economics, as in behavioral economics. The field of operant conditioning can also be seen to interact with work on decision making, and had influence on AI and cognitive science.

Outgrowths

There are radical behaviorist schools of animal training, management, clinical practice (Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA) and education. Skinner’s political views have left their mark in small ways as principles adopted by a small handful of utopian communities such as Los Horcones, and in ongoing challenges to the hegemony of aversive techniques in control of human and animal behavior.

Radical behaviorism has generated numerous descendants. Examples of these include molar approaches associated with Richard Herrnstein and William Baum, Rachlin’s teleological behaviorism, William Timberlake’s behavior systems approach, and John Staddon’s theoretical behaviorism.

Arguably, one very important part of Skinner’s legacy has been omitted. That is cognitive science. Cognitive science was so particularly shaped by his disapproval that he could, with only a little perversity, be described one of its most influential forefathers.

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Behaviorism

December 30th, 2009

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

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Radical behaviorism

December 30th, 2009

http://www.fact-index.com/r/ra/radical_behaviorism.html
fact-index.com

Radical behaviorism is a name for the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. It is the philosophy that underlies the approach to psychology known as the experimental analysis of behavior. Radical behaviorism is not ‘radical’ (as is commonly assumed) because Skinner was particularly vociferous in his rejection of private (mental) life. Rather, it is ‘radical’ because Skinner completely accepted private life as behavior. This position can be contrasted with the dualistic position that the causes of behavior (and the locus of private life) are immaterial and unobservable mental objects, as well as the complementary methodological behaviorist position that private life is to be excluded from consideration on the grounds that it is not publicly observable. Skinner found certain mentalistic concepts to advert explicitly to immaterial, unobservable and dualistic causes of behavior; not believing these existed, he presented forceful criticisms. It is these criticisms which have received the most attention, contributing to the illusion that Skinner was not only an unabashed materialist and determinist (each of which he was,) but that he also denied the existence of a private life, a notion he called ‘foolish.’ In this Skinner differs profoundly from John B. Watson, whose simple ‘behaviorism’ is often confused with Skinner’s ‘radical behaviorism.’

The term ‘radical behaviorism’ has also been associated with Skinner’s ideas in two other areas: Skinner’s experimental psychology (also called behavior analysis, the experimental analysis of behavior, or EAB) and Skinner’s utopianism. Skinner’s psychological work focused on operant conditioning, with emphasis on the schedule of reinforcement as independent variable, and the rate of responding as dependent variable.

Skinner’s political science (better referred to as cultural design) writings emphasized his hopes that an effective and humane science of behavioral control (a ‘behavioral technology’) could solve human problems which were being actively aggravated by advances in physical technology (such as the atomic bomb.) Skinner was accused of being a totalitarian on the basis of these same writings (presumably on the basis that his suggestion amounted to use of unnatural, perhaps even insidious coercion to achieve ends which were covertly fascist.) In some cases, such as that of Noam Chomsky, this was a political smear tactic used successfully to advance competing points of view (and careers). In other cases, it was the result of legitimate misunderstanding. Neither outcome is surprising in light of Skinner’s unorthodoxy, the sensitivity of the topics he dealt with, and his difficulty in expressing his ideas without using language which was provocative and sometimes confusing, especially to someone who had no or only incomplete exposure to behaviorism (such as Chomsky).

However, enough is clear about Skinner that it is not difficult to see why he was not a totalitarian, even at his worst. Skinner was a determinist, believing that all of our behavior is profoundly determined and influenced by the environment (and, reciprocally, that our behavior determines our environment, the idea expressed in the name of operant conditioning.) Seeing this to be the case, Skinner saw the problems of political control not as a battle of control versus freedom, but as choices of what kinds of control were used and what changes they should bring about. Skinner opposed the use of coercion, punishment and fear (the same serving as the principal methods of the totalitarian state) and supported the use of reinforcement (the same principle which takes most of us to work every day). He wanted to prevent humanity from destroying itself while using little or no coercion or punishment, and beyond that had an agenda which was recognizably utilitarian, green, and even could be described as ‘libertarian’ in the sense that even in a determined system people can be held responsible for their actions, and social control can emphasize natural rather than contrived (read governmental) contingencies.

Skinner’s book Walden Two presents a vision of a decentralized, localized society which applies a fundamentally scientific approach together with a futuristically advanced understanding of behavior to peacefully eliminate numerous serious social problems. As in Brave New World, the reader is presented with a controversy over methods of control in light of their results. Skinner’s view naturally compels an acceptance of methods which are ostensibly both more effective and humane than those presently in use, while being no more controlling. Skinner’s utopia, like every other utopia or dystopia, is both a thought experiment (the techniques used in Walden Two do not actually exist any more than Newspeak or the technique it represents) and a piece of propaganda (a description to which Orwell’s masterful book, 1984, answers very well.) However, as a utopian Skinner is remarkably bland, in the end asserting little more than that behavioral technology offers alternatives to threat, imprisonment, execution and assassination, that good science applied right will help society in innumerable ways, and that we would all be better off if we cooperated with each other peacefully. Nonetheless, radical behaviorism is to this day erroneously identified with horrifying techniques (e.g., the technique used in Clockwork Orange, the violent abuses used to ‘reform’ troubled teenagers) and a systematic disregard for the worth and ability of human beings.

Radical behaviorism is generally associated with opinions on many other topics too numerous and complicated to cover fully here. It inherits from behaviorism the position that the science of behavior is natural science, a belief that animal behavior can be studied profitably and compared with human behavior, a strong emphasis on the environment as cause of behavior, a denial that ghostly causation is a relevant factor in behavior, and a penchant for operationalizing. Its principal differences are an emphasis on operant conditioning, use of idiosyncratic terminology, a tendency to apply notions of reinforcement etc. to philosophy and daily life to a thoroughgoing (even obsessive) degree, and, particularly, a distinctly positive position on private experience.

Importantly, radical behaviorism embraces the genetic and biological endowment (and ultimately evolved nature) of the organism, while simply asserting that behavior is a distinct field of study with its own value. From this two neglected points issue: radical behaviorism is thoroughly compatible with biological and evolutionary approaches to psychology (in fact Skinner viewed radical behaviorism as a subfield of biology) , and radical behaviorism does not involve the claim that organisms are ‘tabula rasa,’ homogenous mush or black boxes with no genetic or physiological endowment. In fact, there are other areas of interdisciplinary study which radical behaviorists have engaged in. Operant techniques are a venerable part of the toolbox of the psychobiologist, and many neurobiological theories – particularly regarding drug addiction – have made great use of the notion of reinforcement. Operant methodology and terminology has been used in much research on animal perception and concept formation – with the same topics, such as stimulus generalization, bearing importantly on operant conditioning. Emphasis on outcomes and response rates naturally dovetails with microeconomics, and a few literatures such as behavioral economics have grown out of that. The field of operant conditioning can also be seen to interact with work on decision making, and has a long history of influence on AI and cognitive science (including Marvin Minsky, whose early work included the Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer as well as an explicit dissection of the assignment of credit problem, early and modern reinforcement learning, and connectionism).

Radical behaviorism has generated numerous descendants. Among these outgrowths have been approaches associated with Herrnstein and Baum, Rachlin’s teleological behaviorism, Neuringer’s indeterministic variant, Timberlake’s behavior systems approach, and Staddon’s (politically anti-Skinnerian, but no less Skinner-influenced) theoretical behaviorism, among others (please include others!) There are radical behaviorist schools of animal training, management, clinical practice and education. Skinner’s political views have left their mark in small ways as principles adopted by a small handful of utopian communities such as Los Horcones, and in ongoing challenges to the hegemony of aversive techniques in control of human and animal behavior.

Arguably, one very important part of Skinner’s legacy has been omitted. That is cognitive science. Cognitive science was so particularly provoked by Skinner and so particularly shaped by his disapproval that he could properly be described one of its most influential forefathers. To this day many papers in cognitive psychology are labeled so by the ritual destruction of a behavioristic straw man, and to this day it is often difficult to discern any unifying principles in cognitive science other than opposition to behaviorism as it was characterized in the first rhetorical blasts of the ‘cognitive Revolution.’ This opposition is easily as integral to cognitive psychology as the internal state, the unconscious process, and the computer analogy.

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Blockhead Behaviorism B. F. Skinner and the Perversion of a Science

December 30th, 2009

http://flowstate.homestead.com/skinner.html
flowstate.homestead.com

At the turn of the 19th century, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov had a problem. His special interest was the physiology of digestion, the biological mechanics that tied brain to gut, from the perception of food to a salivating gland. It didn’t of course work the way he thought. The reflexive aspects of the digestive system, from gastric to salivary secretions was not hardwired like a kneejerk. It was plastic, malleable, and dependent upon an animal’s vicarious experience with the world. The digestive process, at once so simple and reduceable to a cantilever of glands and muscles, was tethered to a complex and indecipherable brain. Pavlov surmised that the simple salivary response provided a doorway to the understanding of the labryinthine neural processes that modulated the aspects of not only such ‘respondent’ or classically conditioned behavior, but perhaps behavior in all its manifestations.

Through countless experiments on his hapless subjects , dogs, Pavlov cobbled together a theory of learning and the brain. It was, of course, wrong. But it was ‘right’ to be called a theory because it was testable, or more specifically, falsifiable.

Pavlov’s work represented one of the first examples of a learning ‘theory’. A learning theory is a series of interlocking conjectures about how experience influences behavior. These conjectures necessarily involved processes or mechanisms that make the model for behavior work. But with inference comes the means to test if it is true. Without the ability to test an inference, a scientific theory can never be. The mettle of a theory and whether we may even designate it a theory depends upon our ability to test the key inferences that make its predictions work. An ‘effective’ or robust theory in turn emerges when we can test it logically and empirically from every level, every perspective. This definition of a scientific theory, the work of the distinguished 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper, was met by Pavlov’s theory of learning, and with but one major exception, every theory of learning that was to follow. The path was laden with dead ends, misteps, and contentiousness, but progress began to be made.

Ivan Pavlov and happy, willing subject.
But progress demanded a special manner of thinking, that as with all the biological sciences, required a bit of generalization from knowledge of simpler but similar things. The basic processes of learning,like the essential aspects of ingestion, respiration, and life itself were assumed to be not dissimilar across species. Thus the root essentials of learning were presumably shared between species, and the dependent measure of learning, namely behavior, was like the shadings of light to an astronomer, the stuff that theories are made of. So learning theories met the logical demands of science, were derived root and branch from an ‘ethological’ (animal experiments) perspective, and because they emerged from an observation of non-verbal behavior unclouded by the metaphors of speech, were ‘behavioristic’ in nature.

The learning theories that would follow Pavlov, from Thorndike, Guthrie, Tolman, and Hull to the modern biological learning theories of Bolles, Toates, and Berridge were all of necessity behaviorisms, and were bound to the deductive method of hypothesis testing that drove the progress of the biological and physical sciences.

Yet what the popular and even adademic imagination knows of behaviorism is not a deductive and theoretical approach to learning that informs the way we look at ourselves and our behavior, but rather an inductive and atheoretical approach that aims to supplant our knowledge of self and behavior. This intellectual certitude, and perhaps arrogance was not a recipe for vigorous and fruitful debate, but for a bitter and contentious struggle that has marred and retarded the development of psychology to this day.

The Perversion of Behaviorism

It started innocently enough with a unique procedure and apparatus for the recording of behavior. A little box, fitted with a roll of paper and a depressable key could provide a cumulative record, that like a siesmograph, could record the frequency of activity as the animal pressed the key to ‘work’ for food. Adjust the timing of reward by altering the dependencies between reward and the number and/or interval between key strokes, and the data would come out differently, demonstrating how behavior is shaped by schedules or contingencies of reward or reinforcement. The psychologist B. F. Skinner took this raw data and ran with it, or as he called it, ‘fled’ from the laboratory. The ethological data of laboratory animals was replicated, with no small success, in the real workaday world of humans. The problem though is that when you move a level of description from animals to humans, humans will in turn interject the metaphors of common language, and metaphors have a habit of becoming an unfalsifiable ‘reality’. So the problem Skinner faced was that the wholesale transfer of a behavioristic methodology to human affairs compromised behaviorism, since unfalsifiable mentalisms of need, drive, and desire got in the way of cause and effect. And it was the realities of cause and effect, the facts of behavior that ultimately mattered and were all that counted. Because the mentalisms that populated common speech were unfalsifiable, Skinner simply banished them, and the methodology of his brand of behaviorism, or a ‘methodological’ behaviorism became by virtue of its intrusion in common affairs, the behaviorism that is popularly known today in notoriety and fame.

B. F. Skinner: A philosopher for the birds?
By transposing behaviorism to human affairs, Skinner unwittingly changed the rules that made behaviorism a bonafide science. Removed from its ethological roots and the deductive principles that allowed it to test the boundaries of knowledge, behaviorism became merely guided by the dead hand of fact gathering. It was psychology as if imagined by Price-Waterhouse, a colorless tableau of ordered facts that only an accountant would call beautiful.

Confronted by the specious metaphorical realities of common sense or ‘folk’ psychology, Skinner chose to avoid them entire. But the vast majority of psychologists continue to use them, and vault a myriad mentalisms into an ever morphing kaleidoscope of unfalsifiable realities we call contemporary psychology.

The Clash of Antipodes

The supreme value of science is that it allows us to separate out words and their meaning by providing us with the ability to determine the literal from the aliterative, the metaphorical from the real. Human speech is profoundly metaphorical, and we often transpose words to others to suggest meanings they never had. Thus we speak of engine horse power, cool mints, and splitting headaches, yet because we know the nature of engines, mints, and headaches are able to see that their descriptions are metaphorical and not real.

However, the endeavor to limit the metaphors you use does not entail the ability to determine what is metaphorical and what is not. You can’t after all have a witchhunt without knowing who the witches are. By decrying the use of inferred mentalistic forces, Skinner did not provide the tools to determine their metaphorical content; or in other words, whether they can be falsified or not. To do that requires a behaviorism, a theoretical behaviorism.

Variable Ratio

To illustrate this, let us use a Skinnerian example. In the language of Skinnerian or ‘operant’ conditioning, behavior occurs and is modulated in rate and form by its functional and/or temporal dependencies to reward or reinforcement. Press a key five times to get a reinforcer, and the resulting pattern of behavior is due to a FR 5 or fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement. .Similarly, wait ten minutes for the bus and your resulting behavior or lack of it is due to a FI 10 or fixed interval schedule.

On the other hand, variable schedules (VR) of reinfrcement occur when we don’t quite know what step of our behavior will be followed by a reinforcer. The reinforcer may occur after any response or on average after any set series of responses, or all at any minute, any time. Strange thing though about variable schedules, they bring out the metaphor in all of us. Press a lever down five times for a reward and you are a bored pieceworker. Make the number of pulls variable and vary as well the size of the reward, and you are an energized and addicted slot player. Make the variance more fine grained, with every nuance of behavior followed by a randomized and important event, and like an artist, athlete, or surgeon engaging in the touch and go of their craft, behavior vaults to a higher consciousness, flow or peak experience, self-actualization, or intrinsic motivation.

A Skinnerian would see merely superfluity and the obfuscation of the facts of behavior, namely that variable schedules correlate with high rates of behavior. The rest was specious, unprovable, unnecessary. A humanistic or ’self determination’ (SDT) theoriest would disagree, and say that such states were real, irreduceable and non-metaphorical things, that there are indeed unique flow states, intrinsic motivating processes, and peak experiences.

To a Skinnerian, learning is to be effective, to measure in economic terms behavior and its results, and by coordinating them just so making the economic measure of man. To a humanist or SDT theorist, learning is affective, a thing in itself, unfalsifiable, and unmeasureable in economic terms But between them both is the unbridgeable barrier of metaphor, made so because one party would abandon theory, and the other, misinterpret it.

Rainbows

Science represents the endless quest to separate the essential from the derived. The colors of the rainbow, the nucleotides of DNA, and the structure of matter itself represent the modulation and permutation of simple things. Each of the five senses make palettes of sound, color, and taste from the permutations of simple neural inputs, or rudimentary sensations of bitter and sweet, of red, green and blue, of simple vibrations of sound. The conjectures of science explained the five of them, and have dismissed the sixth. But the seventh and last sense has now been discovered. It is no less than learning itself.

Learning is more than an effective thing, it is an affective thing, and to understand this basic truth gives us comand of the most important and human sense of them all. Although Skinnerian behaviorists would ignore it, and humanistic psychologists deny it, how we learn is not less sensual than any of the senses. We know this from behaviorism, a true theoretical behaviorism, the fact that we are as sensitive to the problems or discrepancies of our world as our irises are to light, and our ears to vibrations of sound. Tune them just right and you have the real pleasure of fulfillment, satisfaction, and pride, but misunderstand or misapply them, and you have the pain of boredom, dissatisfaction, and despair.

Above the arguments is the light of scientific truth. Whether or not psychologists or behaviorists for that matter can learn from the behaviorisms of science only time will tell.

… to Dr. Mezmer
Author’s Note: for more essays on the nature and implications of ‘bio-behavioral’ learning theory, please go to the ‘Essential Mezmer’ section of my website. For a much longer academic version of my argument, the following recent article (introduction copied below) by the neuro-psychologist Kent Berridge chronicles the progress of learning theory from its beginnings to its present form that recognizes the crucial importance of ‘affect’ in human learning. Please note that although Berridge notes the ‘demise’ of behaviorism, he is discussing the a-theoretical ‘methodological’ or ‘radical’ brand of behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, not the theoretical behaviorisms of Thorndike, Hull, Tolman, Bolles, Toates, etc. that are at the root of modern biological learning theories, including Berridge’s own. One more note, the difference between a methodological and radical behaviorism lies in what each brand of behaivorism considers to be ‘behavior’ Methodological behaviorism concerns itself with primarily ‘overt’ responses that are subject to easy measurment, whereas radical behaviorism admits as well molecular or biological responses as an equally important subset of behavior. Both however eschew theory, which is in mine and Berridge’s opinion, a serious error
…to Kent Berridge’s site
excerpt from:

Reward Learning: Reinforcement, Incentives, and Expectations.

Kent C. Berridge

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Behaviorism: Encyclopedia II – Behaviorism – B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism

December 29th, 2009

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Behaviorism_-_BF_Skinner_and_radical_behaviorism/id/615847
experiencefestival.com

Behaviorism: Encyclopedia II – Behaviorism – B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism

Behaviorism – B.F. Skinner and radical behaviorism

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 is credited with having founded a new version of psychological science, which has come to be called behavior analysis or the experimental analysis of behavior after variations on the subtitle to his 1938 work The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis Of Behavior.

Behaviorism – Definition

Behaviorism – 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) and others. 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.

Behaviorism – Relation to language

Although derided as “unprovable” and “scientistic” by Noam Chomsky, Skinner’s treatment of verbal behavior has been applied with great success in several areas, including the treatment of autism.

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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Babies in Boxes

December 29th, 2009

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199511/babies-in-boxes
psychologytoday.com
By Robert Epstein

What would the ideal crib be like? Would it be a drafty cage with no top? Or a cradle that gives you back pains when you pick up your baby?

These two unlikely designs–the crib and the cradle–have been about all we’ve had. But in 1944, psychologist B. F. Skinner thought he had a better idea. Adults sleep in adult-sized rooms. Why not let babies sleep in baby-sized rooms? So Skinner replaced a cage style crib with the first baby-sized room–the “aircrib.” Heated and humidified for baby’s comfort, it put the infant at waist-height, so it doubled as a changing table. Its first occupant: Skinner’s daughter Deborah.

This unique crib made its public debut in, of all places, the Ladies’ Home Journal, in October 1945. A headline proclaimed, “The Machine Age Comes to the Nursery!” and a psychiatrist lauded the new crib as a “tremendously interesting idea.”

Plans for building aircribs abounded. One prospective manufacturer slyly dubbed its version the “Heir Conditioner.”

But the aircrib didn’t catch on. Skinner’s famous lab studies of rats and pigeons were often conducted in small chambers called “Skinner Boxes.” Uh oh. Some people confused the aircrib with the Skinner Box and assumed Skinner was conducting experiments on his children. By the 1960s, rumor had it that daughter Deborah was psychotic.

In all, perhaps 300 children have been raised in Skinner-type cribs. We recently tracked down more than 50 of them. The outcome? Positive results across the board. All of the children had normal health, and their parents praised the crib for its safety, warmth, and convenience. As for Deborah, she grew up normally, married a professor, and is now a successful artist in England.

Alas, the aircrib probably doesn’t have much of a future. Major companies have little incentive to mass-produce it because it can’t be protected by patents. (After all, you can’t get a patent on a small room.) Built one by one, with independent heating and ventilation systems, aircribs are too expensive to become commonplace. Back to the cage!

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Room with a view: peering out of an aircrib.

Robert Epstein, Ph.D., & Michelle Bailey, San Diego State University & Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies

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B.F. Skinner 1904-1990

December 29th, 2009

http://www.loshorcones.org/psychology/skinner.html
loshorcones.org

“What you have done have been one of the nicest things in my life to reflect on and I thank you all.”

Written by B.F. Skinner to Los Horcones in a letter dated November, 20, 1989.

“Faced with the prediction of what life will be like when critical resources are nearly exhausted and the environment irreversibly polluted, it seems irresponsible simply to teach young people to enjoy themselves in less threatening ways. But building a new culture from the very beginning may be our only hope.”
B.F. Skinner, 1987, p. 12

About Los Horcones B. F. Skinner said:

“They do a wonderful job with their children. They make an effort not top punish children, and it shows, I’ve never seen a group of kids who so genuinely loved each other and were so cooperative with each other. Nobody is quite as systematic about it as they are. They are intelligent and dedicated…”

B. F. Skinner, The New York Times, Science section. Nov. 7, 1989

Burrhus Frederic Skinner is considered the most important psychologist of the twentieth century. He has also been the most misunderstood.

He was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, a small railroad town in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. He was the elder of two sons born to William Skinner and Madge Burrhus.

During his life, Skinner established and promoted a science of behavior which he named “Experimental Analysis of Behavior”and its philosophy Radical Behaviorism. Unfortunately, this science and philosophy have been misunderstood.

Skinner did not accept an S-R (stimulus-response) psychology because it does not explain complex behavior. A more complete explanation of behavior needs to take into account the consequences of behavior. Skinner emphasized the selective function of the consequences of the environment over the behavior (we behave as we do because of the consequences we receive by doing so).

Classical Behaviorism of John B. Watson (1878-1958) was substituted by Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism.

The Experimental Analysis of Behavior gave the basis for the Applied Behavior Analysis which consisted in the application of behavior principles to the solution of personal and social problems. Los Horcones is applying behavior analysis to cultural design.

In 1931, B. F. Skinner received a Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard University.

In 1936, he married Yvonne Blue to whom he remained married till his last day. They had two daughters: Julie and Deborah.

From 1936 to 1945 he worked at the Psychology Department of the University of Minnesota.

In 1948 he returned to Harvard University where he worked till his illness did not allowed him to continue.

B.F. Skinner died at 86 years. on August 20, 1990.

What B. F. Skinner was not.

It is very sad that most all the textbooks in psychology misrepresent B. F. Skinner. It is sad that most of the professors continue misrepresenting him.

If you are a psychology student and listen to your professor mispresenting Skinner, please give him/her our e-mail address, We can recommend him/her literature about Skinner’s work that will help him/her to clarify his/her misunderstandings.

1. Skinner was not an stimulus-response psychologist. He was not based on the conditioned reflexes to explain human behavior.

2. He was not against democracy nor in favor of totalitarism. Skinner wanted a society where citizens could collectively manage their own affairs rather than depending on elites. Walden Two is a society that promotes citizen participation in the face-to-face decision-making processes. See Personocracy.

3. Skinner was not a psychologist who considered people as black boxes, this is to say, without anything inside, without thoughts and feelings.

4. He did not deny the existence of feelings. He just said feelings are products of our interaction with our environment. Skinner was concerned about feelings and thinking as well as other affective and cognitive behaviors. Feelings and thoughts are not self-initiated; something happens that makes us feel or think something. For him and all behaviorists, feelings are a product of our interaction with our environment.

5. Skinner was not an environmentalist who considered people merely as product of the environment. He, on the contrary, considered the relation behavior-environment to be bidirectional. We interact with the environment and as a result our behavior changes and we change the environment. We are not slaves of circumstances. We are not puppets nor robots.

6. He did not propose a despotic or manipulative control of human behavior. “Walden Two” the model of society proposed by Skinner is humanistic, deeply concerned in individuals as persons.

7. He did not deny human freedom and dignity. He said that the environment (social and non-social) affect us and that we also affect the environment. Skinner said that our behavior is not independent from what happens in the environment, that the behavior-environment relationship is continuous and reciprocal. In relation to dignity, he said that our personal achievements are not only products of ourselves but also from all those people who have had an influence in our life. Nobody has made his/herself alone.

B. F. Skinner was a prolific writer, he published 19 books and hundreds of articles.

Books written by B.F. Skinner:

1. The Behavior of Organisms: an experimental analysis. 1938. New York: Appleton -Century-Crofts.

2. Walden Two. 1948. New York: Macmillan.

3. Science and Human Behavior. 1953. New York: Macmillan.

4. Verbal Behavior. 1957. New York: Appleton -Century-Crofts.

5. Schedules of Reinforcement. 1957. New York: Appleton -Century-Crofts

6. Cumulative Record: a selection of Papers. 1959. New York: Appleton -Century-Crofts

7. The Analysis of Behavior (with James G. Holland). 1961. New York: McGraw-Hill.

8. The Technology of Teaching. 1968. New York: Appleton -Century-Crofts

9. Contingencies of Reinforcement: a theoretical analysis. 1969.New York: Appleton -Century-Crofts

10. Beyond Freedom and Dignity. 1971.New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

11. About Behaviorism. 1974.New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

12. Particulars of My Life (First part of his autobiography).1976. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

13. Reflections on Behaviorism and Society. 1978. Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall.

14. The Shaping of a Behaviorist (2nd part of his autobiography). 1979 .New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

15. Notebooks. 1980 .Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall.

16. Enjoy Old Age (with Marguerite Vaughan). 1983. New York: W.W. Norton.

17. A Matter of Consequences (3rd and last part of his autobiography). 1983. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

18. Upon Further Reflection. 1987. Englewood Cliffs,NJ: Prentice-Hall.

19. Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. 1989. Columbus: Merrill Publishing.

Among the numerous distinctions B. F. Skinner received are:

- 1958 the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association.

- 1968, the National Medal of Science.

-1971, the International Award of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation for Mental Retardation.

- 1972, the Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Society.

- 1978, the Award for Distinguished contributions to Educational Research and Development, from the American Educational Research Association.

- 1990 , the first American Psychological Citation for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology.

Relationship of Los Horcones with B.F. Skinner:

Children from Comunidad Los Horcones visiting B. F. Skinner at his office in 1986. It was located in William James Hall, at Harvard University. Massachusetts, U.S.A.

From the very beginning of Los Horcones, we established an epistolar relationship with Skinner which lasted until 1990, year in which he died. He wrote to the members of Los Horcones and wanted to be informed about the progress and problems of the community.

He used to write in French to one of the members about more personal matters. He talked about his feelings and explained with enthusiasm some of his experiments with pigeons.

Members of Los Horcones on a symposium on about Walden Two along with B.F. Skinner (on the microphone) and Sidney W. Bijou (far left).

Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA)

Los Angeles, California, 1985

Members of Los Horcones met with him on several occasions, usually at the annual conventions of the Association for Behavior Analysis (ABA) and the American Psychological Association (APA). We always met with him. He liked to see our children, how they behave. About them he said the following to the Arizona Republic Newspaper:

He usually asked us to take him to the airport on our old and well kept WV van saying “It’s like in the good old days”.

We had the opportunity to record several interviews with him and a video tape about Walden Two.

We are about to publish a book of quotations about Skinner (it is written in English and Spanish). Most of these quotations related with his political, social, philosophical and humanistic ideas.

If you are interested in a copy, please write to us.

Fred Skinner at his house in Cambridge Massachusetts, kissing good-bye Amin (one of the children from Los Horcones).

Note.

B. F. Skinner is not a guru to Los Horcones. We are not doing what we do because we follow his ideas. A scientist is not a guru and Skinner was a scientist. A scientist contributes with data about some natural event. Skinner contributed with the concept of human behavior. Many other behavioral scientists have contributed with data. In Los Horcones we apply the data of a science to which many scientists have contributed including members of Los Horcones.

If you think that a guru is a person who teaches another, then Los Horcones has many gurus.

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