B. F. Skinner

• Born: March 20, 1904
• Birthplace: Susquehanna, Pennsylvania
• Died: August 18, 1990
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

American psychologist

By developing a variety of effective techniques for behavioral modification, Skinner radically transformed the science of psychology and thereby exerted a profound influence in the fields of psychiatry and pedagogy. His ideas, moreover, have been popularized through nontechnical writings of his own, including the utopian novel Walden Two.

Areas of achievement Psychiatry and psychology, education

Early Life

In the spring of 1902, William Arthur Skinner and Grace Madge Burrhus were married in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. He was a twenty-five-year-old attorney with political aspirations, while she was a twenty-one-year-old legal secretary of remarkable beauty. The first of the couple’s two children was formally named Burrhus Frederic Skinner. He was, however, soon called “Fred” by everyone. A second son was born two and a half years later. Mr. Skinner did not believe that children should be baptized until they were old enough to appreciate the full significance of this sacred rite. In the case of his elder son, that day never arrived. Despite all attempts to indoctrinate him into the Presbyterian faith, the boy became a freethinker by the time he reached puberty.

Throughout his twelve years at grade and high school, Skinner proved himself to be academically gifted in a variety of areas. He was extraordinarily adept not only in mathematics and other scientific subjects but also in the humanities. Above all, Skinner loved literature, and he even began to write stories and poems of his own at an early age. Although the public school system in Susquehanna offered no courses in music within its educational curriculum, Skinner nevertheless managed to accrue much expertise in this area as well. His mother, who was an accomplished amateur musician in her own right, arranged for him to take piano lessons early in life, and he later studied the saxophone of his own volition when an opportunity to receive free instruction presented itself. Skinner was sufficiently proficient on both instruments to be paid for performing on them. For a time he was a saxophonist in a jazz band that played at various dance halls and was also a pianist in another group that provided background music for silent films at a local motion-picture theater. In his junior and senior years in high school, furthermore, Skinner discovered the world of art and began to paint watercolors and draw in charcoal. He thereupon put his artistic talent to use for monetary purposes by lettering advertising show cards. His chief job during his high school years, however, was at a shoe store, where he developed a speciality of fitting arch supports. Throughout his life, Skinner was to retain this penchant for putting his expertise to practical use.

When Skinner was graduated from high school, he ranked second in a class of seven seniors. Oddly enough, both of his parents achieved a similar class ranking at their own respective high school graduations. Much to the disappointment of his mother, Skinner was short in stature when he reached maturity. His bone structure, however, was delicate to the point of being birdlike and was admirably suited to his slender build. Skinner’s facial features were, moreover, both regular and pleasing. These physical traits, including a full hairline and a slim figure, were to change very little throughout the years that followed his graduation from high school.

It had always been assumed that Skinner would go on to college, and he duly matriculated at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, for the purpose of acquiring a bachelor’s degree in English. His college years proved to be socially pleasant and academically profitable. Despite the fact that Skinner never shied away from taking difficult courses, he still managed to maintain a grade point average sufficiently high to qualify him for election to Phi Beta Kappa. Ironically, he had previously written a piece for the college paper in which he contemptuously dismissed the majority of its members as “key chasers.”

During his college years, Skinner’s prime interest lay in creative writing, and to further these skills he went to Vermont in the summer between his junior and senior years for the purpose of studying at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. There he met Robert Frost, who lived nearby at Ripton, and the celebrated poet suggested that the young man submit some of his work to him for the sake of a critical appraisal. On his return to Hamilton College, he sent Frost three short stories and received a warm letter of encouragement in response. He thereupon resolved to pursue a career as a freelance writer. After his graduation from Hamilton College in 1926, Skinner moved back into his parents’ house and built for himself a study where he could work undisturbed. About a year later, however, it became evident to him that his writings were totally devoid of significant content. After a feeble attempt to become a journalist, he finally decided to abandon his literary ambitions entirely for the sake of a career in psychology. Admitted as a graduate student at Harvard University for the fall semester of 1928, Skinner first spent a few months in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he led the customary bohemian life, and then toured several countries in Western Europe, part of the time in the company of his parents.

Life’s Work

Skinner had always been interested in human behavior. In his endeavor to become a writer, he read very extensively and gradually came to the conclusion that psychology is superior to literature as a method of investigating this topic. It was, above all, the writings of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov on conditioned reflexes and those of John Broadus Watson on the new psychology of behaviorism that particularly intrigued him. Oddly enough, Bertrand Russell’s articles attacking behaviorism, published in various magazines during the 1920’s, served only to strengthen Skinner’s commitment to this doctrine and its basic premise that animal and human behavior may be explained entirely in terms of responses to objectively observable external stimuli. Skinner henceforth never wavered in his adherence to the tenet that behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences. Owing to his boyhood fondness for observing animal life and tinkering with mechanical devices, he was, moreover, ideally suited to devise laboratory experiments aimed at the conditioning of rats and pigeons through behavioral technology.

Even though the Harvard Graduate School curriculum in psychology was predominantly mentalist in orientation, Skinner encountered few obstacles in completing the requirements for the master’s degree in 1930 and for the doctorate in 1931. He was able to remain at Harvard as a National Research Council Fellow for the next three years and as a Harvard Junior Fellow for an additional two years. In 1936, Skinner joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota and soon thereafter married a young lady named Yvonne Blue, who had majored in English at the University of Chicago. Two daughters were subsequently born, Julie in 1938 and Deborah in 1944. During World War II, Skinner worked on a project sponsored by the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development in which he trained pigeons to guide missiles and torpedoes to their targets, but owing to official skepticism this scheme was never actually implemented. In 1945, he accepted an appointment at Indiana University as chair of its Psychology Department. Three years later, Skinner joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he became Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology in 1953. In the mid-1960’s, Skinner terminated his research activities to devote all of his time to writing and lecturing. He eventually retired, in 1975, with the honorary title of professor emeritus.

Skinner’s first major publication, essentially a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, appeared in 1938 under the title The Behavior of Organisms. Most noteworthy among his other professional writings are Science and Human Behavior (1953), Verbal Behavior (1957), and The Technology of Teaching (1968). The lay public first became aware of his work through an article entitled “Baby in a Box” that was published in the October, 1945, issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. There, Skinner describes how he reared his infant daughter Deborah in a temperature-controlled air crib that came to be popularly known as a “Skinner-Box.” Skinner became even more widely known through the publication of Walden Two in 1948. This controversial utopian novel is essentially a fictional elaboration of the oft-quoted proposition made by Watson in 1925, in which he declared, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select doctor, lawyer, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities.” It was not until 1971, however, that Skinner offered the public a comprehensive nonfictional account of his views on the application of behavioral technology to social planning in a book entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity, a work that became the subject of a cover story in the September 20, 1971, issue of Time magazine. His efforts at popular exposition were to culminate in 1974 with the publication of About Behaviorism, in which he presents a masterful defense of the behaviorist position in psychology.

Throughout his career, Skinner, like his compatriots Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford, manifested a characteristically American propensity to translate ideas into practical use for the benefit of the masses. Far from content to write theoretically about designing new cultures, he worked with great dedication over the years to transform the methods of instruction traditionally employed by educational institutions both in the United States and abroad. To this end, Skinner insisted that all instruction, whether in the form of textbooks or teaching machines, be based on two fundamental principles: first, incremental learning (that is, the material to be taught is broken down into such small steps as to preclude the possibility of error on the part of the pupil), and second, immediacy of reinforcement (the student is routinely reassured that his answers are correct after the completion of each of these small steps). Whereas it is theoretically possible to employ negative reinforcement in the pedagogical process, Skinner is totally opposed to the use of punishment and insists that the bestowal of rewards is a far more effective means of social conditioning. This aversion to negative reinforcement appears to have had its roots in his early childhood, a period during which neither of his parents employed punishment as a disciplinary measure. (The time when his mother washed his mouth out with soap for telling a lie constitutes a solitary exception.) Skinner prefers to designate his method of behavior modification as “operant conditioning” to distinguish it from “reflex conditioning.” The essential distinction between these two methods is that the subject experiences the one as voluntary and the other as involuntary. In contrast to the automatic nature of reflex behavior, Skinner asserts that “operant behavior is felt to be under the control of the behaving person and has traditionally been attributed to an act of will.” The term “operant,” moreover, underscores the fact that the process of conditioning espoused by Skinner is entirely overt, observable, and measurable. The efficacy of operant conditioning was perhaps most strikingly demonstrated by Skinner’s own success in teaching pigeons to play table tennis. The merit of the Skinnerian principle that behavior can be predicted and controlled in terms of its consequences has also been amply vindicated by his numerous disciples in such fields as sociology, psychiatry, and penology, who have applied it in their endeavors to solve a wide variety of societal problems.

Significance

Skinner has always been a controversial figure in the field of psychology because the behaviorist movement itself is controversial. Since its theoretical frame of reference excludes all consideration of consciousness and introspection, it constitutes a radical departure from the long-established mentalist orientation of traditional psychology. Even though the behaviorist movement has antecedents in the work of certain European psychologists, the first comprehensive explication of its basic tenets was set forth by Watson in a series of lectures given at Columbia University during the winter of 1912-1913. Watson’s views enjoyed a degree of notoriety from the outset, but it is primarily because of the research activities on the part of Skinner and his collaborators that behaviorism has finally attained academic respectability. It has, however, won relatively few formal adherents outside the United States and may consequently be viewed as a characteristically American phenomenon. The objective of transforming psychology into a scientifically rigorous discipline through the elimination of all subjective factors is, moreover, another manifestation of the pragmatic temperament that is the common denominator of so many individuals who have made significant contributions to the intellectual climate in the United States. With respect to Skinnerian operant conditioning itself, its current popularity as a means of behavior modification stems in large measure from the widespread dissatisfaction with the ineffectual procedures employed in conventional psychotherapy. Through the systematic manipulation of the consequences of previous behavior, operant conditioning has proven to be far less time-consuming and costly than those methods based on the attainment of self-knowledge on the part of the individual being treated. Because of this, Skinner has become the most influential psychologist that the United States has thus far produced.

Bibliography

Demorest, Amy. Psychology’s Grand Theorists: How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Demorest examines the lives and ideas of Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Rogers to discover how their divergent schools of psychology originated in part from their personal experiences.

Geiser, Robert L. Behavior Mod and the Managed Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976. A work that relates how Skinner’s concept of operant conditioning has been applied to societal problems. It focuses on the uses of behavior modification in schools, prisons, hospitals, industry, and elsewhere.

Kinkade, Kathleen. A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community. New York: William Morrow, 1974. A candid assessment of the problems encountered at Twin Oaks, a 123-acre farm situated in the Piedmont region of Virginia, where an attempt to establish a commune modeled after the utopian society depicted in Walden Two was initiated in 1967. Written by one of its founders and accompanied by an optimistic preface by Skinner.

O’Donohue, William, and Kyle E. Ferguson. The Psychology of B. F. Skinner. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001. Chronicles Skinner’s life and his contributions to psychology, including his experimental research and behavioral principles.

Sagal, Paul T. Skinner’s Philosophy. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981. The author persuasively argues that Skinner’s philosophy has been unjustifiably neglected by both professional philosophers and psychologists alike. This perceptive analysis will be especially helpful to those readers about to embark on a study of Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

Skinner, B. F. Particulars of My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. Skinner’s own account of his early life from the time of his birth in 1904 to his matriculation as a graduate student of psychology at Harvard University in 1928. Includes intimate portraits of his parents and grandparents as well as a detailed record of his intellectual and sexual maturation.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Shaping of a Behaviorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Here, Skinner delineates his intellectual and professional development from the time of his arrival at Harvard University as a graduate student to his return as tenured member of its faculty some twenty years later. Especially noteworthy are Skinner’s extensive comments dealing with the air crib that he designed for his daughter Deborah as well as those pertaining to the ideology that underlies the utopian society depicted in Walden Two.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Matter of Consequences. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Spanning a period of more than three decades, this volume is intended as the final installment of Skinner’s autobiography and constitutes an apologia for both his life and work. Much of the information purveyed here pertains to his lifelong interests in music, literature, drama, and art.

Weigel, John A. B. F. Skinner. Boston: Twayne, 1977. An excellent introduction to Skinner’s scientific and philosophical works that also offers a reasoned response to his critics. A brief biographical sketch precedes the author’s discussion of Skinner’s ideas.

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