Radical behaviorism according to B. F. Skinner

TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

Radical behaviorism describes the views of B. F. Skinner, an influential figure in American psychology since the 1930s. Skinner argued that most behavior is controlled by its consequences; he invented an apparatus for observing the effects of consequences, advocated a technology of behavior control, and believed that everyday views about the causes of behavior were an obstacle to its true understanding.

Introduction

According to B. F. Skinner , the behavior of an organism is a product of current and past environmental consequences and genetic endowment. Since little can be done, at least by psychology, about genetic endowment, Skinner focused on those things that could be changed or controlled: the immediate consequences of behavior. By consequences, Skinner meant the results or effects that a particular behavior (a class of responses, or “”) produces. There are many ways to open a door, for example, but since each one allows a person to walk to the next room, one would speak of a “door-opening” operant. The consequences not only define the class of responses but also determine how often members of the class are likely to occur in the future. This was termed the law of effect by early twentieth-century American psychologist Edward L. Thorndike, whose work Skinner refined.

Skinner analyzed behavior by examining the antecedents and consequences that control any specific class of responses in the individual organism. From this view, he elaborated a psychology that encompassed all aspects of animal and human behavior, including language. By the late 1970s, historians of psychology ranked Skinner’s work as the second most significant development in psychology since World War II; the general growth of the field was ranked first. Three journals arose to publish work in the Skinnerian tradition: Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and Behaviorism. Moreover, an international organization, the Association for Behavior Analysis, was formed, with its own journal.

Controlling Variables

Skinner theorized that there are several kinds of consequences, or effects. Events that follow behavior and produce an increase in the rate or frequency of the behavior are termed . In ordinary language, they might be called rewards, but Skinner avoided this expression because he defined reinforcing events in terms of the effects they produced (their rate of occurrence) rather than the alleged feelings they induced (for example, pleasure). To attribute the increase in rate of response produced by reinforcement to feelings of pleasure would be regarded by Skinner as an instance of mentalism—the of behavior to a feeling rather than to an event occurring in the environment. Other consequences that follow a behavior produce a decrease in the rate of behavior. These are termed punishers. Skinner strongly objected to the use of punishment as a means to control behavior because it elicited aggression and produced dysfunctional emotional responses such as striking back and crying in a small child. Consequences (reinforcers and punishers) may be presented following a behavior (twenty dollars for building a doghouse, for example, or an electric shock for touching an exposed wire) or taken away (a fine for speeding, the end of a headache by taking aspirin). Consequences may be natural (tomatoes to eat after a season of careful planting and watering) or contrived (receiving a dollar for earning an A on a test).

Reinforcing and punishing consequences are one example of controlling variables. Events that precede behaviors are also controlling variables and determine under what circumstances certain behaviors are likely to appear. Events occurring before a response occurs are called discriminative stimuli because they come to discriminate in favor of a particular piece of behavior. They set the occasion for the behavior and make it more likely to occur. For example, persons trying to control their eating are told to keep away from the kitchen except at mealtimes. Being in the kitchen makes it more likely that the person will eat something, not simply because that is where the food is kept but also because being in the kitchen is one of the events that has preceded previous eating and therefore makes eating more likely to occur. This is true even when the person does not intend to eat but goes to the kitchen for other reasons. Being in the kitchen raises the probability of eating. It is a discriminative stimulus (any stimulus in the presence of which a response is reinforced) for eating, as are the table, the refrigerator, or a candy bar on the counter. Any event or stimulus that occurs immediately before a response is reinforced becomes reinforced with the response and makes the response more likely to occur again if the discriminative stimulus occurs again. The discriminative stimulus comes to gain some control over the behavior.

Discriminative and Reinforcing Stimuli

Discriminative stimuli and reinforcing stimuli are the controlling variables Skinner used to analyze behavior. These events constitute a chain of behavior called a of . It is a contingency because reinforcement does not occur unless the response is made in the presence of the discriminative stimuli. Contingencies of reinforcement are encountered every day. For example, a soda is purchased from a machine. The machine is brightly colored to act as a for dropping coins in a slot, which in turn yields a can or bottle of soft drink. The machine comes to control a small portion of a person’s behavior. If the machine malfunctions, a person may push the selector button several times repeatedly, perhaps even putting in more coins, and, still later, strike the machine. By carefully scheduling how many times an organism must respond before reinforcement occurs, the rate of response can be controlled as is done in slot or video machines, or gambling devices in general. Responses are made several hundred or thousand times for very little reinforcement—a near win or a small payoff. Schedules of reinforcement are another important set of controlling variables that Skinner explored.

Contingencies are relationships among controlling variables. Some of the relationships become abstracted and formulized, that is, put in the form of rules. When behavior is under the control of a rule, it is termed , as opposed to contingency-shaped behavior. As a person first learns any skill, much of his or her behavior is rule governed, either through written instructions or by the person’s repeating the rule to himself or herself. For example, a novice golfer might review the rules for a good swing, even repeating them aloud. Eventually, though, swing becomes automatic; it seems to become “natural.” The verbal discriminative stimuli have shifted to the very subtle and covert stimuli associated with swing without the golfer’s thinking about it, and the natural consequences of a successful swing take over.

Operant Chamber Experiments

The operant chamber is a small experimental space or cage that Skinner invented to observe the effects that consequences have on behavior. A food-deprived organism (Skinner first used rats and later switched to pigeons) is placed in the chamber containing a lever that, when depressed, releases a small piece of food into a cup from which the organism eats. The first bar-press response is produced through the process of , or reinforcing approximations to bar pressing (for example, being near the bar, having a paw above the bar, resting a paw on the bar, nearly depressing the bar) until bar pressing is regularly occurring. Once the operant of bar pressing is established, an experimental analysis of the variables that influence it can be done. The schedule of reinforcement can be changed, for example, from one reinforcer for each response to five responses required for each reinforcer. Changes in the rate of response can be observed on a device Skinner invented, a cumulative record, which automatically displays the rate at which the operant is occurring. A discriminative can be introduced in the form of a small light mounted on the wall of the chamber. If bar presses are reinforced only when the light is turned on, the light will come to have some control over the operant. Turning the light on and off will literally turn bar pressing on and off in a food-deprived rat.

Skinner controlled his own behavior in the same fashion that he had learned to control the behavior of laboratory organisms. He arranged a “writing environment,” a desk used only for that purpose; wrote at a set time each day; and kept careful records of time spent writing. Other examples of self-management may be found in Skinner’s novel of his research, Walden Two (1948). In this fictionalized account, children learn self-control through a set of exercises that teach ways to tolerate increasing delays of reinforcement.

Behavioral Analysis of Language

Skinner also performed a behavior analysis of language (Verbal Behavior, 1957). For example, a behavioral analysis of the word “want,” “believe,” or “love,” an in Skinner’s sense, would be all those circumstances and situations that control the use of the word, that is, the discriminative stimuli for the verbal response. Skinner tried to show in Verbal Behavior that speaking and writing could be explained with the same principle he had used to explain animal behavior. Many of Skinner’s works and much of his private notebooks are taken up with the recording of how words are used. His purpose was to dementalize them, to show that what controls their use is some aspect of the environment or some behavioral practice on the part of the verbal community, rather than some internal or mental event. The earliest uses of the word “to know,” for example, referred to action, something the individual could do, rather than something he or she possessed or had stored inside the mind.

Understanding Skinner’s Contributions

So much has been written about Skinner, some of it misleading or false, that it is important to clarify what he did not do. He did not rear either of his daughters in a Skinner box. His younger daughter was reared during her infancy with the aid of an aircrib, a special enclosed crib Skinner built that allowed control of air temperature and humidity, and in which the infant could sleep and play without the burden of clothes. Aircribs were later available commercially. Skinner did not limit his analysis of behavior only to publicly observable events, as did the methodological behaviorists. Part of what made Skinner’s radical was his insistence that a science of behavior should be able to account for those private events to which only the individual has access, such as the pain of a toothache. He demonstrated how the community teaches its members to describe covert events such as toothaches and headaches. He did not regard such events as anything other than behavior. That is, he did not give them a special status by calling them mental events.

Skinner did not argue that reinforcement explains everything. He allowed, especially in his later works, that genetic endowment plays a role in the determination of behavior, as do rules and antecedent events. He did not reject physiological explanations of behavior when actual physiology was involved. He did object to the use of physiological terms in psychological accounts, unless the physiological mechanisms were known. For Skinner, physiology was one subject matter and behavior was another. Finally, he did not ignore complex behavior. Many of his works, particularly Verbal Behavior and The Technology of Teaching (1968), offered behaviorist analyses of what in other psychologies would be termed cognitive phenomena, such as talking, reading, thinking, problem solving, and remembering.

Skinner made many contributions to psychology. Among them was his invention of the operant chamber and its associated methodology. Operant equipment and procedures have been employed by animal and human experimental psychologists in laboratories around the world. Most of these psychologists do not adhere to Skinner’s radical behaviorism or to all the features of his science of behavior. They have, however, found the techniques that he developed to be productive in exploring a wide variety of problems, ranging from the fields of psychopharmacology to learning in children and adults and experimental economics. Skinner and his followers developed a technology of behavior that included techniques for working with the developmentally disabled, children in elementary classrooms, and persons with rehabilitation or health care problems; they also considered approaches to public safety, employee motivation and production, and other fields that involved the management of behavior. Although the technology developments never reached the vision he described in Walden Two, the efforts are ongoing.

Skinner may have exhausted the . The idea that consequences influence behavior can be found in many forms in the literature of psychology and philosophy, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is only in the work of Skinner that one sees how much of human and animal behavior can be brought within its purview. Because Skinner took behavior as his subject matter, he greatly expanded what could be regarded as being of interest to psychologists. Behavior was everywhere: in the classroom, at the office, in the factory. Nearly any aspect of human activity could become the legitimate object of study by a Skinnerian psychologist, a point well illustrated in Skinner’s description of a utopian community that takes an experimental attitude toward its cultural practices and designs a culture based on a science of behavior (Walden Two). Finally, Skinner conceptualized an epistemology, a way of understanding what it means for humans to know something, that is perhaps his lasting contribution.

Relationship with Darwinism and Pragmatism

In placing the radical behaviorism of Skinner in historical context, two nineteenth-century doctrines are often invoked. One view, shared by Skinner, is that operant psychology represents an extension of the principle of natural selection that Charles Darwin described at the level of the species. Natural selection explained the origin of species; contingencies of reinforcement and explain the origin of classes of responses. The environment selects in both cases. In operant psychology, the role of the environment is to reinforce differentially and thereby select from among a pool of responses that the organism is making. The final effect is one particular operant that has survival or adaptive value for the individual organism. Skinner has suggested that cultural evolution occurs in a similar fashion.

It is also observed that Skinner’s psychology resembles nineteenth-century pragmatism. The pragmatists held that beliefs are formed by their outcome, or practical effect. To explain why someone does something by reference to a belief would be regarded as mentalism by Skinner; he would substitute behavior for beliefs. Yet he comes to the same doctrine: one in which environmental consequences act in a Darwinian fashion. Finally, Skinner’s philosophy shows the influence of the nineteenth -century positivism of physicist Ernst Mach. Skinner desired a description of behavior and its causes, while avoiding mental states or other cognitive or personality entities that intervene between behavior and the environment.

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