EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
NUMBER 2 (2004)
European Journal of Behavior Analysis
VOLUME 5, No. 2, 2004
CONTENTS
Saul Axelrod:
The Contributions of B. F. Skinner’s Work to my Life .......................................................... 65
A. Charles Catania:
B. F. Skinner at 100: A Selection of Quotations ..................................................................... 69
John W. Donahoe:
Interpretation and Experimental-analysis: An Underappreciated Distinction ........ 83
Jack Michael:
Skinner’s Molecular Interpretations of Behavior ................................................................ 91
Richard F. Rakos:
The Belief in Free Will as a Biological Adaptation: Thinking Inside and Outside
the Behavior Analytic Box ..................................................................................................... 95
Patrick K. Rimell:
A Chronological Review of Events in the Life of one Behaviorist ................................. 105
Alexandra Rutherford:
A “visible scientist”: B.F. Skinner’s writings for the popular press .................................. 109
Nathaniel G. Smith and Edward K. Morris:
A Tribute to B. F. Skinner at 100: His Awards and Honors ................................................. 121
Beth Sulzer-Azaroff:
The Shaping of Behaviorists: B.F. Skinner’s Influential Paper on Teaching
Machines ..................................................................................................................................... 129
Julie S. Vargas:
Contingencies over B. F. Skinner’s Discovery of Contingencies ..................................... 137
i
After the trip, Skinner commented that, if there
was any parts of the country that they had not
visited, those traveling companions were certainly
not to be blamed for it.
Editor’s page
B.F. Skinner was born in Susquehanna,
Pennsylvania, 1904. At the ABA (Association
for Behavior Analysis) conference in Boston in
May 2004 a number of symposia were labeled
‘Skinner Tribute’, on the occasion of the 100 anniversary of his birthday. After the conference we
sent an invitation to all presenters who took part
in the Skinner Tribute presentations/symposia
to contribute with their papers to EJOBA. We
have been very fortunate to have 10 of these
papers published in this Skinner Tribute issue
of EJOBA.
We hope that the current Skinner Tribute issue of EJOBA will add to the record of Skinner’s
influence and, perhaps, even spark off some additional interest.
On the behalf of the editorial troika
Erik Arntzen and Per Holth
References
Korn, J. H., Davis, R., & Davis, S. F. (1991).
American Psychologist. 46, 789-792
Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences.
Science, 213, 499-504.
Skinner was definitely the most important
scholar within behavior analysis. He published a
large number of important books, book chapters,
and articles. Interestingly, he was also ranked by
historians and chairpersons as the most important contemporary psychologist (Korn, Davis,
& Davis, 1991). To publish a special Skinner
Tribute issue of EJOBA seems very natural for
the Norwegian editorial troika, because applied
behavior analysis has a relatively strong position in this country. The position of behavior
analysis in this country can, to a great extent, be
traced to our fellow editorial troika member Arne
Brekstad’s teachings of Skinner’s own work and
other behavior-analytic work based upon it. In
2004, Norway was, as far as we know, the first
country outside the USA to establish a master
program in behavior analysis.
In 1983, Skinner was invited to Norway by
the College for special education, where he gave
two lectures. These were entitled “The shame of
American education” and “Selection by Consequences.” Both are published in journals and republished in Upon Further Reflection (Skinner, 1987).
Those of us who had a chance to meet B.F. and
his wife, Eve, during their visit were impressed
with their kindness. Two of Brekstad’s former
students guided them on a quite strenuous trip
to the west coast to see the fjords. Unfortunately,
due to fog, there was not much to be seen. During the trip, one of the traveling companions was
unfortunate enough to smash Skinner’s thumb in
a car door, and Skinner ended up comforting him.
ii
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 65 - 67
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 65
The Contributions of B. F. Skinner’s Work to my Life1
Saul Axelrod
Temple University
In recognition of the 100th anniversary of B. F. Skinner’s birth, I describe how Skinner’s work created
a field that provided me with a satisfying academic career in applied behavior analysis. He also provided
me and other parents with benevolent, effective child-rearing strategies. Due to the principles that Skinner
explicated, there is now an optimistic psychology, based on single-subject research designs, that values and
helps the individual. Finally, Skinner increased people’s freedom through the explication of behavioral
principles that lead to increased skill development.
When Tom Zane e-mailed me and asked me to
speak at ABA on the influence B. F. Skinner had
on my career, the first thing that came to mind is
that he gave me a career. I cannot imagine a career
more satisfying than being an academician working in the field of applied behavior analysis. My
undergraduate degree was in mathematics, and
I worked unhappily as a computer programmer
for four years after graduation. What I wanted
was a profession that was more people oriented,
yet invoked objectivity and science. That is what
the field of applied behavior analysis, indirectly
created by Skinner, afforded me.
What I would like to do in this paper is to
describe briefly the influence Skinner had on my
personal life, and then describe the influence he
had on my career. This will lead to a description
of what his work has meant to all of us.
ing permissive, while appealing in the short run,
leaves children susceptive to harmful influences
(Wyatt, 2001, p. 96).
I learned from Skinner’s work that I should not
be reluctant to modify behavior directly, whether
it was toilet training, reading, or playing sports.
There was nothing wrong with directly altering
behavior as long as parents used the gentleness
inherent in the application of positive reinforcement, shaping, and fading techniques.
Meanwhile, Skinner gave all parents an alternative to the use of aversive techniques. By
advocating the use of positive reinforcement, he
provided parents and children with a win-win situation. Parents enjoy using positive reinforcement.
Children glow and learn when their behavior
is reinforced; and parents and children form a
close bond when positive reinforcement is the
predominate teaching procedure.
Skinner’s Influence on my Personal Life
Skinner’s Influence on my Career
Shortly after completing graduate school in
1970, my first wife and I had our children. At
the time there were competing philosophies on
how to raise children. Given the influence of the
sixties, many professionals were recommending
permissive child-rearing strategies. Skinner (1971,
p. 79) argued persuasively that permissiveness
was not a valid child - rearing practice. It was the
abandonment of child-rearing responsibilities. Be-
Skinner gave others and me an optimistic
psychology. By focusing on behavior and the
means by which it can be altered by the external
environment, Skinner laid the foundations for a
successful, scientific psychology. (Behavior can
be seen, and the environment can be physically
changed.) By recognizing that behavior was important in its own right, and not merely a lightly
regarded by product of one’s mental life, Skinner
(1956, p. 84) gave importance to what people do
on a daily basis.
1. Based on a paper presented at the meeting of the Association
for Behavior Analysis, May 2004, Boston. Reprints of this article
may be obtained from Saul Axelrod, CITE Department, Temple
University, 13th and Cecil B. Moore Ave. Philadelphia, PA 19122.
65
Saul Axelrod
66
Skinner taught us that comprehending human
behavior was no longer an impossible task. The
understanding came down to applying a limited
number of behavioral principles. Sometimes
the application had to be creative, but it was a
principled creativity in which we did not have to
invent the wheel. We only had to create a better
wheel.
Once we accept that behavior is lawful, as
Skinner (1953, p. 6) asserted, it allows us to
employ and reap the benefits of science, as science has benefited so many other fields, such as
medicine, air travel, and agriculture, to name a few.
By focusing on observable, measurable behaviors
and manipulable environmental events in a scientific manner, we enter a self-correcting feedback
loop in which our efforts eventually succeed. Behavior that was originally inexplicable, eventually
becomes lawful, predictable, and malleable.
Because behavior is physical and accessible,
we now had targets that could be reached. Later,
Skinner gave us the tools to reach those targets
(Skinner, 1953). We can be optimistic it we value
overt behavior and attempt to change it when necessary. If we regard the most important aspects
of our behavior as internal, indefinable, and elusive, we have little reason for optimism. In place
of mysticism, Skinner gave us understanding.
Contributions of Skinner’s Research
Methodology
For me, Skinner’s most important contributions were not the answers he gave us, but the
experimental methodology he gave us to get
answers. As Dawkins (2003, p. 27) pointed out,
what makes scientists different is not the knowledge they generate, but the methods by which
they generate it.
By giving us single-subject research designs in
which people were subjected to each experimental
condition in a replicated manner, Skinner freed
us from the stifling group-comparison research
designs that dominated psychology and education
at the time. To most people, psychology is the
study of the individual. Single-subject research
designs make explicit the relationship between
an experimental condition and its effects on an
individual’s behavior. It is inconceivable that the
group-comparison design and its accompanying
actuarially based statistical analyses could provide
more direct evidence than single-subject research
designs. Whereas the group-comparison design
leads to inferences, single-subject research designs
lead to explication.
Single-subject research designs value the individual. If one person engages in a behavior, the
behavior really did occur. The occurrence is not
made nonexistent because the average (frequently
fictitious) person does not engage in it. Other
psychologists gave lip service to the individual.
Skinner built a psychology around it.
Skinner’s Work as a Force of Freedom
It is likely that one of the reasons that Skinner’s work is not more popular is that he was
an iconoclast with respect to people’s favorite
myths. Thus, Skinner discounted the notion that
people are free and emphasized that behavior is
controlled by its consequences, even in the most
benign environments (Skinner, 1974).
Yet, Skinner helped us to become freer people
by helping us to identify the forces that act upon
us. He taught us that we are not helpless victims
of our genetic endowment and physical environment. We do have the capacity to control parts of
our environment to produce desirable behaviors.
Thus, we can learn to set up environments to stop
smoking, to start exercising, and to treat people
more kindly.
If one sees acquiring new skills as increasing
one’s freedom, Skinner’s behaviorism has much
to contribute to personal freedom. Work in the
area of fluency (e.g., Binder, 1996; Johnson &
Layng, 1992) has shown us that by repeatedly
performing correct behaviors to the point that
they are automatic allows us to develop skills we
never regarded as possible.
In summary, Skinner work has left us with
a psychology, based on science and behavioral
principles, that allows us to be optimistic that
formerly intractable behavior problems can be
solved in a benign manner, and that all people
can increase their choices in life through greater
skil development.
Contributions of B. F. Skinner
References
Binder, C. (1996). Behavioral fluency: Evolution
of a new paradigm. The Behavior Analyst, 19,
163-197.
Dawkins, R. (2003). A devil’s chaplain: Reflections
of hope, lies, science, and love. Wilmington, MA:
Houghton-Mifflin.
Johnson, K. R., & Layng, T. V. J. (1992). Breaking the structuralist barrier: Literacy and
numeracy with fluency. American Psychologist,
47, 1475-1490.
Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
67
Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Skinner, R. F. (1953). Science and human behavior.
New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, R. F. (1956). What is psychotic behavior?
In F. Gildea (Ed). Theory and practice of psychoses: Some newer aspects (pp. 77-99). St. Louis,
MO: Committee on Publications, Washington
University.
Wyatt, W. J. (2001). B. F. Skinner from A to Z. Hurricaine, W. V.: Third Millenium Press.
1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 69 - 81
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 69
B. F. Skinner at 100: A Selection of Quotations
A. Charles Catania
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
The May 2004 meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis featured a centennial celebration for
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) during which favorite Skinner quotations were presented and discussed. This
paper lists and provides some context for 101 quotations from his work, including some relevant others
along with those that were presented at the meeting.
included but not counted in the total a few quotations that are not Skinner’s.
Because the projected quotations recycled, it
is arbitrary to number them from any particular
point because members of the audience who
arrived at different times saw the sequence starting at different places. Furthermore, except for
some thematic groupings the order in which the
quotations was arranged was somewhat arbitrary.
Rather than present them in their original order,
I have re-arranged them here to simplify commentary and to juxtapose some of them with the
quotations that have been added. The ordering of
the quotations in the PowerPoint presentation is
indicated by boldface numbers in parentheses; if
no such number appears, that quotation did not
appear on screen at the evening session. Where
more than one quoted passage appears within a
numbered item, the boldface number applies only
to the quotation that immediately follows it.
I have presented many of the quotations as
simply of interest in their own right. In many
cases, however, a comment on either a single
quotation or on a group of quotations seemed appropriate. Many paths could be followed through
these quotations. Sometimes those from a single
source appear together, and sometimes the grouping instead depends on common themes across
various sources. Because the arrangement on
printed pages is necessarily linear, some groupings will probably seem arbitrary. The problem
with quoting from Skinner is the sheer density of
quotable lines and passages in his writings. I could
have ended up with a very different selection if
In 2004, B. F. Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) would have celebrated his 100th
birthday. His centenary year was commemorated
with several program events at the 30th annual
meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis,
which was held in Boston, Massachusetts. I participated in two of those events on Memorial Day,
May 31. One was a daytime symposium devoted
to favorite Skinner quotations chaired by Mark
L. Sundberg; it included presentations by Jack
Michael, by Jay Moore, by Julie Vargas and by me.
The other was an evening tribute chaired by Michael Perone; it included additional presentations
by the symposium participants and an audiovisual
presentation by Richard Malott.
The evening event was held in the Grand Ballroom. While the participants got organized and
the audience gradually arrived and got seated, a
sequence of about 70 quotations from Skinner’s
work was shown on screen near the stage as a
timed and recycling visual presentation. Each
quotation remained on for several seconds and
then its source was added, so those interested in
doing so could test whether they could identify
where in Skinner’s work each quotation had appeared. Those quotations are presented here,
along with a few others to bring the total to 101.
That number is appropriate for celebrating the
centennial, with one more added for the start
of a new century. As will be seen, the number is
an underestimate, not only because some entries
include multiple parts but also because I have
The author’s email address is: [email protected]
69
A. Charles Catania
70
I had merely started my browsing in a different
place or if I had had different collections of
quotations already in hand. For example, Skinner’s
“Behavior of Organisms” (1938) and the earlier
and primarily experimental papers upon which
it was based provide a rich source that I have
tapped only slightly here. His works for more
general audiences, such as “Beyond Freedom and
Dignity” (Skinner, 1971), provide still another
potential source.
In most cases I have given full bibliographic
source information, but in some cases that was
neither feasible nor practical, especially with regard to the page on which a quotation appears.
For example, an article such as “Are theories of
learning necessary?” (Skinner, 1950) has been
reprinted not only in the several editions of
“Cumulative record” (Skinner, 1959, 1961a, 1972,
1999) but also in both journal and book form as
a Behavioral and Brain Sciences treatment (Catania &
Harnad, 1988; Skinner, 1984a); furthermore, the
later versions include some textual changes from
the original journal article. In a few cases I have
even encountered articles online and without the
original pagination. Because reprinted versions
are in many cases more easily accessible than the
original journal versions, I have tried to provide
the information that will be most useful to the
interested reader.
Skinner was fond of quotation, and a few
quotations from writers other than Skinner are
included at the points where they seem most
relevant. A discussion of Skinner’s quotation
practices and of some of his favorite quotations
is included in Laties & Catania (1999) and in
Catania & Laties (2003).
The Quotations
Behavior is the essence of life itself, so the first
quotations offered here are drawn from “What
religion means to me” (Skinner, 1987b):
1(1). “Science, not religion, has taught me
my most useful values, among them intellectual
honesty. It is better to go without answers than to
accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.”
2(2). “I like Bertrand Russell’s reply to Pascal’s
wager. Pascal argued that the consequences of
believing in God were so immense that only a
fool would not believe; but, said Russell, suppose God values intellectual honesty above all
else and that He has given us shoddy evidence
of His existence and is planning to damn to hell
all those who believe in Him only for the sake of
the glittering prizes.”
3. “I accept the fact that like all living things
I shall soon cease to exist. For a time, some of
the genes I have carried will be replicated in my
children, and something of me will survive in the
books I have written and in the help I have given
other people.”
4(3). “Death does not trouble me. I have no
fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor
could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would
be nothing left for me to do, the task of living
having been accomplished.”
The Basics: Pavlov and Other Influences, and the Path from Reflex to
Operant
5. “I had come to psychology devoted to Pavlov, and I had soon discovered Sherrington and
Magnus. . . . The concept of the reflex had served
them well, and in my thesis I had said that it was
all that was needed in the study of behavior. I
knew better by the time I began to write my book”
(Skinner, 1979, p. 201). Pavlov had moved from
physiology in the direction of the behavior of
the organism by the time he wrote (71): “It seems
obvious that the whole activity of the organism
should conform to definite laws” (Pavlov, 1927,
p. 7), which is one reason why his quotation was
included in the presentation.
6. “My field was the operant rather than the
respondent. . . . I could not break my chains, however. I went on talking about reflexes” (Skinner,
1979, p. 201). The substance is clear enough, but
was Skinner also punning on behavioral chains?
He was fond of puns and other wordplay. His
most notable pun was perhaps his reference to
the position of his mentor E. G. Boring on the
status of private events when, in remarks on his
paper, “The operational analysis of psychological
terms” (Skinner, 1945), he wrote that “The irony
of it is that, whereas Boring must confine himself
to an account of my external behavior, I am still
interested in what might be called Boring-fromwithin” (Skinner, 1999, p. 430). Unfortunately, the
B. F. Skinner at 100
phrase “boring from within” is far less familiar
these days than once it was.
7. “In Pavlov’s experiment a hungry dog hears
a bell and is then fed. If this happens many times,
the dog begins to salivate when it hears the bell.
The standard mentalistic explanation is that the
dog ‘associates’ the bell with the food. But it was
Pavlov who associated them!” (Skinner, 1977,
p. 1).
8. “We may summarize this much of the argument in the following way. A reflex is defined as
an observed correlation of two events, a stimulus
and a response.” This line appeared in “The concept of the reflex in the description of behavior”
(Skinner, 1931), which had constituted part of
Skinner’s doctoral dissertation (see also Skinner,
1999, p. 494).
9. “A reflex, then, is a correlation of a stimulus
and a response at a level of restriction marked by
the orderliness of the changes in the correlation”
(Skinner, 1935; 1999, p. 517)
10(11). “We say that an animal is hungry if,
when we give it food, it eats. . . . In our everyday
use of the word . . . we ordinarily attribute hunger to an animal only because it eats or because
it exhibits behavior that we have frequently observed to be followed by eating” (Skinner, 1932,
p. 22) As early as this passage in the opening
paragraph of “Drive and reflex strength,” Skinner
was concerned with the verbal behavior of the
behavior analyst. In comparing the lay vocabulary with the technical vocabulary of drive, he
explicitly continued: “In the latter case the use
of the word depends on the conditioning of the
experimenter” (p. 22).
11(8). Skinner characterized the boundaries of
response classes in terms of the “natural lines of
fracture along which behavior and environment
actually break” (Skinner, 1935, p. 40).
12(9). “We divide behavior into hard and fast
classes and are then surprised to find that the
organism disregards the boundaries we have set”
(Skinner, 1953, p. 94).
13(10). “In choosing rate of responding as a
basic datum and in recording this conveniently in
a cumulative record, we make important temporal
aspects of behavior visible. Once this has happened, our scientific practice is reduced to simple
looking. . . . we may watch the behavior develop
71
when we have arranged the proper contingencies
of reinforcement, as we later watch it change as
these contingencies are changed” (p. 373)
14(5). Skinner created some memorable lists.
Here are his five laboratory recommendations
from “A case history in scientific method” (Skinner, 1956):
“. . . when you run into something interesting,
drop everything else and study it” (p. 363);
“. . . some ways of doing research are easier
than others” (p. 364);
“. . . some people are lucky” (pp. 365-366);
“. . . apparatus sometimes breaks down” (p.
367);
“. . . serendipity – the art of finding one thing
while looking for something else” (p. 369).
Theory and its Implications
15(12). “The reader will have noticed that
almost no extension to human behavior is made
or suggested. This does not mean that he is expected to be interested in the behavior of the rat
for its own sake. The importance of a science of
behavior derives largely from the possibility of
an eventual extension to human affairs” (Skinner,
1938, p. 441).
16(13). “The book represents nothing more
than an experimental analysis of a representative
sample of behavior. Let him extrapolate who will”
(Skinner, 1938, p. 442).
17(42). “Perhaps to do without theories altogether is a tour de force that is too much to expect
as a general practice. Theories are fun. . . . This
does not exclude the possibility of theory in another sense. Beyond the collection of uniform
relationships lies the need for a formal representation of the data reduced to a minimal number
of terms” (Skinner, 1950). This quotation from
“Are theories of learning necessary?” continues:
“A theoretical construction may yield greater generality than any assemblage of facts. But such a
construction will not refer to another dimensional
system and will not, therefore, fall within our
present definition. It will not stand in the way
of our search for functional relations because it
will arise only after relevant variables have been
found and studied. Though it may be difficult to
understand, it will not be easily misunderstood,
and it will have none of the objectionable effects
72
A. Charles Catania
of the theories here considered” (Skinner, 1950,
pp. 215-216). Presumably Skinner knew that he
was being consistent with Sherlock Holmes (73):
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have
all the evidence. It biases the judgment” (Conan
Doyle, 1888).
18(4). Skinner made the analogy between
Darwinian selection and the operant selection of
behavior explicit in “Science and Human Behavior”: “In both operant conditioning and the evolutionary selection of behavioral characteristics,
consequences alter future probability. Reflexes
and other innate patterns of behavior evolve
because they increase the chances of survival of
the species. Operants grow strong because they are
followed by important consequences in the life
of the individual” (Skinner, 1953, p. 90).
19(6). Skinner continued the analogy in
“Verbal Behavior”: “Certain processes, which
the human organism shares with other species,
alter behavior so that it achieves a safer and more
useful interchange with a particular environment.
When appropriate behavior has been established,
its consequences work through similar processes
to keep it in force. If by chance this environment
changes, old forms of behavior disappear, while
new consequences build new forms” (Skinner,
1957, p. 1). His appeal to old forms and new
forms seems to echo prose that appears in Darwin
(1859): “for old forms will be supplanted by new
and improved forms” (p. 475), and (7) “There
is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a
few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet
has gone cycling on and on according to the fixed
law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have
been, and are being, evolved” (p. 490).
20(35). In “Science and Human Behavior,”
Skinner extended his analysis to complex human
behavior: “When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom”
(Skinner, 1953, p. 229).
21(34). “A mere survey of the techniques of
self-control does not explain why the individual
puts them into effect” (Skinner, 1953, p. 240).
From the outset, Skinner recognized the empirical and logical difficulties raised by the concept
of self-reinforcement (cf. Catania, 1995): “The
ultimate question is whether the consequence has
any strengthening effect upon the behavior which
precedes it” (Skinner, 1953, p. 238).
Behavior in the Context of Physiology, Genetics and other
Biological Categories
22(41). “. . . there are two independent subject
matters (behavior and the nervous system) which
must have their own techniques and methods and
yield their own respective data. No amount of
information about the second will ‘explain’ the
first or bring order into it without . . . a science
of behavior. . . . I am asserting, then, not only that
a science of behavior is independent of neurology but that it must be established as a separate
discipline whether or not a rapprochement with
neurology is ever attempted” (Skinner, 1938, pp.
423-424). Within the same passage Skinner offered two examples in support of his argument:
“No merely endocrinological information will
establish the thesis that personality is a matter of
glandular secretion or that thought is chemical.
What is required in both cases, if the defense
of the thesis is to go beyond mere rhetoric, is a
formulation of what is meant by personality or
thought and the quantitative measurement of
their properties.”
23(39). “A science of behavior is not yet
indebted to neuroscience, but there is an enormous debt in the other direction. . . . behavioral
science gives neuroscience its assignment, just
as the early science of genetics, exploring the
numerical relationships among the traits of successive generations, gave the study of genes its
assignment” (Skinner, 1988b, p. 470, and see also
pp. 60, 239, 334).
24(40). “Valid facts about behavior are not
invalidated by discoveries concerning the nervous
system, nor are facts about the nervous system
invalidated by facts about behavior. Both sets of
facts are part of the same enterprise, and I have always looked forward to the time when neurology
would fill in the temporal and spatial gaps which
are inevitable in a behavioral analysis” (Skinner,
1988b, p. 128, and see also pp. 461, 470).
25(38). “Organisms do not store the phylogenic or ontogenic contingencies to which they
are exposed; they are changed by them” (Skinner,
1988b, p. 302).
B. F. Skinner at 100
26(43). “Such responses are not wholly arbitrary. They are chosen because they can be
easily executed, and because they can be repeated
quickly and over long periods of time without
fatigue. In such a bird as the pigeon, pecking has
a certain genetic unity; it is a characteristic bit
of behavior which appears with a well-defined
topography” (Ferster & Skinner, 1957, p. 7).
Verbal Behavior
27(36). “The human species took a crucial
step forward when its vocal musculature came
under operant control in the production of
speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all
the distinctive achievements of the species can
be traced to that one genetic change” (Skinner,
1986, p. 117).
28. “The listener can be said to understand
a speaker if he simply behaves in an appropriate fashion” (Skinner, 1957, p. 277). Skinner
later elaborated on this quotation from “Verbal
Behavior” when he cited it in “The Technology
of Teaching”: “In general, we understand what
someone is saying when we ourselves say it for
the same reasons, possibly only after the speaker
has repeated it several times in order to bring the
appropriate variables into play” (Skinner, 1968,
p. 139).
What follows is a set of quotations from
Skinner’s seminal book, “Verbal Behavior.” I have
drawn them from a list that I expanded over many
years. I used the list to develop true-false questions in courses in which I used “Verbal Behavior”
as a textbook. I presented the quotations either
as they had appeared in the book (true) or altered
in some way (false). I sometimes also required
students to fix any version they had chosen as
false to make it correct (though I did not ask
them to match Skinner’s exact prose). I found
the responses to such examination questions to
be highly discriminating and very informative.
Through the end of this section, page numbers
are from “Verbal Behavior” (Skinner, 1957) unless
otherwise noted.
29(15). “[Verbal behavior is] behavior which
is effective only through the mediation of other
persons” (p. 2).
30(16). “There is obviously something suspicious in the ease with which we discover in a set of
73
ideas precisely those properties needed to account
for the behavior which expresses them” (p. 6).
Here Skinner was commenting on explanations
of verbal behavior that appealed to mentalistic
concepts such as ideas.
31. “. . . dictionaries do not give meanings; at
best they give words having the same meaning”
(p. 9).
32(17). “The emphasis is upon an orderly
arrangement of well-known facts, in accordance
with a formulation of behavior derived from an
experimental analysis of a more rigorous sort.
The present extension to verbal behavior is thus
an exercise in interpretation rather than a quantitative extrapolation of rigorous experimental
results” (p. 11).
33(18). “Technically, meanings are to be found
among the independent variables in a functional
account, rather than as properties of the dependent variable” (p. 14).
34(19). “To ask where a verbal operant is when
a response is not in the course of being emitted
is like asking where one’s knee-jerk is when the
physician is not tapping the patellar tendon” (p.
21). Just as the organism does not store stimuli
or contingencies (see Quotation 25), it is not a
repository for the storage of behavior.
35. “A mand is a type of verbal operant singled
out by its controlling variables. It is not a formal
unit of analysis. No response can be said to be a
mand from its form alone” (p. 36). Here we see
a striking application of the fundamental distinction between functional and structural analyses.
36. “In this account of the speech episode,
it should be noted that nothing is appealed to
beyond the separate behaviors of speaker and
listener.... By putting the two cases together we
construct the total episode and show how it naturally arises and completes itself ” (p. 40).
37(20). “The young child alone in the nursery
may automatically reinforce his own exploratory
vocal behavior when he produces sounds which
he has heard in the speech of others” (p. 58). Here
is the germ of an account of the shaping of phonetic competence through the natural selection
of different vocalizations based on the similarity
of the sounds produced by the child and those
produced by the child’s caregivers.
38. “. . . we do not behave toward the word
74
A. Charles Catania
‘fox’ as we behave toward foxes.... [The word
may] lead us to look around. . . . but we do not
look around when we see a fox, we look at the
fox” (p. 87).
39(21). “Abstraction is a peculiarly verbal
process because a nonverbal environment cannot
provide the necessary restricted contingency”
(p. 109).
40(22). “In setting up the kind of verbal
operant called the tact, the verbal community
characteristically reinforces a given response in
the presence of a given stimulus. This can be done
only if the stimulus acts upon both speaker and
reinforcing community. A private stimulus cannot
satisfy these conditions” (pp. 130-131). This is one
of several quotations, from “Verbal Behavior”
and elsewhere, on the recurrent theme of how
verbal communities can establish and maintain a
language of private events.
41(23). “It is only through the gradual growth
of a verbal community that the individual becomes ‘conscious’” (p. 140).
42(24). “An important fact about verbal
behavior is that speaker and listener may reside
within the same skin” (p. 163).
43(25). “. . . we cannot tell from form alone
into which class a response falls. Fire may be (1)
a mand to a firing squad, (2) a tact to a conflagration, (3) an intraverbal response to the stimulus
Ready, aim..., or (4) an echoic or (5) textual response to appropriate verbal stimuli. . . . In order
to classify behavior effectively, we must know the
circumstances under which it is emitted” (p. 186).
Compare Quotation 35.
44. “It is a happy condition when the speaker
who is talking primarily to himself achieves an
effect upon himself at approximately the same
time as upon his listeners” (p. 223).
45(26). “We turn now to a different type of
multiple control, in which functional relations,
established separately, combine possibly for the
first time upon a given occasion” (p. 229). Here
Skinner has succinctly described the phenomenon
we have come to call adduction.
46. “One of the principle effects of verbal
behavior, then, is the strengthening of corresponding behavior in the listener. . . . The process is especially important when one is talking
to oneself ” (p. 280). Skinner eventually devoted
an entire paper entirely to the behavior of the
listener (Skinner, 1989a).
47. “The operation of two or more variables
in the multiple causation of verbal behavior is
especially clear when the behavior is composed
of fragments of responses” (p. 293). The significance of multiple causation became especially
clear in Skinner’s treatment of verbal behavior.
48(27). “The verbal operant is a lively unit”
(p. 312).
49. “The verbal operants we have examined
may be said to be the raw material out of which
sustained verbal behavior is manufactured” (p.
312). And so Skinner put autoclitic processes to
work on that raw material.
50. “Part of the behavior of an organism
becomes in turn one of the variables controlling
another part” (p. 313).
51(28). “The speaker . . . is also a locus–a place
in which a number of variables come together in
a unique confluence to yield an equally unique
achievement” (p. 313).
52(29). “. . . the contingencies which generate a response to one’s own verbal behavior are
unlikely in the absence of social reinforcement.
It is because our behavior is important to others
that it eventually becomes important to us” (p.
314).
53(30). “A person controls his own behavior,
verbal or otherwise, as he controls the behavior
of others” (p. 403). Compare Quotation 20.
54(31). “There is no point at which it is profitable to draw a line distinguishing thinking from
acting on this continuum. So far as we know, the
events at the covert end have no special properties, observe no special laws, and can be credited
with no special achievements” (p. 438).
55(32). “The simplest and most satisfactory
view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or
nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the
very behavior itself in all the complexity of its
controlling relations” (p. 449).
On Private Events
56. “There are at least four ways in which a
reinforcing community with no access to a private
stimulus may generate verbal behavior with respect to it” (p. 131). In “Verbal Behavior,” Skinner
B. F. Skinner at 100
recapitulates the argument from “The operational
analysis of psychological terms” (Skinner, 1945),
listing the four ways as:
“(1) A common public accompaniment. . . ”
“(2) . . . some collateral response to the private
stimulus”
“(3) . . . it may reinforce a response in connection with a public stimulus, only to have the
response transferred to a private event by virtue
of common properties, as in metaphorical and
metonymical extension.”
“(4) . . . the response is eventually made to a
private stimulus which is similar except in magnitude
to private stimuli otherwise accompanied by
public manifestations useful to the community”
(pp. 131-133).
In considerably more than half a century since
the 1945 paper, no other plausible alternatives
have been added to Skinner’s list.
57(45). “They were describing what they would
have expected, felt, and hoped for under similar
circumstances. [But] whatever the students knew
about themselves which permitted them to infer
comparable events in the pigeon must have been
learned from a verbal community which saw no
more of their behavior than they had seen of the
pigeon’s” (Skinner, 1963, p. 955). This passage
uses student reports of a pigeon’s behavior in a
classroom demonstration to illustrate the public
origins of the language of expectancies.
58(44). “Private events then remain inferences
to the experimenter or philosopher, but they are
just as directly observed by the person in whose
skin they exist as any environmental stimulus.”
This line appeared in a review of a journal article
that was written by Skinner in 1979. His review
was excerpted in Catania (2003, p. 317). In its onscreen presentation, this quotation was incorrectly
attributed to “Verbal Behavior.”
59. “. . . the private event is at best no more
than a link in a causal chain” (Skinner, 1953, p.
279).
60(47). “. . . private events can be brought
under the control of (especially public) behavior.
In that case they may be called causes, but not
initiating causes. The only possible exception I
can imagine would arise if, when someone had
acquired extensive public behavior, a set of private events (serving as stimulus, response, and
75
consequence) would resemble a public set well
enough to come into existence through generalization. We do engage in productive private
verbal behavior in which some initiation certainly
occurs, if that means anything, but if my analysis
is correct, public versions must have been established first. In that case, the initiation passes to
the environment” (Skinner, 1988b, pp. 486-487).
For reasons of length, the middle (and longest)
sentence of this elaboration on the causal status
of private events was not included in the onscreen presentation.
61(33). “Is talking to oneself behavior? I
would say yes, but I do not think behavior is necessarily muscular action” (Skinner, 1988b, p. 469).
Defining behavior in terms of muscle movement
would have been to offer a structural and physiological criterion, so Skinner’s remark is consistent with his view that behavior is defined by its
interaction with environmental contingencies.
The BBS Treatments
Several of Skinner’s articles were given treatments in the journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
or BBS (Catania & Harnad, 1988; Skinner, 1984a).
Each treatment consisted of an article, the commentaries of a group of scholars, and the author’s
replies to the commentators. For the purposes
of the treatments, the articles underwent some
revision from their original published form. For
example, Skinner generally eliminated language
that had come to be regarded as sexist, and he
changed many (but not all) instances in which he
had written of reinforcing organisms rather than
of reinforcing responses (see Catania, 1987a).
Most of the articles had originally appeared
without abstracts but abstracts were required by
the BBS format. Skinner was occupied with his
replies to the commentators and other activities
and declined to write the abstracts, so I produced
them by entering key sentences from each article
into a word processor (Applewriter on an Apple
IIe computer) and then cutting and rearranging
them. I was able to leave most sentences intact,
but occasionally coherence or continuity required
minor revisions. Skinner approved each abstract
with only a few modifications and praised my
writing. I attribute his satisfaction, however, to the
76
A. Charles Catania
fact that the abstracts essentially consisted of his
own sentences (Catania, 1988, p. xv).
Fortunately, I had transferred the abstract files
to other computer platforms and so still could access them when I was asked to participate in the
centennial programs. The quotations that follow
are drawn from the articles that appeared in the
BBS treatments, and especially from the abstracts.
In a few cases they overlap with themes from
quotations already considered. Unless otherwise
noted, pages cited are from Skinner’s articles as
reprinted in Catania & Harnad (1988). In some
instances, the citation information is from the
original version of the article rather than from the
BBS version. In at least one case, the difference
between the original and the BBS versions is of
special interest (see Quotation 80).
62(49). “The major contributions of operationism have been negative” (p. 150). Given the
title, “The operational analysis of psychological
terms,” the casual reader may conclude that the
article is a defense of operationism, but as this
quotation makes clear it is in fact a critique. The
grounds were that methodological behaviorism
“never formulated an adequate formulation of
verbal reports and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective terms” (p. 150). The status of private events was part of the problem.
63(50). “It is impossible to establish rigorous
vocabularies of private stimuli for public use,
because differential reinforcement cannot be
made contingent upon the property of privacy”
(p. 150).
64(51). “The language of private events is
anchored in the public practices of the verbal
community, which makes individuals aware only
by differentially reinforcing their verbal responses
with respect to their own bodies” (p. 150).
Skinner’s argument here countered the dualism
implicit in the language of mental events: “The
distinction between public and private is by no
means the same as that between physical and
mental. That is why methodological behaviorism
(which adopts the first) is very different from radical behaviorism (which lops off the latter term in
the second)” (p. 161).
65(52). “The treatment of verbal behavior
in terms of such functional relations between
verbal responses and stimuli provides a radical
behaviorist alternative to the operationism of
methodological behaviorism” (p. 150). This may
be Skinner’s first reference to operant analysis as
an instance of radical behaviorism.
66(57). “Behavior which solves a problem is
distinguished by the fact that it changes another
part of the solver’s behavior and is strengthened
when it does so” (p. 218). In its title, “An operant
analysis of problem solving” provided an alternative to operational analysis.
67(58). “Problem-solving typically involves
the construction of discriminative stimuli” (p.
218).
68(59). “Behavior which solves a problem
may result from direct shaping by contingencies
or from rules constructed either by the problem
solver or by others. Because different contingencies are involved, contingency-shaped behavior
is never exactly like rule-governed behavior” (p.
218). This article was written for a symposium
on problem solving, but though that topic was its
title theme, Skinner used it as an opportunity to
introduce the distinction between rule-governed
and contingency-shaped behavior. Because of
different usages in different verbal communities, the language of rule governance has created
problems (e.g., see Shimoff & Catania, 1998), but
whether described as rule governance or as verbal
governance the distinction is a crucial one.
69(37). “Rule and contingency are different
kinds of things; they are not general and specific
statements of the same thing” (Skinner, 1969b,
p. 144).
70(46). “Rule-governed behavior is in any case
never exactly like the behavior shaped by contingencies.... [Even] when topographies of response
are very similar, different controlling variables are
necessarily involved, and the behavior will have
different properties.” Limitations on the length of
on-screen quotations did not leave room for the
informative continuation, which anticipated the
outcomes of subsequent experimental research
on human operant behavior: “When operant
experiments with human subjects are simplified
by instructing the subjects in the operation of
the equipment . . . , the resulting behavior may
resemble that which follows exposure to the
contingencies and may be studied in its stead for
certain purposes, but the controlling variables are
B. F. Skinner at 100
different, and the behaviors will not necessarily
change in the same way in response to other
variables” (Skinner, 1969b, pp. 150-151).
71. Skinner’s BBS paper called “Methods and
theories in the experimental analysis of behavior”
amalgamated material from “The flight from the
laboratory” and “Are theories of learning necessary?” (Skinner, 1950, 1961b). All of the divertissements Skinner warned of in the first of those
two articles continue to exert their attraction, perhaps none more so within behavior analysis itself
than the flight to mathematical models (Catania,
1981): “. . . psychologists have taken flight from
the laboratory. They have fled to Real People and
the human interest of ‘real life,’ to Mathematical
Models and the elegance of symbolic treatments,
to the Inner Man and the explanatory preoccupation with inferred internal mechanisms, and to
Laymanship and its appeal to ‘common sense.’
An experimental analysis provides an alternative
to these divertissements” (p. 77).
72(55). “The ‘theories’ to which objection
is raised here are not the basic assumptions essential to any scientific activity or statements that
are not yet facts, but rather explanations which
appeal to events taking place somewhere else, at
some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different
dimensions” (p. 77). But as Skinner made clear
in Quotation 17, he did not rule out all kinds of
theories. It is especially important to note that
the final conjunction in the present sentence is
an and, not an or.
73(56). “Selection by consequences is a causal
mode found only in living things, or in machines
made by living things” (p. 11). Skinner truncated
the words phylogenetic and ontogenetic in “Selection
by consequences” (Skinner, 1981) and in “The
phylogeny and ontogeny of behavior” (Skinner,
1966), making them phylogenic and ontogenic. This
can be justified by analogy with other words with
shared roots, such as photogenic and hallucinogenic,
but Skinner has occasionally been taken to task for
his coinage. It may be relevant that no objections
were raised by Richard Dawkins and most other
biologists who participated as BBS commentators.
Based on what we know of Skinner’s interactions
with other scholars it is reasonable to assume
that he had discussed his usage with Stephen Jay
77
Gould and other colleagues in biology during
lunches at the Harvard Faculty Club.
74(53). “The contingencies responsible for
unlearned behavior occurred long ago” (p. 382).
Skinner added “The phylogeny and ontogeny
of behavior” to the perennial debate on nature
versus nurture in order to address the mistaken
assumption, especially among some prominent
ethologists, that behavior analysis ignored evolutionary contingencies.
75(54). “. . . it is perhaps unwise to call any
behavior either inherited or acquired. . . . Nor can
the relative importance of phylogenic and ontogenic contingencies be argued from instances in
which unlearned or learned behavior intrudes or
dominates. Intrusions occur in both directions”
(p. 382).
76(60). “Each of us is uniquely subject to
certain kinds of stimulation from a small part
of the universe within our skins. Mentalistic
psychologies insist that other kinds of events,
lacking the physical dimensions of stimuli, are
accessible to the owner of the skin within which
they occur” (p. 278). “Behaviorism at fifty”
(Skinner, 1963) was written to commemorate
the anniversary of John B. Watson’s behaviorist
manifesto. It substantially extended the arguments
that he had initiated in “The operational analysis
of psychological terms.”
77(61). “One solution, often regarded as
behavioristic, granting the distinction between
public and private events and ruling the latter
out of consideration, has not been successful.
A science of behavior must face the problem
of privacy by dealing with events within the skin
in their relation to behavior, without assuming
they have a special nature or must be known in a
special way” (p. 278).
78(66). “The skin is not that important as a
boundary” (p. 283). This line was preceded by
the following: “An adequate science of behavior
must consider events taking place within the skin
of an organism, not as physiological mediators
of behavior but as part of behavior itself. It can
deal with these events without assuming that they
have any special nature or must be known in any
special way” (p. 283).
79(65). “Private and public events have the
same kinds of physical dimensions” (p. 283).
78
A. Charles Catania
80(63). “The search for copies of the world
within the body (e.g., the sensations and images
of conscious content) has also had discouraging
results. The organism does not create duplicates”
(p. 278). This is the version that appears in the
BBS abstract of “Behaviorism at fifty.” In the
original article and in the full BBS article, however,
the texts are different: “At some point the organism must do more than create duplicates. It must
see, hear, smell, and so on, and the seeing, hearing,
and smelling must be forms of action rather than
of reproduction” (p.. 285). Skinner had therefore
moved from stating that copy theories are not
sufficient to stating that they are not relevant at
any point. The arguments are similar to those in
biology that the genetic code provides a recipe
rather than a blueprint for an organism; it is in
no sense a template or copy (Catania, 1987b;
Dawkins, 1986).
81(62). “We know that when we dream of
wolves, no wolves are actually there; it is harder
to understand that not even representations of
wolves are there” (p. 278). Compare Quotation
38.
82(68). “The heart of the behavioristic position on conscious experience may be summed
up in this way: Seeing does not imply something
seen” (p. 287). In other words, seeing is defined in
terms of behavior in a context of contingencies,
not in terms of visual stimuli.
83(64). “Mentalistic formulations create
mental way stations. . . . The practice confuses
the order of events and leads to unfinished
causal accounts” (p. 278). For reasons of length,
most of the connecting material was deleted in
the projected on-screen version: “Mentalistic
formulations create mental way stations. Where
experimental analyses examine the effects of
variables on behavior, mentalistic psychologies
deal first with their effects on inferred entities
such as feelings or expectations and then with
the effects of these entities on behavior. Mental
states thus seem to bridge the gap between dependent and independent variables, and mentalistic
interpretations are particularly attractive when
these are separated by long time periods. The
practice confuses the order of events and leads
to unfinished causal accounts.”
84(69). “We need not take the extreme posi-
tion that mediating events or any data about them
obtained through introspection must be ruled
out of consideration, but we should certainly
welcome other ways of treating the data more
satisfactorily. Independent variables change the
behaving organism, . . . and such changes affect
subsequent behavior. The subject may be able to
describe some of these intervening states in useful
ways. . . .” (p. 291) Here is a more complete continuation: “Independent variables change the behaving organism, often in ways which persist for
many years, and such changes affect subsequent
behavior. The subject may be able to describe
some of these intervening states in useful ways,
either before or after they have affected behavior.
On the other hand, behavior may be extensively
modified by variables of which, and of the effect
of which, the subject is never aware.”
Applications and Extensions: A Potpourri
85. “The quotation marks in my title are intended to suggest that there is a sense in which
having a poem is like having a baby, and in that
sense I am in labor; I am having a lecture” (Skinner, 1999, p. 391). In this article, “A lecture on
‘having’ a poem,” Skinner offered a reply of
sorts to Chomsky’s review of the book “Verbal
Behavior” (Chomsky, 1959).
86. “If I deserve any credit at all, it is simply
for having served as a place in which certain processes could take place” (Skinner, 1999, p. 401).
This was the penultimate line of that lecture.
Compare Quotation 51.
87. “The very privacy which suggests that we
ought to know our own bodies especially well is
a severe handicap for those who must teach us to
know them” (Skinner, 1989d, p. 4). This article,
“The place of feeling in the analysis of behavior,” originally appeared in the London Times
Literary Supplement, May 8 1987. The quotation
illustrates especially well how Skinner reworked
his prose over time, in this instance simultaneously compacting and clarifying his position on
private events.
88(67). “Suppose someone were to coat the
occipital lobes of the brain with a special photographic emulsion which, when developed, yielded
a reasonable copy of a current visual stimulus. In
many quarters this would be regarded as a triumph
B. F. Skinner at 100
in the physiology of vision. But nothing could
be more disastrous, for we should have to start
all over again and ask how the organism sees a
picture in its occipital cortex, and we should now
have much less of the brain available in which to
seek an answer” (Skinner, 1988a, p. 285). Is there
any relation between this passage in “Behaviorism
at fifty” and Skinner’s report in his autobiography of seeing a movie “in which the retina of a
murdered man was developed like a photographic
plate to reveal the person at whom he was looking
when he died” (Skinner, 1976, p. 74)?
89. “We learn the name of an object by reading the label attached to it, and we can then name
the object when asked to do so. Later we shall
have to ‘recall’ the name, perhaps with some difficulty. What we recall or reinstate is a response,
not a copy of the label which we then read” (Skinner, 1969a, p. 274). In “The inside story,” behavior
again trumps other sorts of entities.
90(14). “I may say that the only differences I
expect to see revealed between the behavior of
the rat and man (aside from enormous differences
of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior”
(Skinner, 1938, pp. 442).
91(70). “Etymology is the archaeology of
thought” (Skinner, 1989b, p. 13; see also Skinner,
1989c). This line is in the opening paragraph of
“The origins of cognitive thought.”
92. In “The shame of American education,”
Skinner (1984b) provided this list of four items
of advice to educators (Skinner, 1987a, p. 122124):
“Be clear about what is to be taught”
“Teach first things first”
“Stop making all students advance at essentially the same rate”
“Program the subject matter”
93. Though many behavior analysts probably have not seen its source, here is a Skinner
quotation that has appeared in dictionaries of
quotations: “Education is what survives when
what has been learnt has been forgotten” (e.g.,
Oxford dictionary of quotations, 1980, p. 508).
I have not seen the article, but its source is recorded as “Education in 1984,” New Scientist, 21
May 1964, p. 484.
94. The American Heritage Dictionary of
Quotations (Miner & Rawson, 1997) includes the
79
preceding Skinner quotation and three others: “At
this very moment, we have the necessary techniques, both material and psychological, to create
a full and satisfying life for everyone” (attributed
to “Walden Two,” 1948); “The real problem is not
whether machines think but whether men do”
(attributed to “Contingencies of Reinforcement,
1969); and “We shouldn’t teach great books; we
should teach a love of reading” (attributed to
a quotation in “B. F. Skinner: The man and his
ideas” by Richard I. Evans).
95(48). “In an American school if you ask
for the salt in good French, you get an A. In
France, you get the salt” (Skinner, 1968). This
one should have been in one of those dictionaries of quotations.
96. “I could have shouted at the subjects of my
experiments, ‘Behave, damn you! Behave as you
ought!’ Eventually I realized that the subjects were
always right. They always behaved as they should
have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made
a bad prediction.” This was Frazier speaking in
Skinner’s novel, “Walden Two” (Skinner, 1948,
p. 240). Of course, Frazier was acknowledging
Francis Bacon’s dictum, sometimes quoted by
Skinner (72): “Nature cannot be ordered about,
except by obeying her” (Bacon, 1620).
L’Envoi
97. A letter to Joseph V. Brady (1990) included
the following: “I don’t know whether you’ve heard
about my leukemia. So long as I get platelets
and red cells, I feel perfectly normal. But of
course, in the not too distant future, some silly
infection will take me off. I’ve had a good life,
and it would be rather ungracious to complain,
don’t you think?”
98. Skinner discussed his leukemia in a radio
interview (National Public Radio, 1990): “I recommend it as a terminal illness, because if you get
blood then you’re perfectly normal, except that
the white cells deteriorate and eventually you are
extremely vulnerable to infection.”
99. “Many psychologists, like the philosophers
before them, have looked inside themselves for
explanations of their behavior. They have felt
feelings and observed mental processes through
introspection. Introspection has never been very
satisfactory, however” (Skinner, 1990, p. 1206; see
A. Charles Catania
80
also Skinner, 1999, p. 663). These are the opening
lines of Skinner’s last article, “Can psychology be
a science of mind?,” which was published in the
American Psychologist not long after he received a
Lifetime Contribution Award from the American
Psychological Association.
100. And this is the closing line: “. . . whether
behavior analysis will be called psychology is a
matter for the future to decide” (Skinner, 1990,
p. 1210; see also Skinner, 1999, p. 673).
101. The impact of Skinner’s contributions
is captured in a quotation by Archimedes on the
power of the lever (74): “Give me somewhere
to stand, and I will move the earth.” But here we
must give Skinner the last word. This is an excerpt from his daughter’s description of his final
days: “Near the end, his mouth was dry. Upon
receiving a drink of water he said his last word,
‘Marvelous’” (Vargas, 1991, p. 2).
References
Bacon, F. (1620). Novum Organum.
Brady, J. V. (1990). “It would be rather ungracious
to complain.” Division 25 Recorder, 26, 1, 4.
Catania, A. C. (1981). The flight from experimental analysis. In C. M. Bradshaw, S. E. & C. F.
Lowe (Eds.), Quantification of steady-state operant
behaviour (pp. 49-64). Amsterdam: Elsevier/
North-Holland.
Catania, A. C. (1987a). Editorial selection. Journal
of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 48,
481-483.
Catania, A. C. (1987b). Some Darwinian lessons
for behavior analysis. A review of Peter J.
Bowler’s “The eclipse of Darwinism.” Journal
of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 47(249257).
Catania, A. C. (1988). Preface. In A. C. Catania &
S. Harnad (Eds.), The selection of behavior: The
operant behaviorism of B. F. Skinner (pp. xiii-xvi).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Catania, A. C. (1995). Higher-order behavior
classes: Contingencies, beliefs, and verbal
behavior. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 26, 191-200.
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1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 83 - 89
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 83
Interpretation and Experimental-analysis:
An Underappreciated Distinction
John W. Donahoe
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Behavior analysis and mainstream psychology differ fundamentally in their approaches to the explanation of complex behavior. This difference arises from psychology’s failure to observe Skinner’s distinction
between experimental analysis and interpretation, a distinction that is honored in other sciences. Behavior
analysis uses principles derived from the experimental analysis of basic processes to interpret (explain) more
complex phenomena that cannot themselves be subjected to experimental analysis. In contrast, psychology
uses principles inferred from the complex behavior itself.
Skinner (1974) noted with regard to his efforts
to explain human behavior:
“I am concerned with interpretation rather
than prediction and control” (p. 21) … As in other
sciences, we often lack the information necessary
for prediction and control and must be satisfied
with interpretation, but our interpretations will
have the support of the prediction and control
which have been possible under other conditions”
(p. 194).
The distinction between experimental analysis
and interpretation is present in all science and
is not peculiar to the science of behavior, even
when not explicitly stated. Consider mechanics in physics. The principles of mechanics as
formulated by Newton are thought to be valid
(on the macro level) for describing the motion
of objects. Newtonian principles are based on
experimental analyses conducted with balls rolling
down inclined planes, swinging pendulums, and
the like. In spite of their validity, the application of Newtonian principles to motion in the
world outside the laboratory is often an instance
of interpretation. For example, when a boulder
tumbles down a hillside after a rainfall, all of the
causes of its motion and all of the principles that
describe that motion are presumably known. And
yet, the specific path and final resting place of
the boulder are uncertain. The particulars of the
phenomenon cannot be completely described by
Skinner distinguished between two complementary aspects of science—experimental analysis and interpretation. Failure to honor this distinction is at the core of the differences between
behavior analysis and mainstream psychology.
Experimental analysis can take place only when
conditions permit manipulation and/or control
of all antecedent variables and measurement of
all consequences that enter into orderly functional
relations with those antecedents (Skinner, 1966).
This idealized state may be closely approximated
only in the laboratory. In the specific instance of
behavior analysis, the conditions for experimental
analysis generally require the use of nonhuman
subjects to control pre-experimental history.
From this perspective, many experiments—including most worthy experiments—do not sufficiently approximate these idealized conditions
to qualify as experimental analyses. Interpretation
occurs when some phenomenon is observed
under conditions that do not permit experimental analysis but to which the fruits of prior
experimental analyses may be applied to explain
the phenomenon. Complex behavior—especially
human behavior—is almost always the domain
of interpretation, not experimental analysis. As
Correspondence may be addressed to Prof. John W. Donahoe,
Neuroscience and Behavior Program, Department of Psychology,
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, MA 01002, USA
or via email to: [email protected]
83
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John W. Donahoe
Newtonian principles because the motion occurs
under conditions in which the specific values of
many variables are unknown (e.g., the irregularities of the hillside, the momentary coefficients of
sliding friction at the changing interface between
the boulder and the hillside, etc.). In spite of these
uncertainties, Newtonian principles provide a satisfying explanation for the motion of the boulder,
i.e., they enable us to “understand” the phenomenon. In Skinner’s terms, Newtonian mechanics
provides an interpretation of the boulder’s motion. A major goal of experimental analysis in
any science is to enable an interpretation of that
larger world outside the laboratory. Indeed, all
applications of behavior analysis to fields such as
education and the remediation of dysfunctional
behavior are instances of interpretation.
Explanation in Behavior Analysis vis-à-vis
Psychology
Interpretations of behavior confront an even
stiffer challenge than do interpretations of mechanics: Organisms are historical systems whose
future states are dependent not only on their present state but also on their history of past states
(cf. Smolensky, 1988). A force applied to a body
having a specific location and moving in a given
direction at a given velocity will have the same
effect whatever the prior location, direction, and
velocity of that body. However, organisms that
behave identically in a given situation may react
differently to the same subsequent environmental
event depending on their unique experiences.
For example, failure may have little effect on the
behavior of someone whose prior behavior has
been largely successful but a devastating effect on
someone whose prior behavior has been largely
unsuccessful.
Skinner (1974) showed himself sensitive to
the different roles of history in sciences such
as mechanics and behavior when he affiliated
behavior analysis with biology instead of physics. “The experimental analysis of behavior is a
rigorous, extensive, and rapidly advancing branch
of biology” (italics added) (p. 255) (cf. Hull, 1940).
By so doing, Skinner allied behavior analysis with
the unifying theme of all biology: Complexity is
the cumulative product of basic selection pro-
cesses acting over time In the case of biology,
the environment acts through the process of
natural selection by the ancestral environment on
a population of individuals to favor the survival
of some and the demise of others. In behavior
analysis, natural selection is complemented by the
process of selection by reinforcement. In selection by reinforcement, the environment acts on
a population of environment-behavior relations
of a single individual to strengthen some relations
and weaken others (Donahoe & Palmer, 1994).
In biology, after selection processes have been
identified through experimental analysis, they
are used to interpret complex phenomena that
occur under circumstances that do not permit
experimental analysis—phenomena such as the
evolution of species. Explanation (i.e., interpretation) in behavior analysis parallels explanation
in evolutionary biology: (a) basic processes are
identified and characterized through experimental
analysis, (b) principles that summarize the effects
of these processes are formulated and methods
are devised that trace their cumulative effects, and
(c) complex phenomena are said to be explained
if the principles acting over time are sufficient to
accommodate the observed effects. This mode
of explanation differs from what occurs in mainstream psychology. In psychology, (a) complex
behavior is subjected to experimentation (but not
experimental analysis in the present sense), (b)
inferences about basic principles are made based
on observations of the complex behavior, and (c)
the complex behavior is said to be “explained”
if the complex behavior is necessarily implied by
the principles.
The fundamental difference between behavior-analytic and psychological approaches
to explanation becomes most apparent when
complex phenomena are encountered that are
inconsistent with their respective principles.
In behavior analysis, complex phenomena that
are inconsistent with basic principles prompt
new experimental analyses. Perhaps the basic
processes were incompletely characterized or
perhaps additional basic processes remain to be
uncovered. The central point is that the failure
of existing principles to interpret complex behavior prompts new experimental analyses of
simpler phenomena. By contrast, in psychology
Interpretation and analysis
a complex phenomenon that is inconsistent with
previously inferred processes prompts new inferences derived from further observations of that
or other complex behavior.
The inferred-process approach is plagued by
two classes of problems—formal and pragmatic.
Formally, principles inferred from complex behavior are prey to logical circularity. That is, the
principles that were inferred from the complex
phenomena are then used to “explain” the very
phenomena from which they were inferred. Because the logical/mathematical chain that extends
from observation to inference and back again is
typically lengthy, the circularity of the account is
obscured. Although efforts may be made to validate the newly inferred processes by conducting
new experiments, the methods used in the new
experiments are often very similar those used in
the original experiments. This practice permits
reliability of findings to be mistaken for validity
of principles. A second formal problem with
the inferred-process approach is that inferences
are incompletely constrained by behavioral observations; thus, the likelihood is small that any
specific inference is correct. In general, a given
instance of complex behavior is consistent with
any of a large number of candidate principles
(cf. Anderson, 1978; Donahoe, 2004; Townsend,
1972). As an example from Markov processes
with hidden states—much simpler systems than
the nonlinear neuromuscular systems of organisms—a prominent investigator has remarked: “I
would think it is fundamentally hopeless to try to
deduce the ‘right’ internal machinery from I-O
[i.e., input-output] observations” (Jaeger, personal
communication, May 9, 2001). That is, unobservable states, such as those occurring within an
organism, cannot be validly inferred based solely
on observations of external environmental and
behavioral events.
The pragmatic problem is illustrated by
the history of inferred-process theories: Such
theories have relatively short half-lives—perhaps
less than 10 years on the average. How many
students have found that the “theory-du-jour”
upon entering graduate school has become passé
upon leaving? The consequence is that students
become discouraged and, more fundamentally,
that mainstream psychology lacks the cumula-
85
tive nature typical of science. In the inferredprocess approach, earlier principles are seldom
refined by later experimental work but, instead,
are replaced altogether. In behavior analysis, new
findings rarely lead to the abandonment of earlier
principles but more often to their supplementation. Consider the blocking experiment (Kamin,
1968; cf. vom Saal & Jenkins, 1970) in which it
was demonstrated that a close temporal relation
of a response to the reinforcer was not sufficient
for behavioral change to occur. The reinforcing
stimulus had also to evoke a behavior that was not
otherwise occurring (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972;
cf. Donahoe, Burgos, & Palmer, 1993; Donahoe,
Crowley, Millard, & Stickney, 1982). In the new
formulation of the reinforcement principle, temporal contiguity is not replaced as a requirement
but is supplemented by the additional requirement
of reinforcer-evoked behavioral change. The
modern principle of the reinforcement incorporates both temporal contiguity and behavioral
change in its statement.
Unobserved Events in Behavior Analysis visà-vis Psychology
A common view of behavior analysis is that
it has no place for unobserved events. Although
this is true of experimental analysis, it is a fundamental misconception in the case of interpretation (Skinner, 1945). Interpretation may appeal
to unobserved events (e.g., operants) as long as
three requirements are met (Skinner, 1957, 1984):
(a) The unobserved operant must be of a kind
that has been subjected to prior experimental
analysis. (b) The antecedents that prevail when
the unobserved operant is invoked must include
the critical antecedents identified when it was subjected to experimental analysis. (c) The prevailing
conditions must contain antecedents known to be
present in the history of the individual when the
behavior was reinforced or, minimally, that such
antecedents were very likely a part of the history
of the individual. Under such circumstances, an
appeal to unobserved operants in the interpretation of complex behavior is not fundamentally
different from an appeal to Newtonian principles
in the interpretation of a boulder tumbling down
a hill. As previously noted, the interpretation of
86
John W. Donahoe
the boulder’s motion is persuasive because the
conditions present during the boulder’s motion
have all been subjected to experimental analysis
under other circumstances.
As an illustration of the interpretation of
complex behavior, suppose that a child is heard
to mispronounce the word “train” as “twain”
but subsequently comes to pronounce the word
correctly without explicit training. How can this
change be interpreted? A likely interpretation
begins with the observation that the sound “train”
has previously been established as a discriminative stimulus—as when the parent says “Where’s
the train” and the child points to a picture of a
train followed the parent’s reinforcing comment,
“Yes, that’s right.” This experience establishes the
sound “train” as a discriminative stimulus. Moreover, the sound “train” is simultaneously established as a putative conditioned reinforcer for any
behavior that precedes it (Keller & Schoenfeld,
1950; Dinsmoor, 1950). Given this history, the
more closely the child’s own vocal behavior produces a sound that resembles the sound “train” as
spoken by the parent, the greater the conditioned
reinforcement produced by the child’s vocalization. Through this process, correct pronunciation is automatically shaped without the need for
parental intervention (Donahoe & Palmer, 1994).
Note that the interpretation appeals exclusively to
principles that are the products of experimental
analysis (e.g., discrimination and conditioned
reinforcement) and to conditions that have been
a part of the child’s history. Thus, acquisition of
correct pronunciation without contemporaneous
reinforcement by others can be interpreted by
behavior-analytic principles.
Behavior analysis does not eschew unobserved
events in interpretation, but it rejects unobservable events such as the inferred processes of
mainstream psychology. Unobservable events
cannot be subjected to experimental analysis under any conditions. The long-term memory stores
and retrieval processes of cognitive psychology,
the attitudes and beliefs of social psychology,
and the unconscious impulses and motivations
of clinical psychology are not observable. What
is observable is the behavior from which these
entities are inferred and—should we expand the
scope of our observations—the physiological
events that accompany that behavior.
Appealing to inferred processes to explain
complex behavior repeats the conceptual error
made by creationists in their efforts to account
for complex organisms (Donahoe, 1983, 2003;
Vargas, 1991). Prior to Darwin’s natural-science
explanation of the origins of species through natural selection, creationists attributed complexity
to an entity that was inferred to reside within each
individual and which it shared with others of its
kind—the species’ essence. Individual differences
were of little intrinsic interest and were thought
merely to obscure the underlying essence (Mayr,
1982; cf. Donahoe, 2003; Palmer & Donahoe,
1992; Skinner, 1950). The eminent evolutionary
biologist Ernst Mayr (1976) commented on the
earlier conflict between the inferred essences of
creationism and the observation-based principle
of Darwin as follows: “No two ways of looking
at nature could be more different” (p. 28). “No
typologist [i.e., creationist] has ever understood
natural selection, because he cannot possibly
understand it.” (p. 173).
Similarly, behavior analysis and psychology
have conceived their tasks so differently that a rapprochement seems unlikely. Although both disciplines have the same ultimate goal—to explain
complex behavior, especially complex human
behavior—the paths taken to reach that common
goal differ fundamentally. Behavior analysis seeks
to identify basic processes through experimental
analysis and then to use those processes to interpret complex behavior when circumstances preclude experimental analysis. If behavior analysis
is successful, the interpretation of all behavior will
be stated in terms of a relatively small number of
basic behavioral processes such as discrimination,
generalization and—most centrally—selection
by reinforcement. Unobserved events can be
accepted into the fold only if they participate
in processes that have been subjected to experimental analysis under circumstances in which
they were observable. In contrast, psychology
attempts to explain complex behavior by reference to processes that are inferred from complex
behavior and that are constrained only by formal
(i.e., logical/mathematical) considerations. Moreover, the inferred processes of psychology vary
from field to field within psychology. In contrast,
Interpretation and analysis
behavior analysis seeks to identify a single set of
basic principles that can interpret the full range
of behavior. Thus, an explanation that behavior
analysis would find acceptable would almost
certainly not be stated in terms that would satisfy
mainstream psychology, and an account that psychology would find acceptable would not meet
the demands of behavior analysis. Regrettably,
the two approaches are incommensurate except
for their endpoint—behavior.
Differences on such fundamental matters are
not unique in the history of biology. Biology
encountered a comparable conceptual impasse
in the conflict between those who saw species
differences as primarily the product of a relatively small number of basic biological processes,
notably natural selection, and those who saw
species differences as reflections of the inferred
essences of special creation that were unique to
each species.
Neuroscience and Behavior Analysis
Behavior analysis is a subfield of biology that
is both as independent and as interdependent of
other biological sciences as, say, evolutionary biology and cellular neuroscience. The principle of
the selection of environment-behavior relations
by reinforcement stands on its own merits just
as the principle of natural selection stands independently of the genetic mechanisms that implement it. However, it is enlightening to recall that
natural selection was not accepted as the unifying
principle of evolutionary biology until the cellular
(genetic) mechanisms that implemented it were
identified. More than 70 years elapsed between
the publication of The origin of species in 1859
and the general acceptance of natural selection
in the 1930s.
Two factors were critical to the triumph
of Darwinism—the discovery of biological
mechanisms that implemented natural selection
(Mendelian genetics) and the development of
quantitative procedures that traced the effects of
natural selection over time (population genetics)
(Donahoe, 2003). We may speculate that the
acceptance of behavior-analytic principles will
follow a parallel course. If the parallel holds, the
power of behavior-analytic principles to interpret
87
complex behavior will be appreciated beyond
the behavior-analytic community only after the
relevant biological mechanisms that implement
them have been identified and the quantitative
procedures that trace their cumulative effects have
been devised. Fortunately, both endeavors are
beginning to bear fruit (e.g., Burgos, 1997; 2003;
Donahoe, 1997; 2001; Donahoe & Burgos, 2000;
Frey, 1997; Frey & Morris, 1998; Schultz, 1997;
Waelti, Dickinson, & Schultz, 2001).
The notion that behavior analysis welcomes
coordination with neuroscience may be surprising to those who are acquainted with Skinner’s
writings only through the misrepresentations of
inferred-process theorists in psychology. Lest the
claim of an alliance between behavior analysis
and neuroscience be thought revisionist history,
it is well to cite Skinner’s own words—consistent
over the years.
“What is generally not understood by
those interested in establishing neurological
bases is that a rigorous description at the level of
behavior is necessary for the demonstration of
a neurological correlate ... I am not overlooking
the advance that is made in the unification of
knowledge when terms at one level of analysis are
defined (“explained”) at a lower level” (Skinner,
1938, pp. 422, 428).
“The physiologist of the future will tell
us all that can be known about what is happening inside the behaving organism. His account
will be an important advance over a behavioral
analysis, because the latter is necessarily “historical”—that is to say, it is confined to functional
relations showing temporal gaps. ... What he
discovers cannot invalidate the laws of a science
of behavior, but it will make the picture of human
action more nearly complete” (Skinner, 1974, pp.
236-237).
“Valid facts about behavior are not invalidated by discoveries concerning the nervous
system, nor are facts about the nervous system
invalidated by facts about behavior. Both sets
of facts are part of the same enterprise, and I
have always looked forward to the time when
neurology would fill in the temporal and spatial
gaps which are inevitable in a behavioral analysis”
(Skinner, 1984, p. 543).
Note especially that Skinner held that “all that
88
John W. Donahoe
can be known about what is happening inside the
behaving organism” is dependent on experimental analysis at the level of neuroscience. That
is, unobserved events—whether behavioral or
neural—are welcomed into the scientific fold if
they have been subjected to experimental analysis
under other conditions and are not merely inferences from higher level observations. At the
present time, behavior-analytic interpretations of
complex behavior are regarded by some as the
counterpart of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just so stories”
about the origins of various animals. (For example, the elephant’s long trunk was attributed to
an originally short protuberance being stretched
by a crocodile.) The conjoining of genetics and
the quantitative methods of population genetics with Darwin’s observations now provides a
compelling alternative account of the origin of
complex species. Similarly, the conjoining of the
biological mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and
quantitative methods such as neural networks
with behavior-analytic principles may yield an
equally persuasive and comprehensive interpretation of complex behavior.
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Mayr, E. (1976) Evolution and the diversity of
life: Selected essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press
Mayr, E. (1982). The growth of biological
thought: diversity, evolution, and inheritance.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Palmer, D. C., & Donahoe, J. W. (1992). Essentialism and selectionism in cognitive science
and behavior analysis. American Psychologist,
47, 1344-1358.
Rescorla, R. A., & Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory
of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the
effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black & W. F. Prokasy
(Eds.), Classical conditioning II (pp. 64-99).
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Schultz, W. (1997). Adaptive dopaminergic neurons report value of environmental stimuli. In
J. W. Donahoe & V. P. Dorsel (Eds.), Neuralnetwork models of cognition: Biobehavioral
foundations (pp. 317-335). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Press.
Skinner, B. F. The behavior of organisms. New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
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Skinner, B.F. (1945). The operational analysis of
psychological terms. Psychological Review,
52, 270-277.
Skinner, B. F. (1950). Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review, 57, 193-216.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Skinner, B. F. (1966). What is the experimental
analysis of behavior? Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 9, 213-218.
Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. New
York: Random House.
Skinner, B. F. (1984). The operational analysis of
psychological terms. Psychological Review,
52, 270-277.
Skinner paper by Julie on her father's last talk
at APA.
Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment
of connectionism. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 11, 1-23.
Townsend, J. T. (1972). Some results on the
identifiability of serial and parallel processes.
British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical
Psychology, 25, 168-199.
Vargas, J. S. (1991). B. F. Skinner—The last few
days. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
Behavior, 55, 1-2.
vom Saal, W., & Jenkins, H. M. (1970). Blocking
the development of stimulus control.
Learning & Motivation, 1, 52-64.
Waelti, P., Dickinson, A., & Schultz, W. (2001).
Dopamine responses comply with basic assumptions of formal learning theory. Nature,
412, 43-48.
1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 91 - 93
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 91
Skinner’s Molecular Interpretations of Behavior
Jack Michael
Western Michigan University
Five examples are given of Skinner’s interpretive use of a small number of behavioral principles. The
first two are molecular analyses of relations that might seem to call for molar interpretations, alternation
in concurrent schedules and spontaneous recovery. One exemplifies the role of multiple control as an explanation of a common observation that seems to contradict the behavioral principle of satiation. Another
is his analysis of the surprisingly strong effect of “catching someone’s eye.” Last is an example of the
thoroughness with which Skinner explores the possible reasons for the punishment of verbal behavior.
each key is set up on the basis of time passage
(typically variable interval schedules), the longer
the bird continues to peck one key, the greater
the probability that reinforcement will have been
set up on the other key, which results in a good
deal of alternation from one key to the other. In
other words, “In order to analyze ‘choice’ we must
consider a single final response, striking, without
respect to the position or color of the key, and in
addition the responses of changing from one key
or color to the other (p. 93).” (All that is needed
to molecularize the matching law is to consider the
differential conditioned reinforcement strengths
that result from switching from right to left and
from left to right.)
He goes on to consider the relevance of the
distance between the two keys as a rough measure of the stimulus-difference between them,
which “determines the scope of the response
of changing-over, with an implied difference in
sensory feedback. It also modifies the spread
of reinforcement to responses supposedly not
reinforced (p. 94).” A subsequent consideration
of experimental results with keys about one inch
apart compared with results when the keys were
four inches apart contributes to the plausibility
of this general interpretation.
This type of analysis would seem an appropriate replacement for explanations in terms of
choice or preference, which may well be functioning
as explanatory fictions (one of Skinner’s most useful
pejoratives).
Of his many conceptual contributions, I will
focus on Skinner’s use of a small number of
behavioural concepts and principles (respondent
pairing, operant reinforcement and extinction,
discriminative stimulus control, etc.) as a basis
for an interpretation of any conceivable event
involving behaviour. His analyses of the results
of complex animal experiments in these terms
illustrated the power of these few basic relations,
and constituted strong support for their relevance
to human behaviour as appears extensively in
Science and Human Behavior (1953) and in Verbal
Behavior (1957).
Alternation on Concurrent Schedules
The paper “Are theories of learning necessary?” (1950, page references are to Cumulative
Record, Definitive Edition, 1999) was, for me, a
rich source of Skinner’s detailed analyses. The
fact that in a concurrent schedule, response frequencies are ultimately related to reinforcement
frequencies is analyzed in terms of the response
of pecking without respect to the position of
the key, and in addition the responses of changing from right to left, and from left to right. The
former is related to the average reinforcement
frequency over the two keys, and the latter to
the differential reinforcement of each type of
switching response. Because reinforcement on
Corresponding author: Jack Michael, 1000 Berkshire Drive,
Kalamazoo, 49006 Michigan. E-mail: [email protected]
91
Jack Michael
92
Spontaneous Recovery
A general principle of stimulus-change decrement is stated as follows: “Maximal responding
during extinction is obtained only when the conditions under which the response was reinforced
are precisely reproduced (Skinner, 1950, p. 84, but
page references are to Cumulative Record, Definitive
Edition, 1999)” Experimental data illustrating this
point are provided (Figure 5, p. 84) followed by
an application to the phenomenon referred to as
spontaneous recovery. “Even after prolonged extinction an organism will often respond at a higher
rate for at least a few moments at the beginning
of another session (p. 85).” One interpretation is
in terms of the spontaneous dissipation over time
of an inhibitory process that had accumulated
as a result of unreinforced responding. Skinner’s
alternative explanation is in terms of differential
extinction in the presence of stimuli related to
having just been placed in the chamber and in
the presence of stimuli related to having been in
the chamber for a while. After an extinction session, there has been a good deal of unreinforced
responding in the presence of the latter, but much
less in the presence of the former. Experiments
by Kendall (1965) and by Welker and McAuley
(1978) support Skinner’s interpretation, but those
of Thomas and Sherman (1986) question it. In
any case, it is typical of Skinner’s concern for the
details of environment-behaviour relations.
The Candy Example
Behavioural interpretations of human behaviour are sometimes resisted by citing a common
event that seems to contradict a behavioural principle (with, I think, the hope that maybe the whole
behavioural approach will go away). A proper
analysis usually involves some kind of multiple
control. In Science and Human Behavior there are
many such examples, and a good one involves
giving a small child a piece of candy, which then
results in objectionable behaviour such as asking
for more, crying, possibly a temper tantrum. “We
appear to have increased his candy-hunger, although
our definition of satiation implies that we have
decreased it, at least by a small amount (Skinner,
1953, pp. 206-207).” The increased candy-seeking
and emotional behaviour is explained in terms
of the sight and taste of candy functioning as a
discriminative stimulus for candy-seeking (candy
has typically been dispensed more than one piece
at a time) followed by emotional behaviour when
such behaviour is subjected to extinction. He goes
on to suggest that the satiating and discriminating
functions can be separated if the child is subjected
to a history in which the candy is only dispensed
a single piece at a time, with the result that asking
for more will extinguish, and “it should be possible to demonstrate a small measure of satiation
(p. 207).”
Catching Someone’s Eye
Some social stimuli may have effects that seem
to be beyond a behavioural analysis. “An example
of the surprising power of an apparently trivial
event is the common experience of ‘catching
someone’s eye.’ Under certain circumstances
the change in behavior which follows may be
considerable (Skinner, 1953, pp. 302-304).” This
kind of event supposedly supports the notion
that human social interaction requires a special
kind of ‘understanding’ that is something more
than ordinary stimulus discrimination. However
an interpretation in terms of reinforcing contingencies is readily available. Our behaviour is
often dependent to some extent on the presence
or absence of a particular person. Simply seeing
such a person results in a change in our repertoire.
“If, in addition, we catch his eye, we fall under the
control of an even more restrictive stimulus–he is
not only present, he is watching us. . . “and we also
know that he knows that we are looking at him. .
. If we are to behave in a way that he censures, it
will now be not only in opposition to his wishes,
but brazen (p. 303).”
Why Verbal Behaviour Is Punished
In Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957) Chapter 15
(Self-Editing) is concerned with a speaker’s observation of his own ongoing verbal behaviour
and withholding or altering it before it is emitted overtly, a process he calls self-editing. A major
reason for self-editing is a history of punishment, and he then considers the various reasons
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Skinner’s Molecular Interpretations
why verbal behaviour is punished. This section
illustrates Skinner’s concern for thoroughness,
his reluctance to consider only the most obvious
aspects of an issue. Seven reasons for the punishment of verbal behaviour are provided, and one
can be pretty certain that no important ones have
been overlooked.
“Verbal behavior may be objectionable
to the listener simply as noise. Punishment
for this reason usually drives the verbal
behavior of children to the covert level
(p. 373).” Many children are reinforced
generously for verbal behavior when they
are learning to speak, but eventually their
behavior has to serve some important
current purpose for the listener, or it is
typically punished by some form of social
disapproval.
“Certain properties of responses . . .
too loud a voice, a rasping tone, undue
sibilance, heavy alliteration, singsong, and
such defective execution as bad spelling, stuttering, or incompleteness . . . are
aversive to others . . . and likely to bring
punishment.
“Verbal behavior is frequently punished because of deficient stimulus control.
Poor conditioning, forgetting, interactions
among somewhat similar responses . . .
may lead to ‘the wrong word’–to responses
which do not satisfy the reinforcing contingencies of the community (p. 373).”
Included in this category are lying, exaggerating, wishful thinking, illogical speech,
and far-fetched intraverbal sequences.
“Verbal behavior is usually punished–if
only by its ineffectiveness– when it is
under poor audience control (p. 374).”
Slang and highly formal speech are each
punished when the other would be appropriate. “Familiar expressions appropriate
to one’s peers are punished when emitted
with respect to one’s superiors (p. 374).”
Responses that are too obvious, too commonplace etc., are also punished.
“Verbal behavior may be punished in
a sort of retribution if it has punishing
consequences for the listener. Reference to
a painful state of affairs which ‘hurts the
listener’s feelings’ is a kind of ‘bad break’
which is revoked if it generates aversive
self-stimulation in time (p. 374).”
“Verbal behavior may be automatically
self-punishing. The names of disliked persons and responses appropriate to embarrassing, dangerous, or gruesome episodes
generate punishing consequences in the
process of being emitted (p. 374).”
“A subtle form of punishment follows when a response ‘gives something
away’–when it spoils the point of a joke
by presenting the key word too soon, [or]
reveals an ulterior motive (p. 375).”
Conclusion
Exposure to hundreds of Skinner’s examples
such as these had two general effects on me. It
made me quite uneasy when I encountered a
molar or general regularity that I could not reduce
to molecular relations, and it was also a form of
instruction in how to make similar analyses. Such
examples also contradict the common criticism
that behavior analysis is too simple to deal with
the complexities of animal and human behavior.
It must be admitted, however, that many behavioral treatments of complex behavior are not as
thorough as Skinner’s.
References
Kendall, S. F. (1965). Spontaneous recovery after
extinction with periodic time-outs. Psychonomic
Science, 2, 117-118.
Skinner, B. F. (1950). Are theories of learning
necessary? Psychological Review, 57, 193-216.
Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior.
New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Thomas, D. R., & Sherman, L. (1986). An assessment of the role of handling cues in ”spontaneous recovery” after extinction. Journal of the
Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 46, 305-314.
Welker, R. L., & McAuley, K. (1978). Reductions
in resistance to extinction and spontaneous
recovery as a function of changes in transportational and contextual stimuli. Animal
Learning and Behavior, 6, 451-457.
1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 95 - 103
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 95
The Belief in Free Will as a Biological Adaptation:
Thinking Inside and Outside
the Behavior Analytic Box
Richard F. Rakos1
Cleveland State university
In general, people tenaciously believe they possess free will despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that all human behavior is determined by environmental stimuli. Skinner in particular has consistently,
forcefully, and persuasively argued that the belief in free will is an artifact of human behavior – in his view,
a now-dysfunctional product of the “literature of freedom and dignity.” Drawing on both scientific and
nonscientific sources, I examine this paradox between subjective experience and objective analysis and suggest that the almost-universal “belief in free will” is a product of evolution and thereby an adaptive human
characteristic. From this perspective, I discuss the wisdom of adhering to the dominant behavior analytic
understanding of free will; contrary to Skinner’s contention, the pervasive human belief in free will, even
if scientifically “wrong,” may well contribute to social progress rather than impede it.
”...from the human standpoint, the important
thing is less that man’s will should be free than
that man should think that it is free.” (Sherrington,
1940, p. 199)
philosophers of science recognize that this belief
is, ultimately, an illusion (Crick, 1994; Smilansky,
2000, 2002; Wegner, 2002), legions of “compatibalists” continue to propose creative scenarios
as to how determinism can co-exist with human
freedom and moral responsibility (cf., Honderich,
2002; Kane, 2002b; Smilansky, 2000).
In contrast, Skinner articulated a straightforward and uncompromising incompatibalist
view: “I deny that freedom exists at all” (1948, p.
245); “autonomous man serves to explain only
the things we are not yet able to explain in other
ways. His existence depends on our ignorance...”
(1971, p. 12). He contended that the classical notions of freedom and moral responsibility have
been instilled in us through the “literature of
freedom” that developed in response to aversive
social control schemes (1971, p. 27). He argued
further that the acceptance of human agency
impedes cultural progress by directing attention
to mythological sources of human problems instead of to the real causes and by devaluing the
potency of positive reinforcement to promote
socially desirable behavior. Skinner’s dismissal of
”...this sense of freedom of will is as surely
a part of man’s nature as is the fact that he does
not have it.” (London, 1964, p. 170)
Humans believe they have free will in the classical sense that a competent person is the genuine
author of his or her actions. This libertarian notion of human agency is the fundamental philosophical, religious, and legal tenet upon which
modern Western culture and social organization
rests (cf., Dilman, 1999; Kane, 2002a,b; Pollock,
2000; Watson, 2003) -- “The Core Conception”
from which our ideas of justice and moral responsibility stem (Smilansky, 2002). Yet while many
1
Based on a paper presented at the annual convention of
the Association for Behavior Analysis, Boston, May, 2004. Special
thanks to Professor Dodge Fernald of Harvard University for
many helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Address
all correspondence to Richard F. Rakos, Department of Psychology, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH 44115. E-mail:
[email protected]
95
Richard F. Rakos
96
concepts deeply ingrained in the cultural legacy
of most humans elicits broad, scathing derision
and ire (cf., Bethlehem, 1987) -- if his views are
even considered at all.
Behavior analysts, of course, generally find
Skinner’s arguments persuasive and embrace
determinism as an accurate reflection of reality that also offers the most humanistic way to
eliminate the use of aversive behavior control
strategies, advance a harmonious and socially just
world, and in general maximize human potential.
Freedom is reframed as response competency: the
more behavioral alternatives with the potential
to achieve reinforcement an individual can emit
in a given situation, the more freedom is present. But expanded behavioral options enhance
environmental control only if the individual is
skilled at choosing. Well-refined choice behavior
is typically a chain of overt and covert responses
that acquires information, recognizes motivations
and desired outcomes, articulates values and social
conventions, assesses specific situational variables,
generates a range of potential responses, and
predicts likely short- and long-term consequences
of alternative actions. Naturally, the prominence
of the different response components varies
situationally.
The covert component of human choice behavior almost invariably includes salient cognitive
responses of which persons are directly aware.
It is the “consciousness” inherent to decision
making that gives humans the immediate, pervasive, and unshakable sense of agency. Conscious
thought is the foundation upon which the illusion
of free will rests (Wegner, 2002).
A biological perspective
Why do people so naturally internalize a libertarian notion of free will and accord it the status
of a given that needs no empirical confirmation?
The traditional behavior analytic answer is that
the belief in agency is an omnipresent cultural
phenomenon (Skinner, 1971; Waller, 1999).
There is a very different possibility, not cultural but biological: the human belief in free will
may be a biologically evolved adaptation. This isn’t
a strikingly new idea. Years ago, Sherrington suggested the human embrace of free will “serve(s)
to activate and sustain his zest-for-life. This last,
if he have it not, he is a biological failure and will
die out” (1940, p. 199). Skinner argued that only
behavior can be selected by the environment; for
example, he observed that “the contingencies of
survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression” (1971, p. 12).
Skinner would contend that evolution produces
tendencies to act freely -- that is, to choose -- but
not to have feelings of freedom. The sense of
freedom is a consequence of choice behavior
that is reinforced.
But perhaps the human experience of agency
is a product of evolution. This “sense” need not
be objectively “true” to be functionally adaptive,
much like a contingent consequence need not be
subjectively “pleasant” to functionally strengthen
the response that produces it. In fact, Trivers
(2000) hypothesized that humans possess an
evolved generalized skill at self-deception that
serves a range of socially adaptive functions. In
the case of free will, agency is the positive illusion
and, as I will discuss shortly, enhanced self-regulation is the adaptive benefit.
Psychological adaptations should increase
reproductive fitness and demonstrate design
specificity (Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004). Adaptations that enhance fitness will be expressed as
functional behaviors that address predictable
environmental challenges, and are universal in
the species, activated with exposure to certain
environmental stimuli, complex, and efficient.
While it is not yet possible to provide convincing evidence that the belief in free will is selected
by the contingencies of survival rather than by
behavioral and cultural contingencies, data from
clinical, social, and neuropsychology are consistent with this perspective and provide it with a
solid measure of evidentiary breadth and depth
(cf., Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004)2.
Clinical research and practice document that
the deeply ingrained belief in human volition is
a foundation of behavioral adaptation. Stable
response generalization and maintenance is only
achieved in therapy when the client identifies,
2
A theoretical psychological adaptation will develop construct
validity by accumulating evidence from a variety of sources: anthropological (cross-cultural, trans-historical), phylogenetic, genetic, psychological, medical, and physiological (Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004).
Belief in Free Will
labels, and internalizes the source of behavior
change as the self (Deci & Ryan, 1987, Kanfer
& Gaelick-Buys, 1991, Kanfer & Grimm, 1980,
Kopel & Arkowitz, 1975). Kanfer asserted that
“When people believe that they have responsibility for some action...that the behavior is voluntary
and not controlled by external threats or rewards,
they tend to learn more easily, to be more highly
motivated, and to report more positive feelings
than when operating under perceived external
pressures” (Kanfer & Gaelick-Buys, 1991, p. 319).
Thus, he recommended that “in the last phase of
therapy the clinician should...reemphasize that
the client was responsible for accomplishing the
goals of therapy” (Kanfer and Grimm, 1980, p.
437). Self-regulation training, in particular, teaches
clients to internalize the sense of control and internal agency (Kanfer & Gaelick-Buys, 1991), as
is done, for example, with self-statements in stress
inoculation training, which teach the client to emit
verbalizations that reflect internal control over
reactions to an external stressor (Meichenbaum,
1985). Self-statements to prepare for a stressor
include “What do I have to do?,” “I can handle
the situation,” “I am in control,” “I can meet the
challenge,” and “Just think about what I have to
do.” Each of these statements informs the client
that she has behavioral choice – and, by implication, free will. After successful coping, clients are
taught to emit reinforcing statements such as “I
did it,” “I handled that one pretty well,” and “I
knew I could do it,” which strengthen the adaptive
behavior as well as the sense of internal agency.
These clinical recommendations are supported by
emerging neuroscientific data suggesting that a
belief in agency is necessary for the acquisition of
effective decision making skills; in Churchland’s
words, “the default presumption that agent’s are
responsible for their actions is empirically necessary to an agent’s learning, both emotionally
and cognitively, how to evaluate consequences
of certain events and the price of taking risks”
(2002, p. 236).
The enormous social psychological “locus of
control” literature is provocative as well. When
people have, or believe they have, personal control
in a situation, their systemic release of stress-related cortisol is low and suppressed compared to
situations in which an external locus of control is
97
adopted (Zillman and Zillman, 1996). Perceived
control is associated with a wide variety of
adaptive coping responses and positive physical
(Brannon & Feist, 2000) and mental (Avison and
Cairney, 2003) health outcomes. In fact, many
scholars argue that the effort to exert personal
control is an anthropological constant across
time, culture, and even species (Heckhausen,
2000, 2003). “Striving for primary control [over
the external environment] is the engine that powers [mammalian] behavior” (Schulz, Wrosch, &
Heckhausen, 2003, p. 235), “with humans possessing the unique ability to perceive personal
control, which affords an additional “motivational
resource for active control attempts” (Heckhausen, 2000, p. 1023).3 Further, when people believe
they have control in a situation, and recognize
that their behavior is inconsistent with an existing
attitude, they infer that they are responsible for
choosing to perform that response and reinterpret the original attitude to make it compatible
with the act. “I decided to join the protest rally,
so I must believe the war is wrong.” The agency
illusion mandates that cognitive dissonance be
eliminated (cf., Festinger, 1957).
Brain research in the past 20 years provides
compelling indications that volitional behavior is
a product of biological adaptation rather than of
free will. Three examples will be noted. First, a
range of research suggests that the anterior cingulate, a part of the frontal cortex, is particularly
important for volition, as it is involved in such
mental functions as relating emotion to cognition
and making decisions (Walter, 2001). Its role in
motivation is demonstrated by the consequences
of lesions, such as alien-hand syndrome, in which
a hand behaves independently of conscious
control (Churchland, 2002), and akinetic mutism, in which conversations are understood but
few verbalizations are produced, because one has
“nothing to say” due to an “empty mind” (Walter,
2001). This latter phenomenon led Francis Crick
to proclaim “that the seat of the Will had been
3
Other scholars argue that the Western notion of free will is
a social construction (e.g., McCrone, 1999). In Asian culture, the
social goals are achieved not by individually willed action but by
passivity, as the individual strives to release all sense of willed action
and allow the self to dissolve back into the universal consciousness
(p. 250). Note however, that to strive for passivity and Auniversal
consciousness is simply another modality through which presumed
human agency is enacted. Common to both Eastern and Western
perspectives is the belief that one can direct the action.
98
Richard F. Rakos
discovered! It is at or near the anterior cingulate”
(Crick, 1994, p. 268).
Second, recent research has determined that
two separate neural systems guide human choice
behavior (McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, &
Cohen (2004). Portions of the limbic system
related to midbrain dopamine release are differentially activated when a decision involves
immediate reinforcement. This neural system is
closely associated with the experience of emotion. On the other hand, portions of the lateral
prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex,
which are involved with conscious analysis and
abstract reasoning, are energized when the decision involves delayed reinforcement. The extent
of the delay appears to matter little in terms of
cortical activation. Further, McClure et al. found
that the pattern of neural activation was related to
the decision made when a concurrent schedule of
reinforcement was in effect: greater activity in the
cortex than in the limbic system occurred when
the delayed reinforcer was selected but equivalent
activity in the two brain regions was found when
the immediate reinforcer was chosen. Thus, a key
category of volitional behavior -- self-management – relies on a different and more complex
neural system than do hedonistic responses. As
one of the study’s authors observed, humans
“have different neural systems that evolved to
solve different problems and our behavior is dictated by the competition or cooperation between
them” (EurekAlert!, 2004)
Third, sophisticated experiments by Libet and
colleagues demonstrated that the motor-premotor
cortical area of the brain generates a specific electrical charge, called the readiness potential or RP,
approximately 550 milliseconds prior to emission
of a voluntary action lacking pre-planning (Libet,
Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983). An involuntary
movement such as a tic or reflex does not produce
an RP (Wegner, 2002). The RP begins 350-400
milliseconds before there is the conscious awareness to act, which occurs approximately 150 -- 200
ms before the act itself. While many scientists
view these data as compelling evidence that voluntary behavior is not freely caused by conscious
thought (Churchland, 2002; Walter, 2001), Libet
(1999) himself hedged, observing that conscious
thought can still exert a “veto” function in the 200
ms “awareness” period. Reluctantly, he concluded
that free will is a controller -- but not an initiator
-- of action.
The dilemma for scientists
The data and logic of science argue that empiricists accept determinism. Yet this is difficult
or impossible for many scientists to do. Some
have developed intricate theories to make the
random motion of subatomic particles in quantum mechanics (e.g., Hodgson, 2002; Penrose &
Hameroff, 1995; Stapp, 1999), or the unpredictability in chaos theory, the basis for “naturalistic”
support for free will, despite the thoroughly
deterministic operation of these theories on a
macro level (Churchland, 2002; Walter, 2001).
Others resolutely sidestep or dismiss the data,
and adopt denial.
For example, Libet (1999), struggling with
his own RP data, declared that “the almost
universal experience that we can act with a free,
independent choice provides a kind of prima facie
evidence” for conscious control and that “the
intuitive feelings about the phenomenon of free
will form a fundamental basis for views of our human nature, and great care should be taken not to
believe allegedly scientific conclusions about them
which actually depend on ad hoc assumptions. A
theory that simply interprets the phenomenon of
free will as illusory and denies the validity of this
phenomenal fact is less attractive than a theory
that accepts or accommodates the phenomenal
fact” (p. 56).
Gomes (1999) also objected to hasty conclusions: Libet’s work, “whatever its intrinsic value,
does not give us back the intuition that the initiation of the act itself is free...what about what we
are conscious of as being a free decision that
really initiates the voluntary action? What about
the intuition we have that our actions are really
initiated, and not only controlled by ourselves, and
not by something else?...” (p. 64-65).
And Stapp (1999) contended that if the observer is entwined within the interactive system
Adherence to the quantum principles yields a
dynamical theory of the mind/brain/body system
that is in close accord with our intuitive idea of
what we are” (p. 143).
Belief in Free Will
Intuition, emotion, and free will
What exactly is it about this intuition that makes
it so powerful and unmalleable even when confronted with evidence of determinism?
One possibility is that volitional behavior
has a fundamental emotional component that
is inseparable from conscious, rational thought
(Churchland, 2002; Walter, 2001).4 Hume had
this insight almost 300 years ago: the will is
“nothing but the internal impression we feel and
are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise
to any new motion of our body, or new perception of our mind” (1739, p. 399). According to
Wegner (2002), “To label events as our personal
actions, conscious will must be an experience that
is similar to an emotion. It is a feeling of doing.
Unlike a cold thought or rational calculation of
the mind alone, will somehow happens both in
body and mind” (p. 325). It is the “authorship
emotion” (Wegner, 2002). For Walter (2001), the
emotional component provides “authenticity”
for the actor -- allowing her to identify with and
“own” the action. A purely rational assessment
can be externalized: “I held off because my
boss would not appreciate the criticism.” Here,
restraint is controlled by fear of external negative
consequences. An emotionally involved situation
changes the context: “I held off because my boss
deserves to hear my criticism in private.” In this
case, restraint is governed by a consequence that
incorporates cultural values. From this perspective, humans only emit volitional controlling
behavior when they are emotionally involved
to some extent in the outcome of the behavior.
Studies of brain-damaged individuals demonstrate that cognitively intact persons make poor
decisions when the injury suppresses or eliminates
affective responding (Churchland, 2002; Walter,
2001). Feelings inform us of the importance of
various consequences of behavior. When “caring” about an outcome is absent, behavior is
mechanical, unfocused, hesitant, or indecisive. But
4
Behaviorists typically have conceptualized cognitive responses
as the sole core component of volitional behavior (e.g., Rachlin,
1995; Waller, 1999). McClure et al’s. (2004) work suggests that, at
least for volitional responses that produce delay of gratification,
the limbic system contributes some level of dopamine system
activation that could account for the experience of the emotional
component.
99
when caring leads to a decision that is emotionally
meaningful, thoughtful, and judged to be sound
(Walter, 2001), we not only accept responsibility
for our actions, but responsibility for choosing our
actions. This is a major difference from the Skinnerian view that one is accountable though not
responsible for one’s behavior.
Free will as a motivating operation
The emotional component to the belief in
free will may be why the idea seems so “intuitive”
-- perhaps biological -- to so many. The sense of
agency appears to be an unconditioned cognitive
and emotional response to an inconspicuously
controlled environment that offers multiple response options.5 It functions as an unconditioned
motivating operation (MO, Laraway, Snycerski,
Michael, & Poling, 2003), providing the “meaning
and purpose” to intentional behavior. As an MO,
the belief has several impacts. It is an establishing
operation that increases the effectiveness of at
least two classes of consequences: delayed, probabalistic -- often verbal or nonmaterial -- reinforcers and self-statements related to personal control,
responsibility, and cultural values. It is an abolishing operation that decreases the effectiveness
of other consequences: immediate, predictable,
tangible reinforcers and self-statements related to
what observers might call “selfish” or “immoral”
behavior. Finally, it evokes the problem-solving,
decision-making, and rule generation responses
that comprise self-regulation. Without the agency
MO, the justification for conscious choice behavior resides solely in external reasons, thus weakening internal attributions of control and limiting
the scope of self-controlled behavior.
The belief in free will may be such a powerful
MO because of the physiological nature of conscious responses. Most fundamentally, the initiation of a volitional act (the RP) is not accessible
to conscious awareness. But even if the RP was
discernible, the one third of a second between it
and the subsequent awareness of the act is too
5
From this perspective, the unconditioned belief in free will is
not elicited by environments that present pervasive aversive control
that eliminates all options except direct resistance. When persons in
such situations invoke notions of free will to explain or understand
their counter-responses, they are utilizing the generalized cultural
legacy of the “literature of freedom” that evolved from the unconditioned response to subtly controlled environments.
100
Richard F. Rakos
brief for humans to perceive physically distinct
responses. Humans only perceive the second
response in the chain and, unaware of subtle
environmental influences, infer that they initiated
the conscious choice response. To the actor, correlation in this situation does imply causation.
The belief in the free will MO evolved in response to the natural operation of contingencies
of reinforcement. While behavior is controlled
most strongly by immediate, consistent, and
potent consequences (Kazdin, 2001), the myriad
of competing desires that characterize complex
societies mandates that delayed, partial, sporadic,
or nonmaterial gratification must occur regularly
and frequently. Human self-regulation requires an
environment that is engineered to support behavioral restraint (Watson & Tharp, 2002), perhaps
by activating the parts of the cortex involved with
delay of gratification (cf., McClure et al., 2004). As
the human social environment grew in complexity, the conditions that automatically promoted
self-regulation were present only sporadically.
Language capabilities, however, allow humans
to generate contingency rules that increase the
potency of delayed, probabalistic, socially beneficial consequences. It is the belief in the free will
MO that leads to the rule-governed behavior that
constrains “selfish” responses without the imposition of punishment. We label this rule-governed
behavior as “morality” and reinforce or punish it
through the cultural forces of religion, education,
and law in the unending effort to shape a viable,
growing society.
The agency illusion and progressive social
change
Skinner and other determinists argue that
the human mind, like the planet Earth and the
human body, is part of the natural scientific
continuum, but convincing the average person
that this is true will be the hardest of the three
great scientific realignments to accomplish. The
(pseudo)phenomenon of human agency is accessible and present to each competent person in a
way that differs markedly from our awareness
of the planet or the body: it is active, immediate,
repeated, and functional. Thus, humans believe
they can be, should be, and usually are the author
of their actions. In essence, amid the complexities of the multiple determinants of behavior,
humans gain a measure of comfort from a belief
in free will that appears to bring some order to a
bewildering environment.
Nevertheless, Skinner (1971) argued that our
cultures have advanced sufficiently to discard the
agency illusion, and that in fact we must do so
if we are to make significant social progress. He
stands alone among determinists in contending
that the illusion is a destructive delusion that
needs to be reconditioned.6 However, if the belief
in free will is essentially an evolved adaptation,
can it be modified or even eliminated? Theoretical
analysis does not provide reasons for optimism.
First, the interactional nature of an adaptation –
that is, the fact that it is expressed only in specific
environmental circumstances – means that the belief in free will is strongest in precisely those situations that possess subtle, difficult-to-discriminate
environmental determinants. Because persons in
reinforcer-rich, non-aversive environments always
will have to select among behavioral options and
their contingent consequences, the belief in free
will will be activated naturally and regularly (and
perhaps more frequently and strongly) even if
inhumane social and political conditions are
eliminated. Second, the conditioning phenomena
of preparedness and instinctive drift suggest that
reconditioning the belief will be very difficult.
If the UCS of a choice situation -- defined as a
situation with non-obvious environmental control
and multiple response options -- elicits the UCR
of agency-sensation, then humans very likely are
contraprepared to respond to a choice stimulus
with verbal representations of determinism, such
as behavior analytic philosophy. If attempts are
made to instrumentally condition non-agency
verbalizations in a choice situation, people may
engage in behavior that is analogous to the “instinctive drift” that Breland and Breland (1961)
found for pigs’ “rooting” and racoons’ “rubbing”
of coins. Humans, contraprepared to learn the
association between choice and non-agency, will
“manipulate” non-volitional self-statements in re6
Pereboom’s (2002) “hard incompatibalist” approach is
probably the closest to Skinner’s view. Other leading scientific
philosophers argue that the illusion has significant social benefits
(e.g., Dennet, 2003; Honderich, 2002; Smilansky, 2000, 2002; Walter,
2001; Wegner, 2002).
Belief in Free Will
sponse to the choice situation and “drift” toward
the more natural, prepared response of agencybased verbalizations. Because the drift would be
expected to become more pronounced as the
number of trials increases (Breland & Breland,
1961), “instinctive drift” may help us understand
why so many scientists, in their repeated struggle
to come to terms with determinism, wind up
generating free will or compatibalist schemes.
Finally, even if deterministic verbalizations could
be conditioned under highly structured and potent environmental circumstances, it is questionable whether such responses would generalize to
less tightly controlled settings. College students,
for example, endorsed scientific propositions to
explain the existence of animals and inanimate
objects in a forced choice experimental paradigm
but reverted to teleological theistic explanations
when the evaluative context was removed (Keleman (2004).
The difficulty in reconditioning a biologically
evolved belief in free will is compounded by the
cultural reinforcement the idea receives. Today,
the “literature of freedom” is only a part of the
geopolitical and cultural domination of the West,
with its Weltanschauung of democracy based
in free will. The West’s influence will continue
to increase through technological and cultural
exchanges, economic interactions, and military
escapades. Even with the remarkable scientific advances that will surely be made in the years ahead,
we are decades if not centuries from convincing
people that they lack the free will they experience
dozens of times a day. Neither rational argument
nor empirical demonstrations are likely to modify
a genetically-based and culturally supported belief
in free will that is widely, intimately, and repeatedly
experienced and that produces highly adaptive
outcomes. In this context, Skinnerian determinism will be of little use in designing a more just
world, and may even impede progressive social
change by diverting discussion from the material
to the metaphysical realm.
Why might this be so? It is probably not
an exaggeration to state that individual moral
responsibility, based in the belief in free will,
is a theme that links various American, and in
some cases Western, conservative ideologies on
social and economic issues such as gun owner-
101
ship, tax policies, health care, welfare and social
services, affirmative action, education decisions,
religious expression, etc. (Klinghoffer, 2004). The
promotion of an alternative progressive social
agenda will require the widespread adoption of
a competing ethos of community responsibility.
However, this is unlikely to be accomplished
through strident advocacy of determinism, or
even a milder diminution of the centrality of human agency, both of which confront people with
an aversive and arrogant challenge to their most
cherished and intimate belief about themselves
and their world. Rather than coercing or shaping people into accepting the behavioral world
view, we should emulate effective clinicians by
engineering desirable socially-relevant behavior
changes that the affected people attribute to their
own volition.
To achieve this impact -- dare I say “control” -behavior analysts must become part of the background cultural environment, promoting change so
naturally that our role is unperceived -- thereby
leaving the belief in free will intact. We still know
the “truth” -- Skinner is of course correct. But
whereas a cultural adaptation might effectively be
modified through gradual “cultural shaping,” the
manipulation of a biological adaptation is likely
to require a different strategy. If we are to use
our behavior analytic knowledge to wield power,
our strategy must be to respect, first, the human
capacity to self-deceive, and second, the specific
deception of free will.
This shouldn’t be difficult for behavior analysts, since our approach derives a great deal of
its potency through its functional pragmatism. Yet
on the issue of free will, we adhere dogmatically to
a perspective that is fervently, even if ignorantly,
dismissed by the vast majority of people as utter
nonsense. In this context, where behaviorists
are accused of reducing the richness of human
experience to mechanistic abstractions, it seems
questionable to issue “a call to arms,” such as
Staddon’s (2004) recent plea for behavior analysts
to “speak -- and shoot -- ...at the wide world outside” the behavioral community to ensure “that
truth...will prevail” (p. 118).
Behavior analysts long have lamented our
modest impact on dubious social and cultural
practices, despite some notable achievements.
Richard F. Rakos
102
This frustration should prompt us to examine
closely the functional relationships between
our social intervention efforts and their consequences: it is possible that we, rather than people
in general, are the ones who need to be reconditioned. Skinner, as he has done so many times
in other contexts, may again prove prescient: “It
would be remarkable if any conception of man
did not occasionally need revision” (1964, p. 485).
This reasonable observation actually constitutes
a challenge to behavior analysts: are we ready to
entertain a fundamental revision in our efforts
to wrestle with the free will issue? Free will is
unquestionably illusory, but the belief in it may
well be an inherent, core component of human
behavior -- of what it means to be human. We
therefore need to deal with the free will issue on
that basis if we hope to save – or, more modestly,
improve – the world.
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1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 105 - 107
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 105
A Chronological Review of Events in the Life of one
Behaviorist
Patrick K. Rimell
Southside Virginia Training Center, Petersburg, Virginia
An attempt was made to identify functional relationships for the author-as-a-Behaviorist. Selected
milestones in the author’s life were identified and evaluated in this regard. A point system was used to
reflect each event’s importance. A ranking of events revealed an introductory Psychology course and the
Western Michigan University Psychology program as having the strongest functional relationships.
Introduction
Results
The 2004 conference of the Association for
Behavior Analysis included a number of events
honoring the memory of B.F. Skinner. One such
event was a panel presentation “The Shaping of
Behaviorists: Influence of B.F. Skinner on the
Development of Behavior Analysts.” The present paper took a literal approach to assessing this
influence by examining the degree to which events
in the author’s life were responsible for shaping
his “behavioristic” behavior.
Each event, the rating assigned to it and brief
rationale is shown below:
1945: Iwo Jima > 1 (Incidental but prerequisite)
The author’s father served in the U.S. Marines
in World War II. After one particular campaign
the Marine became ill and was returned to Hawaii
for recovery. During this time his Marine unit
fought on Iwo Jima—a campaign during which
many lives were lost. The Marine’s survival
(and subsequent role in procreating the author)
was considered a prerequisite event made more
probable by his absence from the battle of Iwo
Jima.
Procedure
Several milestones in (and before) the author’s
life were identified and rated based on the degree
to which each contributed to the author becoming
a Behaviorist. A 5-point scale was used:
0
Neutral
1
Incidental but prerequisite
2
Supportive
3
Intensely supportive
4
Significantly behavior-changing
1968: College night at Adrian H.S. > 1 (Incidental but prerequisite)
College night at Adrian High School provided
students with an opportunity to visit recruiters
from three colleges. One session attended by the
author was Western Michigan University. WMU
was considered a good teacher’s college, a profession considered by the student.
The assignment of ratings to each event was
somewhat subjective but accompanied by supportive logic.
1969: Dorm-mates in Hoecke Hall > 2 (Supportive)
The author was one of thousands of freshman
at WMU. He was assigned to Hoecke Hall and
there met another freshman who would become
a future roommate. This friend persuaded the
author, who was majoring in English, to take an
introductory Psychology course.
Offered as part of a panel presentation: “The Shaping of
Behaviorists: Influence of B.F. Skinner on the Development of
Behavior Analysts,” Thomas Zane, Ph.D., Chair, Association for
Behavior Analysis, Boston - May 2004.
105
106
Patrick K. Rimell
1970: Psych 150 > 4 (Significantly behavior-changing)
The introductory Psychology course at
WMU—Psych 150—was found by the author
to be eye-opening and exhilarating. Particularly
influential components were the behavior-shaping rat lab experience as well as the primary text
“Elementary Principles of Behavior” by Donald
Whaley and Richard Malott (1971). Daily readings
and quizzes produced continuous learning. The
author was becoming a “believer” and changed
his major to Psychology after this course.
1970-4: WMU Psychology > 4 (Significantly behavior-changing)
Other Psychology courses followed and bolstered the author’s conviction in the principles
of behavior and increased his knowledge base.
A course on verbal behavior using Skinner’s text
(1957) of the same name was particularly effective
in substantiating behavioral explanations for human behavior. In addition to offering a behavioral
perspective on the subject matter, each course was
designed along behavioral principles: objectives
(target behaviors) were explicitly identified, and
course contingencies were arranged to achieve
mastery of the subject matter.
1972: Beowulf > 2 (Supportive)
An early morning English literature class was
the occasion for derisive behavior on the part of
other students. Insolent comments were directed
at Skinner and the Psychology Department in
general. The comments appeared to be prompted
by the author sleeping in class while wearing his
“Better Living Through Behaviorism” T-shirt.
In retrospect this event was considered to be
reinforcing albeit not of great significance.
1974-6: Murdoch Center > 3 (Intensely supportive)
The author’s first professional job out of
undergraduate school was at Murdoch Center in
Butner, N.C. He got his feet wet in a program
serving individuals with self-injurious behavior.
This was a fertile environment for a Behaviorist as several Psychology graduates from WMU
were employed there, and there was a supportive
program director. One particularly reinforcing
experience was becoming foster parent for a child
with severe self-injurious behavior.
1976-7: Boulder River School & Hosp. > 2 (Supportive)
The author worked as a staff training coordinator at Boulder River School and Hospital
in Boulder, Montana. This environment was
rich in behavior analysts from several different
universities.
1977-9: Kansas Special Education-SMH > 2 (Supportive)
After working at two residential facilities for
persons with mental retardation the author enrolled in the Master’s program in Special Education-Severely/Multiply Handicapped at the University of Kansas. Although few fellow students
shared the author’s behavioral background, many
professors were leaders in the fields of psychology and developmental disabilities.
1981-2004: Marriage > 2 (Supportive)
The author married a special education
teacher who brought a moderately behavioral
orientation to the relationship. The principles
of behavior were commonly practiced in the
raising of children although not necessarily in
spousal activities.
1994-8: VCU Public Administration > 0 (Neutral)
The author returned to graduate school,
earning a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University.
This experience contributed to his professional
career although it was not particularly behavioral
in nature.
1984-04: Offspring > 3 (Intensely supportive)
Raising two sons, now 16 and 20 years of
age, reinforced the use of behavioral practices
tremendously.
1999-04: Quality Management > 2 (Supportive)
The author has held a number of positions
at Southside Virginia Training Center in Petersburg, Virginia. Roles ranged from client training
to administration to quality management. The
current role of quality manager provides much
opportunity to bring data to bear on decisionmaking processes.
The results above, when placed in rank order,
reveal Psychology 150 and the Western Michigan
A Review of Chronological Events in the Life of one Behaviorist
107
Figure 1. Relative impact of events on the shaping of a behaviorist based on a 0 - 4 scale.
University Psychology program as most influential in shaping the author into a Behaviorist.
The relative impact of these and other events are
shown in Figure 1.
Discussion
In Science and Human Behavior (1953) Skinner
wrote "It may be said with some assurance that if
no one has calculated the orbit of a fly, it is only
because no one has been sufficiently interested in
doing so..." (p.20). Like the fly’s orbit, this authoras-Behaviorist has a history of causation, and
sufficient time, interest and technology should
allow that causation to be uncovered. The current examination utilized only limited resources,
and the result is an admittedly simplified analysis
steeped in subjectivity. Nevertheless, an attempt
was made to incorporate some science into this
review—only fitting under the circumstances.
It is clear from the results that the author has
been shaped into a Behaviorist by a number of
events (including, presumably, many lesser events
that were not identified in this analysis). At the
top of the list of behavior-shaping events is
Western Michigan University. The radical nature
and strength of that Psychology program in the
early 1970’s is supported by the results of this
review. The introductory course—“Psychology
150”—in particular, was instrumental in changing
the author’s educational path. The foundation
provided by the Whaley and Malott text, experience in shaping the behavior of a living organism
and 150’s use of the principles of behavior in
teaching students all conspired to re-direct, educate
and inspire a life-long Behaviorist.
Reference
Skinner, B.F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior.
Toronto: The Macmillan Company.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Whaley, D.L. & Malott, R.W.(1971). Elementary Principles of Behavior (1st ed). New
York: Prentice Hall.
1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 109 - 120
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 109
A “visible scientist”:
B.F. Skinner’s Writings for the Popular Press
Alexandra Rutherford
York University
The year 2004 marks the 100th anniversary of B. F. Skinner’s birth. At this historic juncture, it is useful
to consider Skinner’s status, not only in psychology, but in society at large. One way Skinner became known
outside academia was through his popular writing. In this paper, I examine Skinner’s experiences writing
for the popular press and explore his role as a popularizer of his own work. Specifically, I present results
from a survey of newspapers and popular magazines for material authored by Skinner from the 1930s to
his death in 1990. I describe this material and discuss the aims and goals he had for his popular writing, as
well as the problems he encountered in publishing in the popular press. I follow this descriptive account
with a consideration of science popularization generally, to illuminate how this process may have affected
Skinner in his development as a public intellectual.
or as Smith (1996) characterizes him, a “cultural
icon” (p. 294), more closely. In 1977, Rae Goodell
characterized Skinner as a “visible scientist,”
remarking that one prominent characteristic of
scientists who achieve great public recognition is
that they write effectively for audiences outside
their fields, and for the public at large (Goodell,
1977; see also Blakeslee, 1975; “What makes a researcher ‘good copy’,” 1975). Thus, one window
on Skinner as a public intellectual is the writing he
undertook for the popular press throughout the
years of his career. Although less a popularizer
of his own work than an object of popular attention, Skinner did write intentionally for a broad
audience, and it was the books he intended for a
wide readership (such as Walden Two and Beyond
Freedom and Dignity) that ultimately ensured his
status as a “cultural icon.”
In this paper, I survey the writing Skinner
published in newspapers, magazines, and his bestselling books, concentrating on the period leading
up to and including the publication of Beyond
freedom and dignity. What aspects of his work did
he present to popular audiences, and what did he
hope to achieve by writing for a wide readership?
What were some of the challenges he faced in
writing about his work for the popular press? My
He’s a legend in his time. He’s a loaded
subject. His ideas about control and manipulation have been called evil. He has
been accused of setting back the study of
psychology rather than advancing it. He
has also been called one of the most incisive thinkers of modern times. (Sanford,
1977, p. 21)
He antagonizes psychologists and laymen alike, for his contention that behavior
is determined by the environment. But
his theories are as influential as they are
controversial, both in psychology and lay
society. (Goodell, 1977, p. 5)
B. F. Skinner was one of the twentieth century’s most widely recognized psychologists, both
within academia and in the culture at large (see,
for example, Haggbloom, 2002; Korn, Davis,
& Davis, 1991; Slater, 2004). Although many
psychologists achieve eminence within their own
fields or areas of specialization, the psychologist
who attains the level of public recognition that
Skinner did – both in his own lifetime and beyond
– is a much rarer phenomenon. It thus seems
fitting to examine Skinner as a public intellectual,
109
110
Alexandra Rutherford
emphasis is on Skinner’s own writing, although
clearly his audiences in turn had a lot to say about
him, as evidenced by the hundreds of articles that
have appeared, and continue to appear (see, for
example, Gaynor, 2004) about Skinner and his
work in the popular press.1 Specifically, I base my
comments on material from a systematic survey
of popular magazine and newspaper articles by
Skinner from the 1930s until his death in 1990.
I cannot claim that this is a complete survey – as
Knapp (1996), Morris and Smith (2003), and others have shown, the primary and secondary literatures on Skinner are vast, and the challenges of
compiling accurate and complete bibliographies,
especially of popular material, are great. With
this caveat in place, I report how I collected the
material for this survey, describe some of it, and
then provide some of the historical background
for Skinner’s popular writing. Finally, I discuss
science popularization more generally, and then
use this framework to place some of Skinner’s
experiences with the popular press in context.
Survey Method and Results
This survey of Skinner’s writings for newspapers and popular magazines proceeded through
a number of steps. First, references to specific
articles by Skinner in any newspaper were collected from primary and secondary sources,
including Skinner’s three-volume autobiography
and the collection of newspaper clippings in
the Skinner Papers at the Harvard University
Archives. Then a systematic survey of the New
York Times Index was performed. This consisted
of an author search on B. F. Skinner from January
1, 1930 until his death in 1990.2 This approach
surely has limitations and could be supplemented
with systematic searches of the indexes of other
1
See Knapp (1996) for a discussion of the secondary literature,
including popular literature, on Skinner; see Rutherford (2000b,
2003) for analyses of these popular representations and responses;
see DeBell & Harless (1992), Dinsmoor (1992), Nye (1979), and
Todd & Morris (1983) for discussions of “mis”representations and
myths about Skinner that have appeared in the popular and academic
literatures. In this paper, I intentionally restrict myself to discussing
Skinner’s own popular writings, as opposed to discussing reactions
to these writings from his diverse audiences, as I have covered this
material elsewhere.
2
Included in the complete survey, although not reported here,
were additional keyword searches of “B. F. Skinner” and “behaviorism” until 2004, resulting in 255 articles about Skinner and his
work in the popular press. The method for the complete survey is
available from the author upon request.
major papers. The search of the New York
Times index at least ensured a representation of
Skinner’s writings in the national paper of record
in the United States.
In terms of magazines, an author search on
B. F. Skinner of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and the General Reference Center
Gold database, starting on January 1, 1930 until
his death in 1990, was performed.3 A list of all
references to popular magazine articles in Skinner’s three-volume autobiography, in a selection
of secondary works on Skinner, and in archival
material in the Skinner Papers at the Harvard
Archives was compiled. Finally, a search of the
complete run of the popular magazine Psychology
Today was conducted.
Using the strategy outlined above, 50 articles
authored by B. F. Skinner were located in newspapers and magazines. His five books written
for a wide audience – Walden Two, Beyond Freedom
and Dignity, and the three volumes of his autobiography – were also included in the survey, for
a total of 55 publications (see Appendix for the
complete list of articles). A cumulative frequency
distribution and graph show the rate at which
these articles appeared, in five-year increments
(see Figure 1).
Of the 50 articles, 13 appeared in newspapers.
Included in this category are numerous letters to
the editor and book reviews. Reviews of others’
work were some of Skinner’s earliest writings for
the popular press. These included three book
reviews published from 1946 to 1948, of titles
by Max Schoen, J. B. Rhine, and Stuart Chase,
respectively (see Rutherford, 2000b, p. 378, for a
more detailed discussion of these reviews).
The remaining 37 articles appeared in a variety
of magazines, or magazine-type, publications.
Arguably, one of the magazines included in the
survey is not a popular magazine per se – Science,
but given its high status and readership among a
broad range of scientists outside of psychology,
it was included in the survey. Skinner authored
or co-authored nine articles in Science. He also
authored pieces for Atlantic Monthly, Ladies Home
Journal, Psychology Today, The Listener, Scientific
3
My thanks go to Reina Zatylyny and Christian Rizzea for
helping to update this survey and check it for accuracy.
111
A “visible scientist”
American, Free Inquiry, Saturday Review, and The
Humanist, among other magazines. The chart
shows that the rate of Skinner’s contributions to
the popular press was fairly steady after 1950, with
a slight increase in rate between 1965 and 1975,
the period in which he rose conclusively to the
status of public intellectual through his efforts
in developing programmed instruction and the
teaching machine, and the publication of Beyond
Freedom and Dignity.
Although as previously noted Skinner was
less an intentional popularizer of his work than
an object of popular attention, it is significant
to note that he, like other “visible scientists” did
write for an audience beyond academia. In the
next section I discuss some of Skinner’s contributions and examine his attitudes toward and
intentions for his popular writing. In any case
of popularized science, the scientists themselves
play active roles in shaping the public face of their
work. The process of popularization can also be
affected by the scientists’ relationships with their
popularizers, and their intended audiences. It is
to these topics that I now turn.
Skinner and the popular press
Skinner’s personal journalistic debut occurred
in 1934, when he wrote an article for Atlantic
Monthly, entitled “Has Gertrude Stein a secret?”
Motivated by his curiosity about the series of
experiments on automatic writing alluded to by
Stein in “The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,”
Skinner wrote to an acquaintance who worked on
the editorial board of the Atlantic Monthly. He
1930
1935
1940
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
0
1
1
1
9
13
16
20
27
37
45
51
55
1945
1950
1955
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
60
55
50
Number of articles
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1990
1985
1940
1935
1930
Years
Figure 1. Cumulative frequency distribution and graph showing the number of articles written by Skinner for the popular press,
1930-1990.
112
Alexandra Rutherford
inquired if the magazine would be interested in
a piece arguing that Stein’s “Tender buttons” was
essentially automatic writing. She encouraged
him to write the article, and in January, 1934, it
appeared in the magazine.
Reactions from friends and colleagues were
largely positive and encouraging. Skinner, who
by his own account had led a fairly quiet social
life as a graduate student and Harvard fellow, also
benefited from his foray into popular writing by
being invited to a dinner party hosted by the editor
of the magazine, Ellery Sedgwick (Skinner, 1979,
p. 135). In a letter to Sedgwick, Stein responded
to the article, remarking that Skinner was a “pretty
good” psychologist “when he is not too serious”
(as quoted in Skinner, 1979, p. 136).
The next time the creative writing urge overtook Skinner was in the early summer of 1945.
The day after submitting an article on operationism to E.G. Boring for a special issue of Psychological Review, Skinner turned his thoughts to an
imaginary utopian community (Skinner, 1948).
In a letter written to an interested inquirer eleven
years later, Skinner remarked:
I came to write Walden Two in the following
way. In the spring of 1945 I sat next to a woman
at a dinner party who had a son and son-in-law in
the South Pacific. I remarked casually, “What a
shame that these young men, with such crusading
spirits, must come back and sign up in a society in
I they do not really believe.” She asked me what I
would have them do instead…. She insisted that
I write these ideas up for the benefit of young
people…. I insisted that I had other deadlines to
meet, but she was quite adamant. I did meet one
such deadline on June 1, and then to my surprise
began to write Walden Two which I finished within
seven weeks. The only preparation for writing it
had been a sporadic interest in community experiments in the United States, and extensive reading
of Thoreau. (Skinner, March 21, 1956)
Skinner probably had no idea, upon writing Walden Two, that it would sell as well as it
eventually did, or that it would inspire would-be
communitarians in the 1960s to originate Walden
Two-type communities (see Kinkade, 1973, 1994).
He had a hard time getting it published, it did not
sell well until much later in his career, and he actually remarked that he didn’t pay much attention
to it or use it in his courses until many years later
(see Elms, 1981, p. 476). In discussing the several
possible reasons Skinner may have had for writing Walden Two, Elms (1981) includes the reason
Skinner alluded to above, that is, to “provide a
model of life for returning World War II veterans”
(p. 471). In addition to this, Elms demonstrates
that Skinner may have wanted to “apply a ‘science
of behavior’ to the resolution of dissatisfactions
that were external but personal” (p. 471), such as
his struggle to balance administrative duties with
research, and “to provide self-therapy” (p. 471),
by using his writing to help reconcile the two
sides of his character represented by Burris and
Frazier. It is unlikely that Skinner initially wrote
the book thinking that it would have widespread
influence.
In addition to writing Walden Two, in 1945 Skinner was also preoccupied with domestic matters.
It was a busy year for the Skinner family. Skinner
and his wife Eve’s second child, Deborah, had
just been born, and Eve wondered if there was
anything Skinner could do to make the first year
of child-rearing less strenuous (for an account of
the Skinners’ approach to parenting, see Jordan,
1996). To address his wife’s concerns, Skinner
invented a glassed-in crib with temperature and
humidity controls, in which the infant could move
freely wearing only a diaper (for a history of the
baby tender see Benjamin & Nielsen-Gammon,
1999). Skinner, enthusiastic about the potential
of the new device to benefit mother and child
alike, wrote an article and sent it to the Ladies’
Home Journal for consideration. Associate editor
Mary Lea Page responded: “I would have written
sooner, but your article on the “baby box” has
aroused such controversial interest among the
Journal editors, that we are still in the process of
heated discussion” (Page, June, 1945).
Skinner responded to several questions from
the editors about the device (Skinner, June 21,
1945b), and the article was published in October
of that year (Skinner, 1945a). Skinner’s eldest
daughter, Julie Vargas, has noted that although
her father probably wouldn’t have considered the
baby tender to be a major contribution, he wrote
the article because he had “invented this neat
gadget” and thought the public “ought to have
the advantage of it” (Vargas, 2000). In the case
A “visible scientist”
of this publication, it is clear that Skinner hoped
to gain a wide audience so that parents would
become interested in the air crib. His attempts
to commercially market the device (although
ultimately unsuccessful), indicated that he was
– in the case of air crib – eager to have an impact
beyond academic psychology and was willing to
engage the power of the popular press in this
endeavor. It was, in effect, his first use of the
press to market his ideas.
In 1951, Skinner wrote an article for the Amateur Science Section of Scientific American on how
to teach animals (Skinner, 1951). Excerpts from
this article were also published in the Boston Daily
Globe. As Peterson (2001) has shown, this 1951
article was clearly a “landmark” in the history
of animal training and the burgeoning industry
now know as clicker training (see Pryor, 1999).
In it, Skinner turned his attention to the practical problem of how to use operant principles to
shape animal behavior. Not only was it to become
an important article for animal trainers, it also
brought Skinner into more contact with the popular press. The article attracted the attention of a
writer from Look magazine, Joseph Roddy, who
came to Skinner’s office to discuss a possible follow-up piece in which Skinner could demonstrate
further the power of his procedures (Skinner,
1983, p. 42). He proclaimed that if Skinner could
train an animal that easily, they wanted pictures.
Skinner took up the challenge, and Roddy bought
a dalmatian with the understanding that Skinner
would train it to stand on its hind legs and jump.
Photographers arrived, flashbulbs were readied,
and within a few minutes the dog was “jumping
so high that its hind feet rose a foot off the floor”
(Skinner, 1983, p. 42).
But Skinner was not pleased when the article
did appear. Despite having explained the procedures carefully to Roddy in behavioral terms, the
writer reported that Skinner had put the idea of
jumping into the dog’s head. One of the photos
showed a dog placing his paws on a playing card,
and the article quoted Skinner’s colleague, Charles
Ferster, who was present at the shoot, as saying
that Skinner could teach a dog to play poker in
seventeen minutes. Skinner maintained that this
was a misquote. One of Skinner’s students, Michael Maccoby, subsequently wrote an article for
113
the Harvard Crimson outlining some of Skinner’s
concerns about the piece (Maccoby, May 3, 1952).
This was to be one of Skinner’s first altercations
with journalists and science writers who covered
his work, and was by no means the last.
More media attention followed the Look
article, despite Skinner’s dissatisfaction with it.
But this time, Skinner was more circumspect. In
1952, Skinner received a letter from Marjorie Van
de Water, a journalist working for Science Service.
She wrote to him, noting: “I find that we have
been missing some very interesting material from
you and your department, such as your suggestions for training dogs which appeared recently in
Look…. I wonder whether it would be possible for
you to let us know when you are ready to release
something new” (Van de Water, May 8, 1952). To
which Skinner replied:
I shall try to remember to tip you off when
we have anything to release. The Look article was,
from our point of view, very badly handled, and
definitely violated our understanding with the editors. At the moment, I am anxious to avoid any
and all publicity. (Skinner, May 16, 1952)
Ms. Van de Water’s request for material was
not unique. Over the years of his career, Skinner
received numerous requests from reporters for
interviews, as well as invitations to write articles
for magazines and newspapers. For example,
in 1959, an editor for Scientific American wrote to
Skinner inviting him to write an article, like the
one that Skinner had written in 1951, for their
Amateur Science section. One of the paragraphs
from this letter provides an interesting glimpse
into the relationships among scientists, science
writers, and popular science audiences. The editor wrote:
Up to now a number of scientists have written for this part of the magazine, but most have
been physicists. In consequence, we have carried
a disproportionate number of articles on how to
build Wilson cloud chambers, radiation counters,
rockets, instruments for locating artificial satellites
and so on. Recently, more and more high school
teachers, who direct youngsters to our magazine
for science fair projects, have been asking us to
balance the diet. (Stong, November 24, 1959)
Skinner complied with this request, and wrote
an article on teaching machines that appeared in
114
Alexandra Rutherford
1961 (Skinner, 1961). After this time, Skinner
continued to write articles for the popular press,
as well as letters to the editor, but most were short
pieces or excerpts from his scholarly writing. He
continued to have difficulties with journalistic
misrepresentation, including one that created intense personal embarrassment. In 1968, a writer
for the New York Times Magazine took a quote
out of context and titled his article “B.F. Skinner
agrees he is the most important influence in psychology” (Rice, 1968). Two years later, Skinner
was still smarting from the incident. In a letter
to a colleague who had requested biographical
information, Skinner wrote:
I enclose a biographical sketch, but not the
New York Times article. I suffered badly from that
article and its implication that I am some sort
of conceited ass. Some time, if you like, I will
show you the exchange I had with the editors of
the New York Times Magazine about it. (Skinner,
February 11, 1970)
In 1971, of course, Skinner’s bestseller Beyond
Freedom and Dignity (hereafter BFD) was published,
and conceit would become one of the least of
Skinner’s worries. Charges of fascism and Nazism were commonly laid against him and his
work. Skinner, however, obligingly appeared on
television and radio shows. His daughter, Julie
Vargas, has remarked that her father’s attitude
toward requests for appearances and interviews
was one of obligation (Vargas, 2000). Just as he
rarely turned down requests for academic talks,
and painstakingly responded to all manner of
correspondence with personal notes, so too did
he respond to requests for radio and television
appearances. As his annotated schedule from one
post-BFD period indicates, these requests were
numerous and demanding, including appearances
on local and national news programs and daytime
and evening talk shows.
In the midst of this publicity, Skinner did find
time to respond to his critics (see also Skinner,
1973). When a young sociology professor, Richard Sennett (who would soon publish The Fall of
Public Man), wrote a review of BFD for the New
York Times Book Review (see Sennett, 1971), Skinner
responded with a letter to the editor. Here is an
excerpt from his letter:
My book has evoked an angry response from
Professor Sennett, and my only hope is that it
will be better understood by those who read it
dispassionately. Professor Sennett repeatedly
accuses me of subscribing to examples I merely
offer for discussion. I do not rail against sex; I
discuss its role. I do not “believe in hard work”;
I argue that a culture must produce the goods it
needs – but as pleasantly as possible. I do not
recommend “that the control of the population
as a whole be delegated to police, priests, owners,
teachers, therapists, and so on”; I deplore a culture
in which so much of that is necessary…. How are
we to explain Professor Sennett’s extraordinary
misreading? Have I paid too little attention to
his own field of specialization? If so, I ask him
to pay a little more attention to mine. (Skinner,
October 27, 1971)
Thus, Skinner clearly had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the popular press. On the
one hand, throughout his career he recognized
that writing for a wide audience was important
for maximizing the potential impact of his
ideas. However, it does not appear as though
he systematically used the press as a vehicle for
furthering his own public prestige, or for nurturing a popular following (see Cerullo, 1996, for a
similar argument about Skinner’s relationships at
Harvard). He did hope to use it as a vehicle of
persuasion. He was concerned throughout his
career with the public’s resistance to the use of
behavioral technology, and hoped to convince
people of the need for change. Julie Vargas has
noted that, in writing BFD, her father “hoped
to influence people…. I think he hoped that he
would convince people that we need a science of
behavior to solve the world’s problems” (Vargas,
2000). Although often accused of not responding to his critics, Skinner clearly did, on occasion,
attempt to correct the popular misrepresentations
of his work, and sometimes found himself intensely embarrassed or uncomfortable as a result
of misquotation or misrepresentation. There is
evidence that he retreated from publishing in
more popular venues when he was worried that
misrepresentation would result.
Skinner wrote articles for the popular press on
topics he felt would be of public interest or use,
such as the baby tender and the teaching machine.
A “visible scientist”
He occasionally wrote articles and often gave
interviews in response to direct requests, and, as
noted above, occasionally responded to articles or
reviews that he felt misrepresented his position.
Thus, his popular press writing was both proactive
and reactive. He also penned several letters to
the editor later in his career that appeared in the
New York Times outlining his position on a number
of social issues. In these, he expressed anti-war
sentiments (Skinner, 1966), concern about prison
environments (Skinner, 1974), and his opinions
about housing programs (Skinner, 1976). These
letters, among others, suggest that Skinner’s social
conscience and commitment to social meliorism
motivated much of the writing he published in
non-academic outlets.
Thus, in summary, Skinner appeared to use the
popular press for a variety of purposes. First,
it was a vehicle through which he could publicly
disseminate his ideas or inventions in the hope
that this would increase the probability that the
technology of behavior would be used on a large
scale. He also used the press to express his concerns about a variety of social problems, and to
propose behavioral solutions to them. Finally, he
used the press to try and correct misrepresentations of his position (for example, by highlighting
behaviorism’s humanism - Skinner, 1972), and to
respond to specific criticisms of his work.
All of these areas highlight the role that Skinner played in popularizing his own ideas. Increasingly, social studies of science are examining the
relationships between science-producers and
science-consumers in an attempt to understand
how scientific knowledge is transmitted to and
impacts the culture of which it is a part. Thus,
examining science popularization generally may
help us understand Skinner’s own role as a popularizer of his work, and the particular impact that
his work had.
Skinner and the process of science popularization
An account of Skinner’s writings for and interactions with purveyors of the popular press can
be examined in relation to the processes through
which science generally, and psychological science
specifically, is transmitted to the public. These
processes are not always straightforward, and
115
have, at present, remained largely unexplicated.
Cooter and Pumfrey (1994) have written:
[S]urprisingly little has been written on science
generally in popular culture, past or present…
..[Q]uestions have yet to be asked about how
scientists, science communicators, and audiences
define their relationship to something called science, and how that relationship is embedded in
the particularities of their different cultures and
ideologies. (p. 237)
Cooter and Pumfrey touch on several important areas for the study of science popularization,
and for understanding Skinner’s place in popular
culture. First, how do scientists and their audiences, not to mention those who translate science
for the public, think about, conceptualize, and
relate to the broad enterprise called science? I
propose that this relationship will, in part, depend on the “status” of the science in question
and that it will be different for the human and
social sciences, such as psychology, versus the
natural sciences. As a behavioral scientist and
psychologist, Skinner wrote on topics that were
intensely personal, such as the experience of free
will and the design of everyday life. His thoroughgoing scientific/behavioral analyses of these
problems were based on an ontological position
that threatened popularly held (and experienced)
conceptions of what it meant to be human.
Skinner’s inability to translate his position into
terms that were compatible with the “psychology
of everyday experience” meant that some of his
work probably had less popular impact than he
would have liked. It served as a lightning rod for
public debate, but this debate may have mitigated
the transformative potential of the science and
technology of behavior that Skinner envisioned
(see also Rutherford, 2000a).
Secondly, how are the relationships between
scientists and their audiences defined by and
embedded in different cultures circumscribed
by time, place, and ideology? Skinner’s writings
in the popular press spanned almost six decades
in the middle of the twentieth century. Defining American culture in this period were various
ideologies and social values that affected, and
continue to affect, the popular reception of
behaviorism, behavioral technology, psychology, and science generally. These social values
116
Alexandra Rutherford
include views on technology, definitions of the
“good life,” attitudes towards parenting, etc.
(see Rutherford, 2003, for a discussion of these
themes in relation to the reception of Skinner’s
work). Because of the topics on which he wrote,
and the positions he held on those topics, Skinner often found himself at the center of these
social debates. It is clear that the reception of his
ideas was profoundly influenced by the broader
cultural dialogues on these topics. His ideas and
prescriptions resonated with some segments of
the population, but alienated others.
Conceptualizations of the process of science popularization have undergone substantial
revision in recent years, and shed light on the
processes affecting Skinner’s popularization.
Burnham (1987) cited the editor of Popular Science News in 1883, who defined popularization as
“science put in a language which can be comprehended; it means science adapted to every one’s
wants, to every one’s necessities” (p. 34). In this
early view, popularization entailed the transmission of knowledge from scientist to non-scientist.
At the very least this involved a translation from
scientific language into popular jargon, but often
involved the extrapolation from scientific theory
to practical, everyday, applications that would be
of interest to the popular consumer. Certainly
some of Skinner’s popular writings reflect these
characteristics; he undertook popular writing to
extend his ideas to audiences outside academia,
and he translated his ideas into everyday applications that he felt would be of interest, such
as the air crib, pet training, and programmed
instruction.
More recently, however, Whitley (1985) has
proposed that this traditional definition of popularization is too narrow and is based on outmoded
ideas about the nature, production, and transmission of science and its relationship to its publics.
He has suggested instead a much broader and
more inclusive definition. In this revised view,
popularization is the “transmission of intellectual
products from the context of their production to
other contexts” (p. 12). He acknowledges that
the audiences of popularized science, although
traditionally conceptualized as inexpert and passive, are often highly educated, and include other
scientists and intellectuals as well as non-scientists.
Whalen and Tobin (1980) have used the term
“devotees of science” to refer to those members
of science’s popular audience who have varying
levels of scientific training, but are united in their
desire for personal enlightenment through science (such as the readers of the Amateur Science
Section in the Scientific American). In addition to
devotees, researchers, cultivators, and practitioners of science are included in science’s possible
audiences, and certainly comprised the audience
for Skinner’s work. It is clear from archival and
published sources that the audience for Skinner’s
popular writing included other psychologists and
scientists, students, homemakers, politicians,
teachers, parents, and prison inmates, among
others. The readers of Skinner’s work were not
inexpert, and were certainly not passive.
In Whitley’s revised view, scientists are not
necessarily separate from the larger culture. La
Follette (1990) has written that popular magazine
writers have traditionally presented scientists as
“unique and as set apart from society…. They
implied that it was somehow possible to distinguish scientists from ordinary people” (pp. 66-67).
Although this stereotype may still persist in the
public mind, it is now recognized that scientists
themselves and the work that they do are very
much embedded in particular social and cultural
contexts and value systems (Latour & Woolgar,
1979). Skinner’s work was very much a product
of his upbringing and his social milieu (see Bjork,
1993, 1996; Smith 1996). As Woodward (1996)
has noted, “As works consciously constructed
during a period of technological optimism in
American life, Skinner’s writings convey a peculiarly “hands on” social philosophy. They extend
to the social and personal realms a philosophy of
technology that…has long been ingrained in the
American penchant for making and remaking the
environment” (p. 8). More specifically, the problems faced by American society during the time
that Skinner lived and work, such as the plight
of returning WWII veterans, overpopulation,
the depletion of environmental resources, and
the threat of nuclear warfare, shaped his thinking
about his work and the uses to which behavioral
technology could be put.
Finally, in the traditional view, dissemination
of scientific knowledge occurs after the facts have
A “visible scientist”
been discovered, and this dissemination is separate
and distinct from the research enterprise. Thus,
there is no feedback between popularization and
the scientific research enterprise. In the revised
view, these two processes are seen as highly related
and interdependent, especially for scientific fields
that address everyday concerns, as in some areas
of psychology. The process of popularization is
intimately tied to what research gets done, how it
is done, and how it is interpreted. As an example,
in Skinner’s case the publication of BFD resulted
in considerable public controversy. As a result of
the book, the sources of Skinner’s funding were
queried in Congress. The nature of the query was
whether the federal government should continue
to fund research which was perceived to threaten
or subvert American values (see “Freedom and
funding,” 1971). Fortunately, no action was taken
as a result of the concern, and Skinner retained
his funding. However, this provides just one example of how scientists’ activities are intimately
embedded in a larger cultural and political landscape, and how this has the potential to shape the
nature and scope of their activities in, at times,
very direct ways.
A consideration of the processes of science
popularization is closely tied to an analysis of
Skinner as a public figure, and highlight the potential richness and complexity of such an analysis.
Skinner used the popular press in a variety of ways
that either intentionally or unintentionally helped
shape his public persona and thus influenced the
probability that his technology would be taken up
on a large scale. Ultimately, what Skinner actually said provides only one side of this complex
picture. As Geiser (1976) has noted, “What
Skinner says is one thing; what the public hears
is another. The difference could make or break
his technology” (p. 11). Here I have surveyed, in
part, what Skinner said to his popular audiences.
Unraveling what the public heard - and why - is
the other half of the analysis.
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Appendix
Science of society [Review of the book The proper
study of mankind] (1948, November 14). New
York Times Book Review, pp. 20, 22.
Card-guessing experiments (1948). American
Scientist, 36, 36, 456, 458.
How to teach animals (1951, December). Scientific
American, pp. 26-29.
How you can train a dog to do simple dance
steps (1951, December 28). Boston Daily Globe
[reprinted from Scientific American].
How to train a pigeon to play on a toy piano (1951,
December 29). Boston Daily Globe [reprinted
from Scientific American].
A critique of psychoanalytic concepts and theories (1954, November). Science Monthly, pp.
300-305.
Some issues concerning the control of human
behavior: A symposium. (1956). Science, 124,
1057-1066 (with C. R. Rogers).
A chronological listing of Skinner’s writings for the popular press
Has Gertrude Stein a secret? (1934, January).
Atlantic Monthly, pp. 50-57.
Baby in a box. Introducing the mechanical baby
tender (1945, October). Ladies Home Journal,
pp. 30-31, 135-136, 138.
More boxes for babies (1945, December). Ladies
Home Journal, p. 11.
Driver and driven [Review of the book Human
nature in the making] (1946, February 10). New
York Times Book Review, p. 14.
“Psi” and its manifestations [Review of the book
The reach of the mind] (1947, November 2). New
York Times Book Review, p. 34.
Letter to the editor (1947, December 28). New
York Times Book Review, p. 14.
Walden two (1948). New York: Macmillan.
120
Alexandra Rutherford
The experimental analysis of behavior (1957).
American Scientist, 45, 343-371.
Teaching machines (1958). Science, 128, 969977.
May we have a positive contribution? (1960, October 10). The New Republic, p. 22.
Teaching machines (1961, November). Scientific
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Behaviorism at fifty (1963, May 31). Science, 140,
951-958.
New methods and new aims in teaching (1964).
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Why teachers fail (1965, October 16). Saturday
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War’s victims [Letter to the editor] (1966, May 5).
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The phylogeny and ontogeny of behavior (1966,
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Visions of utopia (1967, January 5) The Listener,
pp. 22-23.
Utopia through the control of human behavior
(1967, January 12) The Listener, pp. 55-56.
Teaching science in high school: What is wrong?
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The machine that is man (1969, April) Psychology
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Beyond freedom and dignity (1971). New York:
Knopf.
Autoshaping (1971). Science, 173, 752.
Humanistic behaviorism (1971, May/June). The
Humanist, 31, 35.
B.F. Skinner says what’s wrong with the social
sciences (1971, September 30). The Listener,
pp. 429-431.
[Letter to the editor] (1971, November 21). New
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Humanism and behaviorism (1972, July/August).
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Freedom and dignity revisited (1972, August 11).
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Are we free to have a future? (1973) Impact, 3,
5-12.
To build constructive prison environments [Letter
to the editor] (1974, February 26). New York
Times, p. 36.
Particulars of my life (1976). New York: Knopf.
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Freedom at last, from the burden of taxation
(1977, July 26). New York Times, p. 29.
Between freedom and despotism (1977, September). Psychology Today, 11, 80-82, 84, 86,
90-91.
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numbers! (1977, September 25). Boston Sunday
Globe, p. A4.
The shaping of a behaviorist (1979). New York:
Knopf.
My experience with the baby tender (1979,
March). Psychology Today, 12, 29-31, 34, 3738, 40.
Getting more mileage out of incentives (1979,
April). Interview by D. Yergin. Psychology
Today, pp. 18+.
Symbolic communication between two pigeons
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and R. P. Lanza).
‘Self-awareness’ in the pigeon (1981). Science, 212,
695-696 (with R. Epstein and R. P. Lanza).
Selection by consequences (1981). Science, 213,
501-504.
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Psychology Today, pp. 48-49.
A matter of consequences (1983). New York:
Knopf.
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Sleeping in peace (1986, Summer). Free Inquiry,
6, 57.
What religion means to me (1987, Spring). Free
Inquiry, 7, 12-13.
A humanist alternative to A.A.’s twelve steps
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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 121 - 128
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 121
A Tribute to B. F. Skinner at 100: His Awards and
Honors
Nathaniel G. Smith and Edward K. Morris
University of Kansas
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) is among the most eminent, prolific, and widely cited figures in modern psychology. Throughout the course of his distinguished career (1930-1990), he was the recipient of numerous
awards and honors from various associations, societies, colleges, and universities. He was recognized for
his experimental research, its extensions and applications, and philosophical contributions, both nationally and internationally, and both in psychology and the sciences in general. In this paper, we pay tribute
to Skinner on the centennial of his birth by reviewing the awards and honors he received over the course
of his career.
Key words: B. F. Skinner, awards, honors, history
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) is among the most
widely cited and influential psychologists in American history. Indeed, he is regarded as the most
eminent psychologist of the 20th century, ranked
ahead of Freud and Piaget (see Haggbloom et al.,
2002). His death at the age of 86, in 1990, was
preceded by over 60 years of significant contributions. It was a remarkable career that included
many accolades (see Appendix).
Among his awards and honors, Skinner was
recognized for his philosophical contributions
(e.g., Humanist of the Year award, American Humanist Society, 1972), his experimental research
(e.g., Howard Crosby Warren Medal, 1942), and
its extensions and applications (e.g., National Association for Retarded Citizens first annual award,
1978). These were garnered nationally (e.g., National Medal of Science, 1968) and internationally
(e.g., International Award of the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation for Mental Retardation, 1971),
and in psychology (e.g., Citation for Outstanding
Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, American
Psychology Association, 1990) and the sciences
more generally (e.g., President’s Award, New York
Academy of Science, 1985). He also received
awards and honors from professional associations
(e.g., American Educational Research Association,
Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research Award and Development, 1978), societies
(e.g., American Psychological Society, William
James Fellow Award, 1990), colleges (e.g., Hamilton College, Sc.D., 1951), and universities (e.g.,
John Hopkins University, L.H.D., 1979). In this
paper, we pay tribute to Skinner on the centennial
of his birth by reviewing the awards and honors
he received for his contributions to psychology,
its applications, and its philosophy over the course
of his career.
Harvard University: 1928-1936
In the fall of 1928, at age 24, Skinner entered
Harvard University as a graduate student in psychology. After an unsatisfactory literary interlude,
he had become interested in a science of human
behavior, influenced in part through Bertrand
Russell’s philosophical writings and the more
technical works of Jacques Loeb, Ivan P. Pavlov,
and John B. Watson (see Skinner, 1986a). On his
entrance to Harvard, however, Skinner was not
yet “a fully committed convert to psychology”
Authors’ Note: The manuscript is based, in part, on a presentation at the 2004 meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis.
Correspondence may be sent to the Department of Applied
Behavioral Science, Dole Human Development Center, University
of Kansas, 1000 Sunnyside Avenue, Lawrence, KS 66045. Ph:
785.864.4840; fax: 785.864.5202; e-mail: [email protected].
121
122
Nathaniel G. Smith and Edward K. Morris
(Skinner, 1979, p. 37) and the Department of
Psychology was not yet sympathetic to the kind of
research that interested him (Skinner, 1956). Thus,
as a graduate student, he worked mainly on what
interested him, without much direct supervision
(Skinner, 1967, 1979, p. 35). In a Baconian style,
he was “asking questions of the organism rather
than of those who have studied the organism”
(Skinner, 1967, p. 409). In 1930, he was given his
first award -- he was made a Thayer Fellow. Of
the fellowship, he wrote: It “clinched my loyalty to
psychology by giving me a fairly large room as an
office and laboratory” (Skinner, 1979, p. 35).
In March of 1931, Skinner received his doctorate and, the same year, under the auspices of E. G.
Boring and W. J. Crozier, two research fellowships.
He received a Walker Fellowship (1931-1932) and
was made a National Research Council Fellow
(1931-1933). Two years later, he was invited to
become a Junior Fellow in the newly founded and
prestigious Harvard Society of Fellows (19331936). As a Junior Fellow, Skinner came into contact with some of the most prominent scholars
of the day. For instance, in 1934, Skinner met
the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, one
of the Society’s first Senior Fellows, while dining
at the Society. During a discussion of behaviorism, Professor Whitehead challenged Skinner to
explain language as behavior (see Skinner, 1957,
pp. 456-457). The following morning, Skinner
began working on what he judged was his most
important book, Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957;
see Skinner, 1977, p. 379).
As Fellow, Skinner had no teaching responsibilities, and thus devoted himself to formulating
and refining his science -- the experimental analysis of behavior -- and, importantly, differentiating
it from Pavlov’s (1927) stimulus-response reflexology. In his science, he continued the program
of research he had described in part of his thesis
published as “The Concept of the Reflex in the
Description of Behavior” (Skinner, 1931). That is,
he conducted studies to “follow up leads arising
from [his own] work itself,” where he “answered
questions, clarified points, and solved practical
problems” (Skinner, 1979, p. 343). Much of his
empirical research and the behavioral system that
arose from it culminated in his seminal book, The
Behavior of Organisms (Skinner, 1938).
University of Minnesota: 1936-1945
At age 32, Skinner left Harvard and the shelter
of his research fellowships for his first academic
position, this at the University of Minnesota.
There, he began extending the systematic position
he had described in The Behavior of Organisms to
more complex cases, including verbal behavior.
For instance, he taught courses and gave lectures
under the titles of “The Psychology of Literature” and “The Psychology of Language.” In
1942, he received a John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation fellowship to focus more on
this work, but he requested a postponement until
after World War II. When he resumed the Guggenheim for the 1944-1945 academic year, he used
it to refine and extend the basic formulation and
conceptual framework for what would become
his 1947 William James Lectures at Harvard and,
10 years later, Verbal Behavior.
By the end of 1941, Skinner had published
53 works, 45 of them reports of experimental
research, for which he had a reputation as an original experimenter (Bjork, 1998, p. 267). In 1942,
at age 38, he received his first national recognition for these contributions. He was awarded the
Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society
of Experimental Psychologists, of which he had
been a member since 1938. The Society, also
known as “The Experimentalists,” was founded in
1904 by the structuralist, E. B. Titchener, a student
of Wilhelm Wundt (see Boring, 1938, 1967).
During Skinner’s years at Minnesota, he was
drawn away from his 1932 “Plan for the Campaign for the Years 30-60” (see Skinner, 1979, p.
115) by several unforeseen “products of time and
chance” (Skinner, 1979, p. 344). Although this
plan was grounded in the experimental analysis
of behavior, Skinner instead took up projects of
a more applied nature, such as Project Pigeon
(Skinner, 1960), the mechanical baby-tender
(Skinner, 1945), and his utopian novel, Walden
Two (Skinner, 1948), his fictional account of a
behaviorally-engineered community.
Indiana University: 1945-1948
In the fall of 1945, at age 41, Skinner became Professor and Chair of the Department
A Tribute to B. F. Skinner at 100
of Psychology at Indiana University. In spite of
his administrative responsibilities, he continued
to publish research on the analysis of behavior.
He studied differential reinforcement of low
rates of responding, choice, matching-to-sample,
reaction time, and superstition (see, e.g., Skinner,
1979, pp. 343, 341), summarizing much of it in
his May, 1949 Presidential Address at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association
titled “Are Theories of learning Necessary?”
(Skinner, 1950).
By the mid-1940s, Skinner’s program of research was being replicated, refined, and extended
at other universities (e.g., Columbia University).
When communication among them became difficult, he and Fred Keller started a series of Conferences on the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
(1947-1951), the first one held in Bloomington,
Indiana, in June 1947 (Dinsmoor, 1987). These
conferences served as a model for such later organizations as the Society for the Experimental
Analysis of Behavior (est. 1957), Division 25 of
the American Psychological Association (est.
1964), and the Association for Behavior Analysis
(est. 1974).
For Skinner, his Minnesota and Indiana years
marked a change in the direction of his research,
as he “considered issues that came not from the
research itself but from an application” (Skinner,
1986b, p. 229). In The Behavior of Organisms, he had
concluded by saying, “Let him extrapolate who
will” (Skinner, 1938, p. 442). The 1940s marked
the beginnings of his extrapolations, as noted
above, and included the William James Lectures
he gave at Harvard in the fall of 1947, titled,
“Verbal Behavior: A Psychological Analysis.”
Harvard University Revisited: 1948-1990
On the strength of these Lectures, Skinner
was invited to join the Harvard’s Psychology
Department (Skinner, 1967). In September of
1948, two decades after he arrived as a graduate
student, Skinner, at age 44, returned to Harvard
as a faculty member. As he described his career
to that point:
I had made up for my slow start in the
profession. I was returning to Harvard as
a full professor. I had been proposed for
123
membership in the two most prestigious
learned societies for which I was eligible
and had been elected [in 1948] to what
[Walter] Hunter called the better one--the
American Philosophical Society, founded
[in 1743] by Benjamin Franklin. (I would
make the other, the National Academy
of Sciences, the following year). (Skinner,
1979, p. 341)
Back at Harvard, Skinner amassed an extensive
list of accomplishments and contributions, from
laboratory-based research -- particularly during
the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and briefly again
in the early 1980s -- to extensions and applications of his science to education (e.g., Skinner,
1968), human services (e.g., Skinner, 1972a, pp.
283-291), and society at large (e.g., Skinner, 1971).
As a result, still other awards and honors came
his way.
On January 1, 1958 Skinner succeeded Boring
as the second Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Later that year, at age 54, he
received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution
Award from the American Psychological Association (APA). The Association (1958) described
him as:
An imaginative and creative scientist,
characterized by great objectivity in scientific matters and by warmth and enthusiasm in personal matters.… Few American
psychologists have had so profound an
impact on the development of psychology
and on promising younger psychologists.
(p. 735)
In return for the award, Skinner gave a lecture
at the next APA meeting (Skinner, 1982, p. 259,
1983, p. 169). It was based on his just declassified
wartime research at Minnesota -- Project Pigeon
(1940-1944) -- and titled, “Pigeons in a Pelican”
(Skinner, 1960).
In the early 1950s, Skinner began applying
his science to education, the impetus for which
was a visit to his younger daughter’s fourth grade
arithmetic class on November 11, 1953. In his
words:
Possibly through no fault of her own,
the teacher was violating two fundamental
principles: the students were not being told
at once whether their work was right of
124
Nathaniel G. Smith and Edward K. Morris
wrong (a corrected paper seen twenty-four
hours later could not act as a reinforcer),
and they were all moving at the same pace
regardless of preparation or ability. (Skinner, 1983, p. 64)
In a matter of days, he had constructed a prototype of a teaching machine based on principles
of behavior derived from his research. A few
months later, at a conference on Current Trends
in Psychology on March 12, 1954, he delivered
his first paper on education, “The Science of
Learning and the Art of Teaching” (Skinner,
1954), in which he “demonstrated a machine
that could teach spelling and arithmetic” (Skinner, 1967, p. 406). Within a few years, a teaching
machine and programmed instruction movement began (Benjamin, 1988), to which Skinner
made significant advances in over 30 subsequent
publications across the remainder of his career
(Morris, 2003).
In the years that followed, Skinner’s contributions to education led to further professional
recognition -- APA’s Edward Lee Thorndike
Award (1966), the Creative Leadership in Education Award from New York University (1972),
the American Educational Research Association
Award (1978), and the Scholar Hall of Fame
Award from The Academy of Resource and Development (1997). A recent survey has ranked him
among the most influential contributors to the
field of special education (see Polloway, 2000).
While considering retirement in the early
1960s, Skinner applied for a Career Award from
the National Institute of Mental Health. His project title was “A Behavioral Analysis of Cultural
Practices” (Skinner, 1983, p. 227). In 1964, at age
60, he received the Award, writing:
For five years, renewable for another
five, it would free me from all commitments to the University and allow me to
devote myself to an analysis of cultural
practices from the point of view of an
experimental analysis of behavior. Of the
four books [Skinner, 1969, 1971, 1972,
1974]
written during those 10 years, of his career
award, Beyond Freedom and Dignity was closest to
the assigned theme. The grant terminated upon
my retirement in 1974 [as professor emeritus],
but I have continued to work in the same vein.
(Skinner, 1982, p. 38)
On January 17, 1968 Skinner received the
highest scientific award bestowed by the United
States government, the National Medal of Science. During the last days of his administration,
President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized Skinner for his “basic and imaginative contributions
to the study of behavior which had profound
influence upon all psychology and many related
areas” (APA, 1969, p. 468). He was just the third
psychologist to receive the Medal since it was
established in 1959 by the 86th Congress; the
two others were Neal E. Miller (1964) and Harry
F. Harlow (1967). Of the many awards Skinner
received throughout his career, he only publicly
displayed his certificate for the National Medal of
Science, although even then only in the basement
of his house (Vargas & Chance, 2002).
By the late 1960s, Skinner had become a
prominent figure in American psychology (see
Davis, Thomas, & Weaver, 1982; Francher, 1979;
Gilgen, 1981; Myers, 1970; Perlman, 1980; Wright,
1970). In a 1970 Festschrift published in honor
of him on his 65th birthday, Dews (1970) wrote
of Skinner:
Massive advances in science can affect
society either by changing man’s views
of himself or by leading to substantive
changes in his environment…. Skinner’s
discoveries in the field of the transaction
of a higher organism with its environment
will have a greater and more enduring effect on man’s view of himself than the
views of Freud. Meanwhile, slowly but
increasingly, education is being influenced
by Skinner’s findings, and perhaps some
day they may influence broadly how men
dispense justice and punishment, raise
children, handle neuroses, organize an economic system and conduct international
relations. (pp. ix-x)
In 1971 he was awarded the Gold Medal from
the American Psychological Foundation for his
lifetime achievements and enduring contributions
to psychology. The following year, he received a
Career Contribution Award from the Massachusetts Psychological Association.
125
A Tribute to B. F. Skinner at 100
Skinner’s concerns for the implications of his
science for society at large, and his contributions
thereto, led to still other awards and honors, these
for his philosophical and humanistic contributions. In 1971, he received an International Award
from the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation for
Mental Retardation, renowned as the “Nobel
Prize” in the field of human services; Mother
Teresa had been a previous recipient (see Skinner,
1983, p. 325). On the occasion of the award, he
presented a paper titled “Compassion and Ethics in the Care of Retarded Persons” (Skinner,
1972a). Despite some opposition, the American
Humanist Society named Skinner “Humanist of
the Year” in 1972 (see Skinner, 1972b). About
this he wrote:
Many people objected to my nomination. Must a Humanist not believe in free
will and freedom of thought? Would a
Skinnerian world not mean ‘destruction of
all that we who are Humanist know ourselves to be?’ On other grounds I myself
had had doubts. I had been a contributing
member of the American Humanist Association for many years, and I was an honorary member of the Rationalist Press in
Britain, which published the New Humanist,
a journal more militantly anticlerical and
anti-big-state than the American Humanist,
but I was bothered by the aggrandizement
of the individual in much Humanist writing. With the publication of Beyond Freedom
and Dignity my position became awkward.
If Humanism meant nothing more than
the maximizing of personal freedom and
dignity, then I was not a Humanist. If it
meant trying to save the human species,
then I was. (Skinner, 1983, pp. 343)
In 1978, Skinner received the first annual
award from the National Association for Retarded Citizens. In 1985, he was given an Award
for Excellence in Psychiatry by the Albert Einstein School of Medicine and, later that year, the
President’s Award by the New York Academy of
Science. In 1990, he received the William James
Fellow Award from the American Psychological
Society for “lifetime of significant intellectual
contributions to the basic science of psychology.”
Finally, on August 10, 1990 Skinner was awarded
APA’s first Presidential Citation for Lifetime
Contributions to Psychology. The Association’s
(1990) citation summarized his contributions as
follows:
As a creative scientist with a vision,
you led a groundbreaking movement in
psychology that challenged our views
of behavior and inspired numerous advances in the field. Your incisive analysis
of contingencies of reinforcement and
your articulation of its implications for
evolutionary theory and verbal behavior,
your insightful views on the philosophy of
behaviorism, your innovations in research
methodology, and the breadth of the practical applications of your scientific work
are unparalleled among contemporary
psychologists. (p. 1205)
Conclusion
On the basis of his many and varied contributions over the course of his long career, B. F. Skinner became a prominent scientist, philosopher,
scholar, and humanitarian. His many awards and
honors readily attest to this. Of course, they do
not mean that his views in psychology were universally accepted (e.g., Skinner, 1957) or that his
prescriptions for cultural practices were followed
(e.g., Skinner, 1971). Many scientists and scholars
dispute what Skinner had to say (e.g., Chomsky,
1957; Scribner, 1972). He remains a controversial
figure (see, e.g., Modgil & Modgil, 1987).
Nevertheless, for Skinner himself, it was his
works -- not his acclaim, accolades, or achievements -- that were most important. For instance,
when by accident he recorded his first extinction
curve, he wrote later: “It was a Friday afternoon
and there was no one I could tell. All weekend I
crossed streets with particular care and avoided
all unnecessary risks to protect my discovery
from loss through my death” (Skinner, 1979, p.
95). However,
….it was the curve and not my accomplishment that I was carefully preserving. I
have felt the same way when writing some
of my books: I must stay alive until they are
finished but again because I believe in the
126
Nathaniel G. Smith and Edward K. Morris
importance of what I am saying. (Skinner,
1983, p. 410)
In these regards, Skinner noted that his behavior as a scientist was shaped and maintained
largely by his subject matter:
That is why I was able to work for
almost twenty years with practically no
professional recognition. People supported
me, but not my line of work; only my rats
and pigeons supported that. I was never
in any doubt at its importance, however,
and when it began to attract attention, I
was wary of the effect rather than pleased.
Many notes in my flies comment on the
fact that I have been depressed or frightened by so-called honors. I forgo honors
which would take time away from my work
or unduly reinforce specific aspects of it.
(Skinner, 1967, p. 408)
Skinner’s genetic endowment and personal
history produced a notable organism, but we
would claim no special credit. As he remarked in
his autobiography (Skinner, 1983), “By tracing
what I have done to my environmental history
rather than assigning it to a mysterious creative
process, I have relinquished all chance of being
called a Great Thinker” (p. 411). Through his enduring contributions, though, Skinner did obtain
a form of immortality. If contemporary scholars
would construct a better record, and then better
histories, of these contributions -- basic, applied,
and conceptual -- then those contributions might
become clearer, more accessible, and lead perhaps
to even better science, application, and theory. As
Skinner (1983) noted, “a scientist is only science’s
way of making more science” (p. 408).
We conclude our tribute to Skinner on the
centennial of his birth by quoting from his February 12, 1966 presidential address to the Pavlovian
Society:
Facts and formulations of facts change
as science progresses. The experimental
spirit and integrity of the scientist do not
change. In the abiding aspects of the life
of a scientist we still have much to learn
from Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov. (Skinner,
1966, p. 78)
We, too, still have much to learn from Burrhus
Frederic Skinner.
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Skinner, B. F. (1986a). B. F. Skinner [“The books
that have been most important …”]. In C. M.
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The Harvard guide to influential books: 113 distinguished Harvard professors discuss the books that
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future. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of
Behavior, 45, 229-235.
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Nathaniel G. Smith and Edward K. Morris
128
Appendix
Chronology of B. F. Skinner’s Awards and
Honors
Career
1926 A.B., Hamilton University; 1930 M.A.,
Harvard University; 1930-1931 Thayer Fellowship; 1931 Ph.D., Harvard University; 1931-1932
Walker Fellowship; 1931-1933 National Research
Council Fellowship; 1933-1936 Junior Fellowship,
Harvard Society of Fellows; 1936-1937 Instructor, University of Minnesota; 1937-1939 Assistant
Professor, University of Minnesota; 1939-1945
Associate Professor, University of Minnesota;
1942 Guggenheim Fellowship (postponed until
1944-1945); 1942 Howard Crosby Warren Medal,
Society of Experimental Psychologists; 19451948 Professor and Chair, Indiana University;
1947-1948 William James Lecturer, Harvard
University; 1948-1958 Professor, Harvard University; 1949-1950 President of the Midwestern
Psychological Association; 1954-1955 President
of the Eastern Psychological Association; 1958
Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award,
American Psychological Association; 1958-1974
Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Harvard
University; 1964-1974 Career Award, National
Institute of Mental Health; 1966 Edward Lee
Thorndike Award, American Psychological Association; 1966-1967 President of the Pavlovian
Society of North America; 1968 National Medal
of Science, National Science Foundation; 1969
Overseas Fellow in Churchill College, Cambridge;
1971 Gold Medal Award, American Psychological
Foundation; 1971 Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation for Mental Retardation International award;
1972 Humanist of the Year Award, American
Humanist Society; 1972 Creative Leadership in
Education Award, New York University; 1972
Career Contribution Award, Massachusetts
Psychological Association; 1974-1990 Professor
of Psychology and Social Relations Emeritus,
Harvard University; 1978 Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research Award and
Development, American Educational Research
Association; 1978 National Association for
Retarded Citizens Award; 1985 Award for Excellence in Psychiatry, Albert Einstein School of
Medicine; 1985 President’s Award, New York
Academy of Science; 1990 William James Fellow
Award, American Psychological Society; 1990
Lifetime Achievement Award, American Psychology Association; 1991 Outstanding Member
and Distinguished Professional Achievement
Award, Society for Performance Improvement;
1997 Scholar Hall of Fame Award, Academy of
Resource and Development
Honorary Degrees: Colleges and Universities
Alfred University, Dickinson College, Hamilton College, Harvard University, Hobart and
William Smith Colleges, John Hopkins University,
Keio University, McGill University, North Carolina State University, Ohio Wesleyan University,
Ripon College, Rockford College, Tufts University, University of Chicago, University of Exeter,
University of Missouri, University of North
Texas, Western Michigan University
Awards in His Name
The B. F. Skinner Prize (Hamilton College),
The B. F. Skinner Award (APA, Div. 12)
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 129 - 135
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 129
The Shaping of Behaviorists:
B.F. Skinner’s Influential Paper on Teaching
Machines1
Beth Sulzer-Azaroff
Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts; Browns Group of Naples
B.F. Skinner’s 1958 paper, Teaching Machines, had a powerful influence on my own and many others’
approach to designing instruction. The key features of teaching machines included: a focus on student
recall, instead of simple recognition; promoting progress in small steps to enable student understanding;
ensuring continuous interaction with the program; making certain, through shaping and fading of prompts,
that the right answer is given; and reinforcing correct responding through immediate feedback.. Skinner
also taught us to incorporate a specific set of features while designing our instruction. Although a few
practical issues, such as time and cost, required our adjusting a few of those features, we have been able to
adhere to the most critical ones. Those applications have accelerated learning and performance among
an extraordinarily large cohort of students.
When Dr. Thomas Zane invited us to participate in a panel entitled “The Shaping of Behaviorists,” he suggested we choose a particular paper
of B.F. Skinner’s that we felt was an especially
powerful influence on our development as a scientists and professionals. That was easy. Without
a doubt, it was “Teaching Machines” (Skinner,
1958). I remember, as if it were only yesterday,
when Ed Sulzer2, then a graduate student at Columbia University, brought it to my attention. At
any rate, I have this image of reading it and thinking “Of course. That’s it! Those are the things I
should have done to teach, motivate and manage
the students I’d taught in the inner city.” Soon
we began surveying every paper we could find
on the topic (e.g., Sulzer & Sulzer, 1962.) And I
have been studying and applying those concepts
openly ever since, not just with children, but
with young adults enrolled in the University, and
also professionals, blue and white collar workers,
managers and everyone else whose behavior I was
responsible for, (or often in my private life, just
hoping) to shape. What was the appeal? Up
front Skinner told his readers that his research
on teaching was
“…not about proving and disproving theories,
but on discovering and controlling the variables
of which learning is a function. By arranging
appropriate contingencies of reinforcement, specific forms of behavior can be set up and brought
under the control of specific classes of stimuli…
and the resulting behavior can be maintained in
strength for long periods of time” (p. 972).
Gone were the fictions with which I had
grown up; myths like “Children need to be motivated by their parents if they are to succeed in
school;” “Poverty is paired with a lack of motivation;” “Those children aren’t able to learn.”
Like a shaft of sunshine shining through a sky
full of gray clouds, this new approach displayed
teaching in a new light. Skinner’s paper served
up many tools I could apply toward promoting
student learning and motivation. Basically they
were incorporated within Skinner’s list of teaching
machine features.
1
Based on an invitational paper presented at a symposium
chaired by Thomas Zane, Ph.D., at the annual meetings of the
Association for Applied Behavior Analysis, International. Boston,
MA. May 31, 2004.
2
Edward Stanton Sulzer, Ph.D., was my husband at the time.
Before his untimely death in 1970, he had established and coordinated at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the first Behavior
Modification graduate training program in the United States.
129
130
Beth Sulzer-Azaroff
Features of Skinner’s Teaching Machine
Process
Skinner’s process for programming the teaching machine, (and most probably, any effective
instructional process) included the following:
• Instructional stimuli are composed for recall,
not just recognition
• The student takes small steps
• The program ensures a constant interchange
between program and student and makes sure
the student understands the material (gives the
correct answer) before proceeding
• It presents only material for which the student
is ready
• It is programmed to help the student achieve
the right answer by making use of many different techniques for shaping and fading of
prompts
• It ensures that the correct answer is reinforced
through immediate feedback
Technological Arrangements for the
Teaching Machine
In creating his early teaching machines, Skinner enabled those programming features through
a number of technological arrangements. His
recommended approach towards supporting
skilled verbal behavior (or what some might call
“conceptual” or “cognitive skills”) included the
following:
• Define the field of coverage to be taught
• Collect technical terms, laws, principles and
cases
• Make presentations clear and interesting
• Guide the student to perform in small, achievable steps
• Assess objectively
• Base progress on success
• Reinforce immediately via confirmation
• Go at one’s own pace
In our own teaching strategies, we have applied
directly or modified some of these features to
suite our own specific situations. For instance,
in the mid-sixties, when I began teaching at the
university level, supplying teaching machines for
the hundreds of students enrolled in our large
service courses or even those in our somewhat
smaller specialty courses was neither financially
or technically feasible. (Today, the availability
of personal computers would enable such implementation.) Nevertheless, we were able to apply
some of those features. One strategy we used
was providing rapid feedback via a student responder
system (Sulzer, 1968). Developed and funded by
General Electric, the system permitted students to
take multiple choice quizzes by pushing one of
an array of four button choices before them. As
soon as all had made their choices, a main frame
computer analyzed and displayed the distribution of responses and the correct response to
the class.
Later, lacking such technology at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), we turned to
the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI: Keller,
1968). Instead of the tiny steps required of the
teaching machine, we chose to teach material
in somewhat larger chunks and did not use any
mechanical devices. Other features of PSI are
elaborated below.
Define the Field of Coverage to be Taught
Specifying what to cover in an area of instruction is not always obvious. Here is one
place where we have had to go to specialists for
our information. To find out what information
and also what applied skills, (and even occasionally affective or value elements) to cover in our
Developmental Disabilities Training Program at
UMass, as well as in instructing behavioral safety
practitioners and also in teaching personnel and
parents of children with autism, we first conducted surveys among behaviorally oriented authorities (Lischeid, Sulzer-Azaroff, & Alavosius, M.,
1997; Sulzer-Azaroff, B., Fleming, R.K., Hamad,
C., Bass, B. & Tupa, M., unpublished manuscript;
Sulzer-Azaroff, Thaw, & Thomas, C., 1975). As
one example, when designing an internet-based
program to teach instructors and parents of
children with autism, our respondents specified
63 concepts and terms for us to cover.
Collect Technical Terms, Laws, Principles and Cases
For our coursework, we collected or prepared
material covering those key concepts and selected
key points of information. We then converted
The Shaping of Behaviorists
those, as Fred Keller (1968) advised, into study
questions (e.g., Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1991;
Sulzer-Azaroff, Fleming, & Mashikian, 2003).
These questions probed for definition or recognition of technical terms, laws, principles, analytic
and problem solving concepts. We often used
case examples to guide students to hone in on
critical features.
Throughout my career, we have used or
developed products to prepare lessons, materials, and to program student experiences. The
textbooks I wrote with G. Roy Mayer (Sulzer
& Mayer, 1972; Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1977,
l986, 1991) focused on and specified instructional
objectives, defined and illustrated terms, supplied
application guidelines and so on. As mentioned,
nearly every text Roy and I wrote together and
those I’ve written alone or with other co-authors
was accompanied by or incorporated into a study
guide, containing study questions covering just
about every key point in the text. (When not
otherwise available, we also prepared study guides
for texts written by others.)
Content, of course, needs to be updated as
new areas of application, technical terms, laws,
principles, and case examples are discovered
and disseminated. As most of our colleagues
do in any scientific or technological field, we
have performed research and read, written or
revised textbooks. Behavior Analysis for Lasting
Change (Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1991) actually
is the third version of a text initially published in
1972, under the title Behavior Modification for School
Personnel. Today the field has expanded to such
a degree that, if and when we produce a new
version, we probably will need to divide it into
two volumes.
In areas such as educational psychology, applied behavior analysis, behavioral safety, and
autism education, where the practice of applied
skills is so important, we have gone beyond
conceptual learning into guided practice by
developing laboratory &/or field manuals (e.g.,
Sulzer-Azaroff, 1998; 2004; Sulzer-Azaroff &
Reese, 1982). Additionally, we have attempted to
tap into affective responding through story lines,
3
This program was funded in part by the United States Office
of Education, Learning Anytime, Anyplace Program (LAPP) #
P3398000 300
131
images and discussions. A current example is the
course sequence a team of us affiliated with the
Shriver Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, designed to teach ABA over the internet3 to parents
and educators of children with autism. We try
to make study questions, and other instructional
content realistic and sometimes, deliberately, emotionally moving. Similarly, some of the questions
we pose for discussion purposes are designed to
elicit positive affect.
Make Presentations Clear and Interesting
We make every effort to keep our presentations clear and interesting, while also trying to
maintain a low response cost ratio for the student.
For instance, our books contain as many useful
illustrations as the publishers will permit, and our
study guides and field manuals include numerous forms, templates and other tools to ease the
student’s task. Simulated and actual practice also
is included wherever possible.
When, as typically, very high proportions of
our students have mastered and reported enjoying the material, presumably the material was
clear and interesting. In the arena of behavioral
safety instruction, I deliberately concentrated on
the affective dimension, by setting the behavioral
safety model within a mystery story entitled “Who
Killed My Daddy? A Behavioral Safety Fable,”
(Sulzer-Azaroff, 1998). Gauging just how successful one is on the interest dimension is difficult
to assess. Book adoptions and sales provide one
metric. Comments, though surely filtered, are
another. All I can say is that I’ve often advised
readers to take the book along on a long plane
ride. Those who actually did that, have consistently reported not being able to put it down until
the last pages, where the mystery was solved.
Another, more current effort is Destination
Unknown: A Behavior Analysis Practicum Journey
into Autism Education (Sulzer-Azaroff, B. 2004).
This laboratory/field manual covers fifteen sets
of assignments, with each “week” introduced by
a short vignette describing the adventures of a
group of five friends off on a journey together.
Whether that feature will add to the “interesting”
dimension remains to be seen, but I certainly had
fun preparing it.
132
Beth Sulzer-Azaroff
Guide Student to Perform in Small, Achievable Steps
Supported, for example, by the objectives,
study questions, quiz questions, and informative answer keys, steps are kept small and readily
achievable, especially in the beginning. Later,
because most of the material we teach is directed
toward actual application, assignments become
increasingly complex and challenging. Shaping
through the reinforcement of successive approximations also is built into as many aspects
of every teaching, training and performance
management program as possible. A simple
example is promoting the act of contributing to
group discussions, a necessary skill for personnel working in any organization that depends on
team-based decision-making. Often hesitancy to
contribute their own perspectives has imposed a
severe barrier for many of our students.
One tactic I’ve used is to pose a question and
ask the group to write down a brief reply. Then
we go around the room, asking each person to
read his or her written statement. Of course I attend closely to and compliment the praiseworthy
parts of each contribution, especially the spontaneous (unscripted) ones. Before long the other
students begin to follow that lead. Other short
written assignments, such as filling out forms,
writing abstracts and so on, gradually become longer and more complex, as participants continue to
share what they have with one another. By the
end of the program, each learner generally gives
a fairly sophisticated oral presentation before the
class. Many eventually present posters and papers
at meetings, conferences and conventions. Practically all are able to state and defend their points of
view, an ability essential to effective participation
in just about any skilled job performance.
Assess Objectively
We have arranged to assess student products
objectively by crafting and furnishing precise
answer keys or minimal standards for quiz questions and assignments. In a few cases, I probably
have even gone overboard by providing detailed
answer keys and other instructional supports
to study questions, as in the Instructor’s Manual
designed to accompany to The Pyramid Approach
to Education in Autism (Bondy, & Sulzer-Azaroff,
2002). Criteria for assessing performance and
suggestions for instructor feedback also are furnished in Destination Unknown (Sulzer-Azaroff, in
press). To reassure ourselves of the objectivity
of our scoring of essay questions in the Behavioral
Interventions in Autism internet course, we have
made it a practice independently to evaluate or
review sample student products in pairs.
Base Progress on Success
Progress does depend on success in much of
our work. Fred Keller (1968) taught us how to do
this to promote mastery of text material through
the Personalized System of Instruction. During my
entire tenure at the University of Massachusetts,
in every course with which I was involved, student
progress depended on their achieving pre-determined mastery levels (usually 90% or above correct). Otherwise they were asked to re-study the
material and take a different form of the quiz or
revise the assignment accordingly. Naturally, our
staff and I also made ourselves regularly available
to assist students seeking help.
In the recently field-tested Behavioral Interventions in Autism practicum course, students may
advance on to subsequent material as soon as they
have successfully met the requirements for each
assignment. We manage this by using objective
standards to assess their submissions of assignments. If any portions are missing or incorrect,
we return the assignment and request and guide
them toward completing it satisfactorily. Once
they meet objective standards, we deliver welldeserved congratulations.
Reinforce Immediately. As just described, reinforcement via confirmation and praise has
been integral to all our instruction. Our distance
course includes detailed quiz answer keys and, as
previously mentioned, so do many of our other
assignments. Beyond that, we have learned the
value – indeed, sometimes the necessity – of
augmenting that reinforcement with other events
or objects. Points toward a grade or certificate,
letters of commendation, social reinforcement
and even occasional tangible and edible rewards
are distributed contingent on progress. We also
use progress charts, compliment rapid and improving rates, and sometimes set a limited hold,
in the form of “to obtain a grade of A, you must
complete the course by ….” Additionally, we try
The Shaping of Behaviorists
to distribute reinforcers, such as mini-lectures,
information of current interest, snacks, parties,
and so on, non-contingently as well. Giving can be
as much fun as getting.
Go at One’s Own Pace
The last key programmed instruction feature
is permitting each learner to move at his or her
own pace. Within our Mastery Learning Center program, numerous time slots during which students
could take their quizzes were available. Because
the Center usually operated three or more days
a week for several hours, students could move at
their own paces within the week or sometimes
across weeks; but, absent a compelling reason,
we did require them to complete course requirements before the end of the semester. That
practice did diverge somewhat from Skinner’s
guideline on pacing because we (as many of our
colleagues) have found that University Registrars
are rather intolerant of instructors’ turning in
many incompletes at the end of a semester and
the students themselves often seem to cry out for
contingencies to help them maintain a reasonable
tempo.
Our General Programmed Instruction Experience
Was Skinner “right on,” in every regard
when it came to teaching technology? From my
viewpoint, just about. Yes, we did find ourselves
deviating from the list to a small degree, though,
as described above: we shifted from the extremely
small steps inherent in his teaching-machine program frames,4 because they are so time consuming
to prepare and test, because our students seemed
to prefer the larger chunks proposed by Fred
Keller (1968); and because we we used paper and
pencil materials instead of machines.
A few other concerns might be mentioned.
One I was fortunate not to have had to address,
is a concern of many universities: grade inflation.
Most of our students could, and did (probably
well over 80%) earn A’s, because they did complete all their assignments and, consequently, did
score within the A range on mid-term and final
4
Professor Darryl Bostow, of the University of South Florida,
has employed an elaborated form of Holland & Skinner’s “The
Analysis of Behavior” (1961) in computerized format for many
years. Beyond mastering the material well, his students apparently
find those short frames acceptable.
133
examinations. The very detailed course policies
we distributed and reliability checks we routinely
conducted on scoring probably helped in that
regard.
Course attrition has been another issue. In our
experience, during the early years, many students
dropped the course during the first few weeks.
Apparently, realizing how much they would need
to invest in order to master the material and earn
an A grade was too daunting. Later on, as word
circulated, this became less of an issue. Apparently students really wanting to learn the material
thoroughly and earn a high grade elected to join
and remained in our courses.
The extensive amount of time and effort faculty
members usually find they need to invest in programming material for teaching machines, even
for the PSI process, presents another hurdle. If
their adopted texts are not accompanied by study
guides and banks of quiz items and answer keys,
they must prepare these themselves. Repeated
quiz scoring also takes considerable time (although this has become far less of a problem
with the advent of computerized quizzing.)
Because (I have been told) I am a “workaholic”
those hurdles did not deter me, though my student assistants and I did find ourselves having to
become creative in minimizing this formidable
barrier. We engineered systems for developing
study questions and quizzes, proctor-grading of
quizzes, quality assurance and other essential
elements (Johnson, K. R., & Sulzer-Azaroff, B.,
1975 a & b; 1978; Johnson, Sulzer-Azaroff, B., &
Maass, 1976, Sulzer-Azaroff, Johnson, Dean, &
Freyman, 1977).
Personalization, or attending to the social factor,
is one element Fred Keller (1968) and many others apparently felt Skinner’s system overlooked.
While many students are happy to learn in isolation, we who are attracted to applied behavior
analysis seem to find the opportunity to interact
directly with instructors and fellow students especially reinforcing. Many of our students did
seek out and appeared to appreciate such contact.
In our courses in applied behavior analysis, our
regular discussion groups were valued and very
well attended. Also, during our Learning Center’s
hours of operation, my graduate assistant(s) and I
would make a point of being present, circulating,
Beth Sulzer-Azaroff
134
responding to and initiating conversations. We
also carefully selected and trained our proctors
to be friendly and positive in providing feedback
and guidance to their assigned students. And we
supervised and differentially reinforced staff for
applying those skills appropriately. Student course
evaluations, published in the campus newspaper,
tended to be highly complimentary.
Conclusion
That the courses I teach to this very day
incorporate most of the features listed above
undoubtedly is a function of the reinforcement I
have personally received. Over the years, students
in our programmed courses master their material
thoroughly. Of the hundreds of dedicated graduate and undergraduate students who have passed
through and participated in the teaching of these
course sequences, the vast majority have gone
on to make significant contributions to the areas
of education, research and service. And many
(probably most) have continued the tradition of
behavior-based teaching in their own programs,
to the advantage of their descendants.
In case you are wondering, indeed I do apply
these features in my own professional, social,
and personal life. And yes, I do try to explain
what I am doing and why. When one’s actions
are positive and constructive, most people don’t
seem to mind at all, especially when they actively
participate in setting the goals and choosing their
reinforcers. Probably that’s why our children and
grandchildren are so extraordinarily outstanding!
Thanks, Fred Skinner. The rules you provided
in “Teaching Machines” work not only in formal
instruction, but everywhere else as well!
References
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Newark, DE, Pyramid Educational Products, Inc.
Holland, J.G. & & Skinner, B.F. (1961). The Analysis of Behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Johnson, K. R., & Sulzer-Azaroff, B. (1975). PSI
for first time users: Pleasures and pitfalls.
Educational Technology, 15, 9-17.
Johnson, K. R., & Sulzer-Azaroff, B. (1978). An
experimental analysis of proctor prompting
behavior in a personalized instruction course.
Journal of Personalized Instruction, 3, 122-130.
Johnson, K. R., Sulzer-Azaroff, B., & Maass, C. A.
(1976). The effects of internal proctoring
upon examination performance in a personalized instruction course. Journal of Personalized
Instruction, 1, 113-117.
Johnson, K., & Sulzer-Azaroff, B. (1975). The
effects of different proctoring systems
on student examination performance and
preference. In J. M. Johnson (Ed.), Research
and technology in college and university teaching
(pp. 159-185). Springfield, Illinois: Charles
C. Thomas, Publishers.
Keller, F. S. (1968). Goodbye teacher. Journal of
Applied Behavior Analysis, 1, 79-89.
Lischeid, W.E., Sulzer-Azaroff, B., & Alavosius,
M. (1997). Behavioral safety: Who will train
the safety profession? Professional Safety, October, 32-36.
Skinner, B.F. (1958). Teaching machines. Science,
128, 969-977.
Sulzer, B. (1968). Teaching educational psychology with the aid of computerized student
response system. General Electric Publication.
Sulzer, B., & Mayer, G. R. (1972). Behavior modification procedures for school personnel. New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston (Dryden Press).
Sulzer, B., & Sulzer, E. S. (1962). Automated
instruction: An overview. Minnesota Department of Mental Health: Current Conclusions.
Sulzer-Azaroff, B. (1998a). Who Killed My Daddy:
A Behavioral Safety Fable. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies,
Sulzer-Azaroff, B. (1998b). Activities Manual for
‘Who Killed My Daddy.’ Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies,
Sulzer-Azaroff, B. (submitted for publication).
Destination Unknown: A Behavior Analysis
Practicum Journey into Autism Education
Sulzer-Azaroff, B. & Mayer, G. R. (1986). Achieving educational excellence using behavioral strategies.
Reprinted (1994) in three volumes by Western Image, P.O. Box 427, San Marcos, CA
92079-0247
Sulzer-Azaroff, B. & Mayer, G.R. (1991). Behavior analysis for lasting change. Fort Worth, TX:
Harcourt Brace.
The Shaping of Behaviorists
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S. (2003). Study Questions, Laboratory and Field
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Sulzer-Azaroff, B., & Mayer, G. R. (1983). Prosedimientos del analysis conductial aplicado con ninos y
jovenes. Mexico: Editorial Trillas.
Sulzer-Azaroff, B., & Mayer, G. R. (1977). Applying behavior analysis procedures with children
and youth. New York: Holt, Rinehart &
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Sulzer-Azaroff, B., & Reese, E. P. (1982). Applying
behavior analysis: A program for developing profes-
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sional competence. New York: Holt, Rinehart
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Sulzer-Azaroff, B., Fleming, R.K., Hamad, C.,
Bass, B. & Tupa, M. (In preparation). Designing a distance learning curriculum for early
behavioral intervention with young children
with autism: Setting priorities for instructional
content.
Sulzer-Azaroff, B., Johnson, K. R., Dean, M., &
Freyman, D. (1977). An experimental analysis
of proctor quiz-scoring accuracy in personalized instruction courses. Journal of Personalized
Instruction, 2, 143-149.
Sulzer-Azaroff, B., Thaw, J., & Thomas, C. (1975).
Behavioral competencies for the evaluation of
behavior modifiers. In W. S. Wood (Ed.), Issues in evaluating behavior modification (pp. 47-98).
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1
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS
2004, 5, 137 - 142
NUMBER 2 (WINTER 2004) 137
Contingencies over B. F. Skinner’s Discovery of
Contingencies
Julie S. Vargas
B. F. Skinner Foundation
B. F. Skinner began graduate school thinking he would extend Pavlov and Watson’s stimulus-response
analysis of behavior. He met the physiologist William Crozier who encouraged Skinner’s inductive approach. With little supervision and a willingness to build new equipment and start over, Skinner’s work
was determined largely by the data he was getting. Bit by bit those data shaped the operant chamber that
allowed Skinner to discover that postcedents, not antecedents determined what his rats did. Thus began a
new science. The science eliminates the role of hypothesized inner agencies and instead relates properties
of behavior directly to contingent events.
In The Behavior Analyst, the main journal of
the American Association for Behavior Analysis,
behavior analysis is called an “approach” (Dewsbury, 2003; Roche and Barnes-Holmes, 2003),
a “view” (Moore, 2003), a “discipline” (Malott,
2004), a “field” (Malott, 2004; Madden, Klatt,
Jewett, and Morse, 2004), or a “theory” (Vyse,
2004). What B. F. Skinner began is not an “approach”, ‘view”, “discipline”, “field”, or “theory”.
It was, and is, a science, differing from psychology
in its dependent variables, its measurement system, its procedures, and its analytic framework.1
Skinner and his colleagues left us thousands of
studies documenting functional relationships
between contingencies and behavior. Behavior,
they found, can be explained without appealing
to internal physiology or hypothesized mental
processes.
All sciences develop. Refinements of Skinner’s
experimental analysis of behavior continue to be
made, but the science of the interplay between
contingent events and behavior holds as solidly
in the 21st century as it did in the 20th century
when B. F. Skinner first made his discoveries. The
revolutionary nature of those discoveries, in particular the excising of an internal agency credited
with initiating behavior, still raises objections. But
no objection can alter the way that contingencies
work. Increasingly Skinner’s legacy is spawning
effective technologies in education (especially
autism and physical education), pharmacology
and counseling, business and industry, animal
training and instructional design.
How did this small town boy discover the
principles that continue to cause so much furor?
In his article “A Case History in Scientific Method,” Skinner makes light of the circumstances
responsible for his discovery of the operant,
suggesting “unformalized principles of scientific
practice” such as “some people are lucky,” (Skinner, 1956/1999). How much luck entered into
his discoveries isn’t certain but, as he was fond
of quoting, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.”
Three “preparations” were critical; acquiring shop
skills, adopting an inductive scientific approach,
and responding to behavioral evidence rather
than theories.
Skinner grew up in Susquehanna, a small
railroad town in the hills of Pennsylvania. As
a young boy, one of his primary activities was
building things. Materials were plentiful in both
his parents’ home and that of his grandfather a
few blocks away. He had few restrictions over
1
Because behavior analysts seem reluctant to call behavior
analysis a science, a small group has proposed the term “behaviorology” for the science of contingent relations between actions and
other events. For a discussion of the relationship of behaviorology
to behavior analysis, see Vargas, E. A. (2000).
137
138
Julie S. Vargas
what he could build. In addition to building
tables and chairs, a cart that turned left when the
wheel was turned right, and numerous gadgets, he
made a steam cannon that, when enough steam
built up, shot plugs of carrot across the unkempt
backyard.
By the time he reached high school, Fred, as
he was then known, had an extensive repertoire
of trying things out to see how they worked. This
experimental approach to life gained philosophical justification through challenging a teacher,
Miss Graves, in whose class he announced that
Bacon, not Shakespeare wrote “As you Like
it”. When Miss Graves said “You don’t know
what you are talking about,” Skinner went to the
library to bolster his position. In addition to a
book called “Bacon is Shakespeare,” the library had
Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum,
and a book of his essays. Since the Advancement
of Learning begins with a long praise of the British king, it is difficult to imagine an American
teenager reading much of that book. But Novum
Organum is another story. At the beginning of the
20th century, science had given citizens electricity, the telephone, the automobile, and the radio.
Though Novum Organum offered no help for the
young Fred’s arguments in school, Bacon equated
with science the kind of tinkering Fred loved to
do. Bacon did not believe in following an idea
just because it was sanctioned by an established
authority. He advocated examining events directly. Bacon’s distrust of authority as the source
of truth must have appealed to a teenager who
was challenging his own teacher. In any case, what
Skinner read of Novum Organum stayed with him.
In his experimental research in graduate school,
he used procedures consistent with those Bacon
recommended—direct observation and a search
for functional relations between dependent and
independent variables.
After college, and a year and a half trying, and
failing, to become a writer, Skinner applied to
Harvard University to study psychology. He began graduate school in 1928 with three books he
thought would prepare him for a scientific study
of behavior, Bertrand Russell’s 1927 Philosophy,
John B. Watson’s 1924 Behaviorism, and the new
1927 English translation of I. P. Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes. For the department he was to enter,
he couldn’t have picked less appropriate books.
The Harvard Psychology Department was dominated by E. G. Boring, a disciple of Titchener
whose school of psychology Watson called, in
the very book Skinner had on his bookshelf “the
ancient days of superstition and magic.”
Perhaps it was fortunate that Boring was on
sabbatical that first semester of 1928. Skinner
signed up for a course in the Department of
Physiology whose text discussed Pavlov. Through
this course Skinner met the physiology chairman,
William Crozier, who was a disciple of Jacques
Loeb. Crozier, like Loeb, insisted on studying the
organism as a whole. Crozier’s love was tropisms
and he encouraged tropism research in the department’s courses. By the end of Skinner’s first
year of graduate school, he and another student
submitted a tropism article (on ant behavior!) to
the journal of which Crozier was editor. The five
references for this article give an idea of what
Skinner was reading: All five references are from
journals in physiology.
Crozier encouraged Skinner in looking for
dependent variables that involved the behavior
of the whole organism, and in finding functional
relationships between experimental treatments
and behavior. Tropisms did not interest Skinner, but Pavlov and Watson’s work did. Pavlov’s
respondent conditioning showed clear effects
of pairing a neutral antecedent stimulus with a
stimulus that already produced a reflex response.
Watson extended this analysis to children’s behavior, again attributing the cause of what they did
to antecedent stimuli. Skinner began his own line
of research in the summer of 1929, unaware that
he was to challenge both Pavlov’s and Watson’s
stimulus-response analysis. Both Pavlov and
Watson had used “trials” where an animal was
placed in an experimental space and its response
to a stimulus was measured. Intending to continue
their line of research, Skinner built a six foot long
runway starting with three steps. He called it the
“Parthenon.” At the runway’s end he placed food.
Careful to control extraneous variables, the whole
runway was enclosed in a large box. Observation was possible through a small peep hole. To
release the experimental subject (a rat) without
disruption, Skinner constructed a pneumatic
release to make sure the door opened silently at
Contingencies over B. F. Skinner’s Discovery of Contingencies
the start of each run. When the rat came out of
his start box and down the steps, Skinner made a
carefully calibrated sound, and the rat’s behavior
was recorded. The records from this experiment
are pencil lines on six foot long rolls of paper.
It looks as though Skinner held a pencil against
paper unwinding from a rotating drum, perhaps
using one of the kymographs available from the
psychology department. When the rat came out
of the tunnel, Skinner would move the pencil
up for each step descended. Then he sounded
the click. When the rat ran back into the tunnel
he moved the pencil back down to the original
line making stalagmite shapes on the line. On
his paper strips, Skinner noted the temperature,
the times, and the weights used to calibrate the
sounds. It was all very scientific.
For nearly a month Skinner used this apparatus with at least six different rats. He varied the
weights and examined his long paper strips, but he
could not see any clear relationship between his
experimental procedures and the rats’ behavior
other than their adaptation to the clicks. On the
last record he wrote, “Apparently not responding
to click at all.” Adaptation, though clearly shown,
was nothing new and he tore apart the equipment.
Meanwhile his rats had babies. He designed
another piece of apparatus to see how baby rats
responded to a pull on their tails. The records
from this experiment are wiggly kymograph
scratches on smoked paper. Crozier, returning
after a summer out of town, was impressed with
Skinner’s work. But Skinner could not see any
clear functional relations. He had reached a dead
end.
Harvard’s curriculum permitted students to
take mostly research courses, which suited Skinner well. Shuttling between departments, no one
kept track of what he was doing. Of his work,
he wrote,
In my research courses ... I worked entirely without supervision. No one knew
what I was doing until I handed in some
kind of flimsy report. Possibly the psychologists thought I was being counseled
by Crozier and Hoagland, and they may
have thought that someone in psychology
was keeping an eye on me, but the fact was
139
that I was doing exactly as I pleased (Skinner, 1979, p. 35).
With no one suggesting experiments or offering him apparatus to use, Skinner’s behavior became increasing under control of his experimental
results, namely how his rats were responding to
his experimental procedures. There could not
be any better contingencies for the discovery of
something entirely new.
The progress towards that discovery was not
smooth. By the beginning of his second year
Skinner still did not have a good dependent variable, although he was using the kymograph for
recording responses along a continuous line. He
was still looking at the response to a click, and
went back to a runway. The “Parthenon” had
not produced results, but maybe a longer runway
would. By the middle of October he was running
rats down a runway 8 to 10 feet long. He attached
a kymograph that had three lines all running
in real time. The top one had hatch marks for
portions of a second. The second showed the
click, and the third the behavior of the rat. The
records from the long runway end November 23,
about a month after the first records. Another
dead end.
At the beginning of the next semester, Skinner designed a runway to save himself work. This
new runway was rectangular in shape. After the
initial run, the rat could return to the start position without being carried from the end to the
start. To get the rat to go around the rectangular
runway, a food dish was added close to the start
for the next run. Without realizing it, Skinner had
made a breakthrough. He had eliminated “trials”.
Instead of interrupting the flow of behavior,
he no longer interceded during an experimental
session. As Skinner sat and watched his rat’s behavior, he found that they paused at the food dish
sometimes as long as five to ten minutes before
starting another run. This was more interesting
than the response to a click. Skinner began timing those pauses. But though happy with his new
data, he found sitting and timing the intervals tedious. As usual he solved his problem with a new
piece of equipment. He put the whole runway
on a fulcrum so that the rats tipped the runway
as they ran from one end to the other. Hooking
the kymograph up to this system, Skinner made
140
Julie S. Vargas
a further refinement: By adding a weight to the
needle that scratched the line on the black smoked
paper, his records would be curves instead of
being hatch marks on a straight line. Here was
another breakthrough. Now, not only were there
no “trials”, the rats recorded their own behavior in
a cumulative record whose slope showed the rate
of their activity. Skinner could set up an experiment, leave, and return a couple of hours later.
The records Skinner was now generating had no
specific antecedent stimulus for the rats’ actions.
But he was still looking for causes in conditions
that preceded the behavior to be explained.
The surviving records from the rectangular
runway show nearly a month’s work (February
6 to March 1, 1930). Skinner graphed time in
minutes for the last 50 runs. The lines on the
graphs are jagged, bouncing between half an hour
to two hours descending to a generally lower level
over the last five days. No independent variable
is in evidence. Skinner describes the move to the
next piece of apparatus as follows:
Eventually, of course, the runway was
seen to be unnecessary. The rat could
simply reach into a covered tray for pieces
of food, and each movement of the cover
could operate a solenoid to move a pen
one step in a cumulative curve (Skinner,
1956/1999, p. 116)
“Of course”? No one else who was using
runways in 1930-31 switched to a box with a door.
But others were not measuring “rate of eating
behavior”. They were recording percent correct
in T-mazes or time for each trial in experimenterinitiated runs.
Skinner had finally found a good dependent
variable and a recording system that showed each
response at the exact moment it occurred. The
slope of the curve showed changes in rate of
response and provided a sensitive record over the
entire session. With his new apparatus and cumulative recorder, Skinner started getting results. In
March of 1930 he wrote home,
The greatest birthday present I got was
some remarkable results from the data of
my experiment. Crozier is quite worked up
about it. It is a complicated business and
deep in mathematics. In a word, I have
demonstrated that the rate in which a rat
eats food, over a period of two hours, is
a square function of the time. In other
words, what heretofore was supposed to
be “free” behavior on the part of the rat
is now shown to be just as much subject
to natural laws as, for example, the rate of
his pulse (Skinner, 1979, pp. 59-60).
Ingestion was the first in a long line of behaviors previously thought to be “free” that Skinner
was to show to be under experimental control.
In 1930 he had not yet rejected antecedents for
the source of explanation of behavior, nor had
he relinquished the term “reflex”, but his research
was bearing fruit, and it took on a fever pitch.
Everything I touched suggested new
and promising things to do. I slept well
at night, but my days were feverishly active... I...tried to relax, but it was no use.
I thought constantly of my rats, designing
new pieces of equipment and formulating new questions to be answered. I lost
weight and my heart began to skip beats. I
went to a doctor for a checkup and learned
there was nothing the matter (Skinner,
1979, p. 38).
Every day in April of 1930 he ran at least two
rats for two-hour sessions each. The curves of
“ingestion” were remarkably smooth, starting
steep and gradually flattening out as time went
by. Different rats produced curves of differing
heights, but all showed the same reliable path.
Occasionally a rat would stop for as much as
fifteen minutes, but when it again ate it made up
for the lost time, soon reaching, and following, the
usual curve. That suggested another procedure.
Skinner tried locking the door to produce an interruption. Sure enough, when the door was again
unlocked, the rats speeded up until the recording
line joined the projection for the original curve.
Skinner was tremendously excited. He showed his
results to Crozier who urged publication. Without skipping a day of research, Skinner managed
to submit “On the Conditions of Elicitation of
Certain Eating Reflexes” by April 21, 1930.
He now had data for a doctoral thesis. In the
fall of his third year, Skinner worked on his thesis.
The first half discusses the history of the term
reflex. The authors he cites discuss physiological
work with reflexes and methodology. The second
Contingencies over B. F. Skinner’s Discovery of Contingencies
part of the thesis examines the eating behavior of
the rat, with deprivation (and emotional disturbance) as the independent variables, still on the
antecedent end of the responses recorded. The
apparatus shown has a door that the rat pushes
to obtain food.
Skinner’s ambivalence about the nature of
what he was studying shows in two contradictory
statements in his thesis: The first follows the
standard S-R formulation.
We shall assume that every movement of an organism is in response to a
stimulus....and in a suitable experimental
situation we may proceed to examine the
conditions under which a selected reflex
is or is not elicited (Skinner, 1930, pp.
62-63).
But the second, 10 pages later, shows doubt
about the requirement for an initiating stimulus.
The report of the experimental material that follows could very well be made
without reference to the reflex: we should
then be discussing “rates of eating”. Nevertheless the experiments themselves grew
out of considerations of the sort we have
here been concerned with and the results
are satisfactorily interpreted in harmony
with reflex doctrine. Accordingly, the
experimental report will be made in the
terminology of the reflex (Skinner, 1930,
p. 73).
Skinner kept working with the box with the
door for quite a long time. It is still shown in
“Drive and reflex strength” submitted on July 7,
1931, seven months after the date on his thesis.
Of course, he was getting nice data with this apparatus. But those data had limitations. Since the
push on the door was correlated one to one with
obtaining a pellet, the data were described as an
“eating response” or “ingestion”, not as a push
on the door. Looked at that way, the relationship
between actions and their consequences could
not be seen.
The first indication of a box with a lever appears in notes on cumulative records saved from
April of 1931. This new apparatus recorded
bar presses with a cumulative recorder and each
press turned a disk with holes around the edge
into which Skinner put pellets of food. When
141
the rat pressed the bar, the cumulative recorder
stepped the pen up one notch, and the disk
turned, dropping a pellet of food down a tube to
the food dish in the box. The shift from a door
to a bar separated the act of pressing the bar
from obtaining food, making bar pressing and
reinforcement two events rather than one. That
permitted varying the relationship between action
and reinforcement so that functional relations
between action and consequence could be seen.
It was not long before a “variation” occurred and
Skinner was terribly excited. As he described it
in his autobiography,
A rat was pressing the lever in an experiment on satiation when the pellet dispenser
jammed. I was not there at the time, and
when I returned I found a beautiful curve...
The change was more orderly than the
extinction of a salivary reflex in Pavlov’s
setting and I was terribly excited. It was a
Friday afternoon and there was no one in
the laboratory whom I could tell. All that
weekend I crossed streets with particular
care and avoided all unnecessary risks to
protect my discovery from loss through
my death (Skinner, 1976, p. 95).
He wrote to his colleague and best friend, Fred
Keller, about his “brand new theory of learning”
(Keller, 1931). He was still trying to fit his “new
theory” into Pavlov’s reflex frame, talking about
the stimulation from the lever. But eventually he
realized that what he was seeing were not actions
controlled by antecedents like those Pavlov had
described, but actions controlled by immediate
postcedent events. By February of 1932 he
submitted an article describing a “second type
of conditioning” (Skinner, 1932) that he later
called “Type I” and still later “operant”. Finally
he had an apparatus to record the rate of a specific act of the whole organism as a function of
experimental manipulation. In the next few years,
supported by fellowships, he investigated all of
the basic contingencies including intermittent
reinforcement, discrimination and generalization,
delay of reinforcement, and even the effect of
some drugs. Much of this research appeared in
the Behavior of Organisms, the book that launched
the science for which he is known. It describes
how the interaction between individual actions
142
Julie S. Vargas
and independently measurable events determines
rate of behavior.
Skinner did not ignore what psychologists
call “cognitive processes”. Behavior occurring
inside our bodies, like thinking, develops through
the same basic processes of operant conditioning as talking or any external operant behavior.
Acknowledging that human behavior is no more
free of contingencies than our movements are
from the physical restraints of gravity has been
difficult for the general public. Major changes in
our understanding of the world never pass easily
into the mainstream. But the downstream effects
of Skinner’s work on the impact of contingencies
on properties of behavior has altered the course
of behavioral science forever.
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