The Philosopher
B. F. Skinner
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- American
- Period:
- 20th century
The synopsis
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, inventor, and social philosopher. He held the Edgar Pierce Professorship of Psychology at Harvard University from 1948 until his retirement in 1974. Skinner pioneered behavior analysis, specifically the philosophy of radical behaviorism, and founded the experimental analysis of behavior as a school of experimental research psychology. He applied operant conditioning to reinforce behavior, using the rate of response as the primary measure of response strength. To facilitate his research, he created the operant conditioning chamber, commonly known as the Skinner box, and the cumulative recorder for measuring response rates. His significant experimental work, conducted with Charles Ferster, was published in the 1957 book "Schedules of Reinforcement." Skinner was a prolific author, with 21 books and 180 articles to his name. His 1948 utopian novel, "Walden Two," explored the application of his ideas to community design, and his 1958 work, "Verbal Behavior," presented his analysis of human language. Alongside Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson, Skinner is recognized as a foundational figure in modern behaviorism. A 2002 survey ranked him as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.
The works
The quotes
A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.
I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.
Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.
Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.
I believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills.
I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.
What is sought can never produce the seeking.
Great scientific contributions have been techniques.
I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.
The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
The environment shapes people's actions.
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
I'm very pessimistic.
I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.
The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.
I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.
We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
Reinforcement is being right.