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One of the most controversial and influential figures in the last century, Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pa., USA in 1904. He graduated with a major in literature from Hamilton College, New York in 1931 and initially had aspirations to be a professional writer.
He quickly realized that this was not the vocation for him and around the same time that he decided not to pursue writing for a living he discovered the theories of the great Behaviorist, John B. Watson. Watson's thesis was to have a major impact on Skinner and would direct the rest of his life.
Watson founded Behaviorism in 1913, when Skinner was just 9 years old, because he, like many other researchers and critical thinkers of his day, had become disillusioned with the Structuralist school and their method of studying behavior via 'introspection'. Watson believed that the theories of Darwin (evolution) and Functionalism were the way forward. He was impressed by the work of Russian researchers on reflexes in dogs, most notably the findings of Ivan Pavlov. Watson concluded that basic reflexes could be developed into learned responses directly influenced by stimuli in the environment.
The principal question Watson asked was 'what useful purpose does behavior serve?' - Behaviorism was born. In this field of study only observable behaviors were to be examined and a wider number of subjects could now be studied (unlike Structuralism), including animals, children, the retarded and the insane.
Skinner returned to college, spurred on by his enthusiasm for Behaviorism, and he obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1931 from Harvard University. By this stage, Watson had left Psychology completely after rumors of an affair with his research assistant. Skinner took up the mantle with enthusiasm and was to have much more influence in both psychology and critical thought than Watson could have ever imagined.
B.F. Skinner held a strict behaviorist viewpoint advocating that operant instrumental learning was more important than Pavlov's Classical Conditioning. In Classical Conditioning naturally occurring behaviors or reflexes are paired with a neutral stimulus e.g. dogs naturally salivate when they are presented with food. Pavlov discovered that if a bell was rang (the neutral stimulus) when the dogs were feed they would eventually salivate every time a bell was sounded regardless of whether food was presented or not.
In operant instrumental conditioning, learning occurs as a result of reinforcement where specific rewards or punishments are implemented in order to achieve or dissuade the behavior to be changed. Skinner went further than Watson in that he firmly suggested that the study of learning should only be concerned with observable stimuli and responses -'thought', 'feeling', 'motivational factors' etc were deemed 'unobservable' and therefore not measurable, and that mental events were themselves behaviors and not causes. He had no time for such concepts, and it was this strict behaviorist viewpoint that brought him both admirers and ardent critics.
Skinner wrote that if humans were to be changed, even saved, then the environment itself must be changed and not the 'inner self', via a specifically chosen pattern of rewards and punishments. He believed that it was possible to have large-scale control over human behavior and that the belief that people were 'free agents' was simply wrong. To Skinner, therefore, the environment was THE key, because it was this that molded behavior.
Most of Skinner's work was carried out on animals, principally rats and pigeons, and it was from their behaviors that he would infer how humans also behave. The controlled chamber he designed to study learning in rats, where the animals press levers for food rewards, was named after him - the Skinner Box.
He also designed an open baby crib - called the Air Crib, which was constructed using clear Plexiglas sides (rather than the usual wooden bars), because he felt it was essential that infants should see the world clearly and not in a restricted fashion. His own children were reared in these cribs and later; one of his daughters would also use the air crib with her own children.
Commercially though, the Air Crib was a huge flop - people believed that Skinner was treating humans in the same way as he treated his rats - in boxes. This reaction, in retrospect was probably due to a lack of understanding about what Skinner intended.
Skinner published a great number of articles and books during his lifetime, the two most widely read being 'Walden Two' (1948) and 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' (1971). They were to provoke a massive protest from many scientists who disputed the behaviorist concept that humans were simply 'reactors' to events in their environments.
Skinner's work influenced thinking in many different fields of psychology and his views in two principal areas will now be briefly highlighted:
On language: - Skinner assumed that children were born as 'blank slates' or 'tabula rasae' and that they learn language via shaping the sounds they hear from their caregivers into words and eventually sentences through selective reinforcement. This viewpoint was most avidly criticized by Noam Chomsky (1968, 1980), who found evidence for an innate 'Language Acquisition Device' or 'LAD', where newborns are biologically programmed for language learning.
On Personality: - Skinner said (1977, p10): "I see no evidence for an inner world of mental life relative either to an analysis of behavior as a function of environmental forces or to the physiology of the nervous system". So, once again it was the external environment, plus the past learning history of the individual, which was said to 'shape' their personality. New research has shown this line of thought to be flawed - children are born with certain temperamental characteristics and it is both genetics and environment that shape personality.
Conclusion:
B.F. Skinner's work had a major effect not only on Psychology but also in how 20th Century thought evolved. He had his avid supporters and fiercest critics. Many of his critics had never even read his work, but simply rejected it outright, mainly because of Skinner's inferences of human behavior from his research on animals. He spent his life fighting in the Behaviorist corner until his death in 1990. Undisputedly he will be remembered for his important findings, his advancing the study of learning and for his legacy - how to best channel critical thinking and the pitfalls we would do well to avoid.
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