"Although avoidance suggests that behavior may be influenced by an event which does not occur, we may account for the effect without violating any fundamental principle of science with the…
Operants podcast is available for download. Sheila Habarad hosts Dr. Julie Vargas, Dr. Joyce Tu, Bruna Colombo dos Santos, and Monalisa Leão. Duration: 1 hour 5 minutes. Here is the…
"An important example of [the] use of aversive conditioning is the practice of branding an act wrong or sinful. Any behavior which reduces the stimulation arising from the early stages…
"It is not difficult to show that an organism which is reinforced by the withdrawal of certain conditions should have an advantage in natural selection." (p. 173) Subscribe to RSS…
"Just as we did not define a positive reinforcer as pleasant or satisfying, so in defining a negative reinforcer in terms of its power to reinforce when withdrawn we do…
"Painful stimuli are generally aversive, but not necessarily so—as a counterirritant shows. Stimuli which have acquired their aversive power in the process of conditioning are especially unlikely to possess identifying…
"Moods and dispositions represent a kind of second-order probability—the probability that a given circumstance will raise the probability of a given response." (p. 169) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"A man does not neglect his business because of anxiety or worry. Such a statement is at best merely a way of classifying a particular kind of neglect. The only…
"It does not help in the solution of a practical problem to be told that some feature of a man's behavior is due to frustration or anxiety; we also need…
"Responses that vary together in an emotion do so in part because of a common consequence . . . Some of the behavior involved in an emotion is apparently unconditioned,…
"In casual discourse and for many scientific purposes some such way of referring to current strength in terms of the variables of which it is a function is often desirable.…
"When the man in the street says that someone is afraid or angry or in love, he is generally talking about predispositions to act in certain ways . . .…
"In the search for what is happening "in emotion" the scientist has found himself at a peculiar disadvantage. Where the layman identifies and classifies emotions not only with ease but…
"The "emotions" are excellent examples of the fictional causes to which we commonly attribute behavior." (p. 160) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"Behavior is as much a part of the organism as are its anatomical features . . . Since we cannot change the species of an organism, the variable is of…
"Behavior which is characteristic of a species is attributed to an instinct (of uncertain location or properties) said to be possessed by all members of the species. This is a…
"We could say that the eating of salty hors d'oeuvres makes a guest thirsty and that his thirst then drives him to drink. It is simpler, in both theory and…
"So long as the inner event [e.g., need or want] is inferred, it is in no sense an explanation of behavior and adds nothing to a functional account." (pp. 143-144)…
"Needs and wants are likely to be thought of as psychic or mental, while hungers are more readily conceived of as physiological. But the terms are freely used when nothing…
"Not all deprivation or satiation is concerned with the conspicuous interchange of materials. A man may be “deprived of physical exercise” if he is kept indoors by bad weather; as…
"In the search for what is happening "in emotion" the scientist has found himself at a peculiar disadvantage. Where the layman identifies and classifies emotions not only with ease but…
"The discovery that part of the behavior of an organism was under the control of the environment led, as we have seen, to an unwarranted extension of the notion of…
"Our "perception" of the world—our "knowledge" of it —is our behavior with respect to the world. It is not to be confused with the world itself or with other behavior…
". . . "interpretation" is like . . . "attention" . . . we need not find a particular form of behavior to be identified with it. We "interpret" a…
"We operate in one world—the world of physics. Organisms are part of that world, and they react to it in many ways. Responses may be consistent with each other or…
"Responses to some forms of stimulation are more likely to be "right" than responses to others, in the sense that they are more likely to lead to effective behavior. Naturally…
"What happens when an organism responds "as if" a stimulus had other properties? Such behavior seems to indicate that the "perceptual" world—the world as the organism experiences it—is different from…
"Stimulus induction on the basis of a "relation" presents no difficulty in a natural science if the relation can be described in physical terms. Where this appears not to be…
"Actually it is possible to condition an organism either to choose the larger of two objects or to choose a particular size no matter what the size of an accompanying…
"An adequate solution [of the problem of induction from one sensory field to another] would require an experimental analysis of the various auxiliary processes through which stimulus control can be…
"An organism will not acquire an abstract response until a reinforcing agency sets up the required contingency. There are no "natural" contingencies which reinforce a response in the presence of…
"Abstraction, too, is not a form of action on the part of the organism. It is simply a narrowing of the control exercised by the properties of stimuli. The controlling…
"We are interested, of course, only in conditions or events which have an effect upon behavior. The electromagnetic radiation of radio and television has no effect upon the unequipped organism,…
"No matter what our philosophy of behavior may be, we are not likely to deny that the world about us is important. We may disagree as to the nature or…
"Just as we may attend to an object without looking at it, so we may look at an object without attending to it. We need not conclude that we must…
"Attention is a controlling relation—the relation between a response and a discriminative stimulus. When someone is paying attention he is under special control of a stimulus." (p. 123) Subscribe to…
"The control exerted by a discriminative stimulus is traditionally dealt with under the heading of attention. This concept reverses the direction of action by suggesting, not that a stimulus controls…
"Although imitative responses approach a continuous field, that condition is probably never reached. The duplication of the stimulus is often not precise, and the “grain” of the repertoire with which…
"When we learn the names of a large number of people, we do not expect either the visual patterns which the people present or their names to form continuous fields.…
"In the behavior of reaching toward and touching a spot in the visual field, each position which the spot may occupy requires a particular combination of reaching and touching movements…
"Behavior is the coherent, continuous activity of an integral organism. Although it may be analyzed into parts for theoretical or practical purposes, we need to recognize its continuous nature in…
"We do not hold people responsible for their reflexes—for example, for coughing in church. We hold them responsible for their operant behavior— for example, for whispering in church or remaining…
"It is not so easy to determine whether we can condition purely reflex responses in striped muscles through operant reinforcement. The difficulty is that an operant response may arise which…
"Since we ordinarily lack anything like adequate knowledge of all these [historical] variables, it is simpler to assume that the behavior is determined by the guest's will—that he will come…
"It is natural that the “will” as an inner explanation of behavior should have survived longer in the study of operant behavior, where the control exercised by the environment is…
"The distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior is a matter of the kind of control." (p. 112) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"To ask whether someone can turn a handspring is merely to ask whether there are circumstances under which he will do so." (p. 112) Subscribe to RSS feed here
The collection of B. F. Skinner's works on education, The Technology of Teaching, is now available in electronic formats. Exclusive to the B. F. Skinner Foundation's bookstore is the PDF,…
"In the present analysis we cannot distinguish between involuntary and voluntary behavior by raising the issue of who is in control. It does not matter whether behavior is due to…
"The relation between the discriminative operant and its controlling stimulus is very different from elicitation. Stimulus and response occur in the same order as in the reflex, but this does…