On January 4, 2016, the B. F. Skinner Foundation launched a new project – Skinner’s Quote of the Day. Quotes from B. F. Skinner’s works, selected by renowned scientists, appear daily Monday-Friday in order, starting with Chapter 1 of each book and running all the way through the last chapter. We started with the Science and Human Behavior (January-December 2916), followed by About Behaviorism (January-November 2017), Contingencies of Reinforcement (January-October 2018), Recent Issues (October 2018-May 2019), Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (May 2019-February 2020), and now moving on to Upon Further Reflection (from February 10 2020).
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When Stimulus 1 is present, the pigeon executes the performance appropriate to Schedule 1. When Stimulus 2 is present, the pigeon executes the performance appropriate to Schedule 2. And so…
. . . the performance characteristic of a given schedule can be brought under the control of a particular stimulus and that different performances can be brought under the control…
Co-operation can also be set up, perhaps more easily than competition. We have trained two pigeons to co-ordinate their behavior in a co-operative endeavor with a precision which equals that…
... it is not too difficult to arrange the complex contingencies which produce many types of social behavior. Competition is exemplified by two pigeons playing a modified game of ping-pong.…
Most important types of schedules have now been investigated, and the effects of schedules in general have been reduced to a few principles. (p. 180)
Reinforcements continue to be important, of course, long after an organism has learned how to do something, long after it has acquired behavior. They are necessary to maintain the behavior…
Extremely complex performances may be reached through successive stages in the shaping process, the contingencies of reinforcement being changed progressively in the direction of the required behavior. The results are…
Once we have arranged the particular type of consequence called a reinforcement, our techniques permit us to shape up the behavior of an organism almost at will. (p. 180)
Sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, theologians, psychotherapists, and psychologists have long tried to reach an understanding of human behavior which would be useful in solving practical problems. In that technological…
Techniques are now available for a new and highly profitable exploration of the human behavior at issue in education, commerce and industry, psychotherapy, religion, and government. (p. 175)
At one time we [Ferster and I] intended—though, alas, we changed our minds—to express the point in this dedication: “To the mathematicians, statisticians, and scientific methodologists with whose help this…
Fortunately, a statistical program is unnecessary. Most of what we know about the effects of complex schedules of reinforcement has been learned in a series of discoveries no one of…
Beyond the prediction and control made possible by recent research in reinforcement lies the broader field of interpretation. And it is a kind of interpretation so closely allied with prediction…
. . . where the analyst has studied behavior in a given environment as the manifestation of hidden (even if eventually-to-be-revealed) forces, we can now interpret the same behavior and…
A teacher who understands reinforcement will survey the class during the final minutes of a period and choose for dismissal the moment at which things are going as well as…
. . . what reinforcers are available to the teacher? The answer to that question is sometimes discouraging, but even in the worst possible case she can at least reinforce…
How can we recapture the orderly conduct once attributed to “discipline” without reinstating all the undesirable by-products of an inhumane aversive control? The answer is: use positive reinforcement instead of…
When contingencies of reinforcement are properly understood, we cannot thoughtlessly allow damaging contingencies to arise or go unremedied. (pp. 171-172)
When two young children are left alone in a room with a few toys, conditions are almost ideal for shaping selfish and aggressive behavior. Under these circumstances one child’s reinforcement…
The parallel between the contingencies now being studied in the laboratory and those of daily life cry for attention—and for remedial action. In any social situation we must discover who…
The contingencies of reinforcement which man has made for man are wonderful to behold. (p. 171)
The world in which man lives may be regarded as an extraordinarily complex set of positive and negative reinforcing contingencies. (p. 171)
The technology [of behavior] is difficult. It cannot conveniently be learned from books; something resembling an apprenticeship is almost necessary. Possibly we may explain the fact that psychologists in general…
The technology resulting from the study of reinforcement has been extended into other fields of psychological inquiry. It has permitted Blough, Guttman, and others to convert pigeons into sensitive psychophysical…
The analysis of avoidance and escape behavior in the hands of Sidman, Brady, and others has made it possible to study combinations of positive and negative reinforcers in many interrelated…
What we have learned about the shaping of response-topography and about the techniques which bring an organism under the control of complex schedules has made it possible to study the…
As the result of careful scheduling, pigeons, rats, and monkeys have done things during the past five years which members of their species have never done before. It is not…
In the usual study of problem solving, . . . the experimenter constructs a complex set of contingencies and simply waits for it to take hold. This is no test…
The fact that it is the combination of schedule and performance which generates reinforcing contingencies can easily be overlooked. A physiologist once asked to borrow one of our apparatuses to…
Some complex schedules can be studied only by taking the organism through a series of simpler schedules into the final performance. The performance, as well as the topography of a…
An obvious fact about behavior is that it is almost never invariably reinforced. Not so obvious is the fact that the pattern of intermittent reinforcement controls the character and level…
When one has watched the actual shaping of behavior, it is obvious that such [traditional learning] curves do not reflect any important property of the change in behavior brought about…
The technique of shaping behavior is now a familiar classroom demonstration, but the principle it demonstrates has not yet found a secure place in textbook discussions of learning. (p. 167)
In early experiments on lever pressing, a quick response to the food-magazine was always set up before the lever was introduced. This was done for another reason—to permit emotional responses…
In magazine-training the pigeon—that is, in getting it to respond to the sound of the magazine by turning immediately and approaching the food tray—we had created an auditory conditioned reinforcer.…
In 1943 Keller Breland, Norman Guttman, and I were working on a wartime project sponsored by General Mills, Inc . . . The result [of shaping ball swiping in a…
. . . I shall try to characterize some of the changes in our conception of reinforcement which have been forced upon us and to suggest why it has been…
The scope of reinforcement is still not fully grasped, even by those who have done most to demonstrate it, and elsewhere among psychologists cultural inertia is evident. (p. 165)
During the past twenty-five years the role of reinforcement in human affairs has received steadily increasing attention—not through any changing fashion in learning theory but as the result of the…
For a long time men of good will have tried to improve the cultural patterns in which they live. It is possible that a scientific analysis of behavior will provide…
In extrapolating our results to the world at large, we can do no more than the physical and biological sciences in general. Because of experiments performed under laboratory conditions, no…
Have we been guilty of an undue simplification of conditions in order to obtain this level of rigor? Have we really “proved” that there is comparable order outside the laboratory?…
The reproducibility from species to species is a product of the method. In choosing stimuli, responses, and reinforcers appropriate to the species being studied, we eliminate the sources of many…
Several features should not be overlooked. Most of the records reproduced here report the behavior of single individuals; they are not the statistical product of an “average organism.” Changes in…
… in turning to probability of response or, more immediately, to frequency of responding we find a datum which behaves in an orderly fashion under a great variety of conditions.…
. . . under experimental conditions, a specific response can be reinforced by the production or clarification of a stimulus which controls other behavior. The matter is of considerable practical…
Unfortunately mere “attending” (as in reading a book or listening to a concert) has dimensions which are difficult to study. But behavior with comparable effects is sometimes accessible, such as…
We often forget that looking at a visual pattern or listening to a sound is itself behavior, because we are likely to be impressed by the more important behavior which…
In watching experiments of the sort described above, most people feel that they could “figure out” a schedule of reinforcement and adjust to it more efficiently than the experimental organism.…
What about man? Is rate of responding still an orderly and meaningful datum here, or is human behavior the exception in which spontaneity and and caprice still reign? (p. 157)