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).
You can leave your comments here (registered users only), or join the discussion on our open Facebook forum. Please keep your comments brief and directly related to the quote.
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)
In one of Olds’ experiments, a rat presses a lever to give itself mild electrical stimulation in the anterior hypothalamus. When every response is so “reinforced,” behavior is sustained in…
Much of what we do during the day is done not because of the positive reinforcements we receive but because of aversive consequences we avoid. The whole field of escape,…
Typical curves [of dark-adaptation in the pigeon] show a break as the dark-adaptation process shifts from the cone elements in the retina to the rods. (p. 146)
The control of behavior achieved with methods based upon rate of responding has given rise to a new psychophysics of lower organisms. It appears to be possible to learn as…
The general rule seems to be that the stimuli present at the moment of reinforcement produce a maximal probability that the response will be repeated. Any change in the stimulating…
In speaking about colors projected on the key or the fact that a key is on the right or left, we are, of course, talking about stimuli. Moreover, they are…
In our study of different kinds of schedules of reinforcement, Ferster and I found that it was possible to set up several performances in a single pigeon by bringing each…
By differentially reinforcing high rates of responding, pigeons have been made to respond as rapidly as 10 to 15 responses per second. Here technical problems become crucial . . .…
In Schedules of Reinforcement Charles B. Ferster and I checked this explanation [in terms of conditions at the moment of reinforcement] of the effect of schedules by controlling conditions more…
Interval and ratio schedules have different effects for several reasons. When a reinforcement is scheduled by a timer, the probability of reinforcement increases during any pause, and the first responses…
After certain schedules, the rate may decline in a smoothly accelerated extinction curve. After other schedules, when the rate itself enters prominently into the experimental conditions, it may oscillate widely.…
A variable-ratio schedule programmed by a counter corresponds to the variable interval schedule programmed by a timer. Reinforcement is contingent on a given average number of responses but the numbers…
Anyone who has seen workers paid on such a schedule is familiar with some features of the performance generated: a high rate is sustained for long periods of time. For…
Reinforcements may be scheduled with a counter instead of a timer. For example, we may maintain a fixed ratio between responses and reinforcements. In industry this schedule is referred to…
If the length of interval is varied essentially at random [on a “variable-interval” schedule], responding occurs at a single rate represented by a constant slope in the cumulative record. (p.…
The over-all pattern of performance on a “fixed-interval” schedule is a fairly smoothly accelerating scallop in each interval, the acceleration being more rapid the longer the initial pause. Local effects…