Skinner’s Quote of the Day

Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. (p. 200)

In shifting control from autonomous man to the ob­servable environment we do not leave an empty organism. A great deal goes on inside the skin, and physiology will eventually tell…

Without the help of a verbal community all behavior would be unconscious. Consciousness is a social product. (p. 192)

It would be foolish to deny the existence of that private world, but it is also foolish to assert that be­cause it is private it is of a different nature…

Abstract thinking is the product of a particular kind of environ­ment, not of a cognitive faculty. (p. 189)

We must know how the environment works before we can change it to change behavior. A mere shift in emphasis from man to environment means very little. (p. 185)

As a science of behavior adopts the strategy of physics and biology, the autonomous agent to which behavior has traditionally been attributed is replaced by the environ­ment . . .…

[The scientist’s] apparatus exerts a conspicuous control on the pigeon, but we must not overlook the control ex­erted by the pigeon. (p. 169)

To prevent the misuse of controlling power, . . . we must look not at the controller himself but at the contingencies under which he engages in control. (p. 168)

There are, of course, good reasons why the control of hu­man behavior is resisted. The commonest techniques are aversive, and some sort of countercontrol is to be expected. (p. 167)

The problem is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are but by those who live in it. (p. 164)

The important thing is not so much to know how to solve a problem as to know how to look for a solution. (pp. 160-161)

A science of behavior is not yet ready to solve all our problems, but it is a science in progress, . . . the analysis continues to develop and is…

The ease with which mentalistic explanations can be invented on the spot is perhaps the best gauge of how little attention we should pay to them. (p. 160)

An analysis of behavior naturally begins with simple organisms behav­ing in simple ways in simple settings . . . We move forward only as rapidly as our successes permit, and…

Perhaps we cannot now design a successful culture as a whole, but we can design better practices in a piecemeal fashion. (p. 156

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. (p. 156)

In an experi­ment we are interested in what happens, in designing a culture, in whether it will work. This is the difference between science and technology. (p. 153)

. . . if [an observer] cannot understand what he sees in a simplified laboratory environ­ment, how can we expect him to make sense of what is happening in daily…

Nothing less than an experimental analysis was needed to discover the significance of contingencies of reinforcement, and contingencies remain almost out of reach of casual observation. (pp. 148-149)

The task of the cultural designer is to accelerate the development of practices which bring the remote conse­quences of behavior into play. (p. 143)

. . . change occurs not because of the passage of time, but because of what hap­pens while time is passing. (p. 137)

"Why should I be concerned about the survival of a particular kind of eco­nomic system?" The only honest answer to that kind of question seems to be this: "There is…

Heaven is portrayed as a collection of positive reinforcers and hell as a collection of negative, although they are contingent upon behavior executed before death. (p. 136)

Both species and cultures "compete" first of all with the physical environment. (p. 133)

The parallel between biological and cultural evolution breaks down at the point of transmission. (p. 130

A culture, like a species, is selected by its adaptation to an environment: to the extent that it helps its members to get what they need and avoid what is…

A technology of behavior is available which would more successfully reduce the aversive consequences of be­havior, proximate or deferred, and maximize the achieve­ments of which the human organism is capable,…

A man who has been alone since birth will have no verbal behavior, will not be aware of himself as a person, will possess no techniques of self-management, and with…

Verbal behavior presumably arose under contingencies involving practical social interactions, but the individual who becomes both a speaker and a listener is in possession of a repertoire of extraordinary scope…

One advantage in being a social animal is that one need not discover practices for oneself ... An important repertoire, necessarily acquired from others, is verbal. (p. 122)

The contingencies of sur­vival could not generate a process of conditioning which took into account how behavior produced its consequences. The only useful relation was temporal: a process could evolve…

Behavior cannot really be affected by anything which follows it, but if a "conse­quence" is immediate, it may overlap the behavior. (p. 120)

The distinction between feelings and contingencies is particularly important when practical action must be taken . . . What must be changed are the contingencies, whether we regard them as…

As Maslow pointed out, valueless-ness is "variously described as anomie, amorality, anhedonia, rootlessness, emptiness, hopelessness, the lack of something to believe in and be devoted to." These terms all seem…

A person does not support a religion because he is devout; he supports it because of the contingencies arranged by the religious agency. We call him devout and teach him…

One may follow a rule or obey a law simply because of the contingencies to which the rule or law refers, but those who formulate rules and laws usually supply…

A rule or law includes a statement of prevailing contin­gencies, natural or social. (p. 114)

The things we call bad . . . are all negative reinforcers, and we are reinforced when we escape from or avoid them. (p. 104)

Good things are positive reinforcers. (p. 103)

A fact is no doubt different from what a person feels about it, but the latter is a fact also. (p. 103)

Autonomous man is not easily changed; in fact, to the extent that he is autonomous, he is by definition not changeable at all. But the environment can be changed, and…

As we learn more about the effects of the environment, we have less reason to attribute any part of human behavior to an autonomous controlling agent. (p. 101)

In what we may call the prescientific view (and the word is not necessarily pejorative) a person's behavior is at least to some extent his own achievement. (p. 101)

The fundamental mistake made by all those who choose weak methods of control is to assume that the balance of control is left to the individual, when in fact it…

The illusion that freedom and dignity are respected when control seems incomplete arises in part from the probabilistic nature of operant behavior. (p. 96)

We sample and change verbal behavior, not opinions. (p. 95)

We change behavior toward something, not an attitude toward it. (p. 95)

We reinforce behavior in particular ways; we do not give a person a purpose or an intention. (p. 95)

We change the probability of an act by chang­ing a condition of deprivation or aversive stimulation; we do not change a need. (p. 95)