Skinner’s Quote of the Day

We acknowledge [a] curious relation between credit and the inconspicuousness of controlling conditions when we conceal control to avoid losing credit or to claim credit not really due us. (p.…

We give credit generously when there are no obvious reasons for the behavior. (p. 47)

We do not give a writer much credit for a potboiler, or an artist for a picture obviously painted to sell in the current fashion. Above all we do not…

The amount of credit a person receives is related in a curious way to the visibility of the causes of his behavior. We withhold credit when the causes are conspicuous.…

There may be a natural inclination to be reinforcing to those who reinforce us, as there seems to be to attack those who attack us, but similar behavior is generated…

Praise and approval are generally reinforcing because anyone who praises a person or approves what he has done is inclined to reinforce him in other ways. (p. 45)

. . . as an analysis of behavior adds further evidence, the achievements for which a person himself is to be given credit seem to approach zero, and both the…

Any evidence that a person's behavior may be attributed to external circumstances seems to threaten his dignity or worth. We are not inclined to give a person credit for achievements…

The literature of freedom . . . has been forced to brand all control as wrong and to misrepresent many of the advantages to be gained from a social environment.…

Man's struggle for freedom is not due to a will to be free, but to certain behavioral processes characteristic of the human organism, the chief effect of which is the…

Although technology has freed men from certain aversive features of the environment, it has not freed them from the environ­ment. (p. 42)

Were it not for the unwarranted generalization that all control is wrong, we should deal with the social environ­ment as simply as we deal with the nonsocial. (p. 42)

The problem is to free men, not from control, but from certain kinds of control, and it can be solved only if our analysis takes all consequences into account. (p.…

We shall see later that in order to maintain the position that all control is wrong, it has been necessary to disguise or conceal the nature of useful practices, to…

It is said that even though behavior is completely de­termined, it is better that a man "feel free" or "believe that he is free." If this means that it is…

Freedom is a matter of contingencies of reinforcement, not of the feelings the contingencies generate. The distinction is particularly important when the contingencies do not generate escape or counterattack. (pp.…

Want­ing is not . . . a feeling, nor is a feeling the reason a person acts to get what he wants. Certain contingencies have raised the probability of behavior…

. . . according to Voltaire, "When I can do what I want to do, there is my liberty for me . . . or in the power to want…

We say that a person behaves in a given way because he possesses a philosophy, but we infer the philosophy from the behavior and therefore cannot use it in any…

What we may call the "literature of freedom" has been designed to induce people to escape from or attack those who act to control them aversively. (p. 30)

Other people can be aversive without, so to speak, trying: they can be rude, dangerous, contagious, or annoying, and one escapes from them or avoids them accordingly. They may also…

Escape and avoidance play a [particularly] important role in the struggle for freedom when the aversive conditions are generated by other people. (p. 28)

When a bit of behavior is followed by a certain kind of consequence, it is more likely to occur again, and a consequence having this effect is called a reinforcer.…

The role of natural selec­tion in evolution was formulated only a little more than a hundred years ago, and the selective role of the environ­ment in shaping and maintaining the…

The environment is obviously important, but its role has remained obscure. It does not push or pull, it selects, and this function is difficult to discover and analyze. (p. 25)

When we have observed behavioral processes under controlled conditions, we can more easily spot them in the world at large. (p. 23)

A scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame to the environment, and traditional practices can then no longer be justified. These are sweeping changes, and those who…

Per­sonal exemption from a complete determinism is revoked as a scientific analysis progresses, particularly in account­ing for the behavior of the individual. (p. 21)

In the traditional view, a person is free. He is au­tonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and…

We have moved forward by dispossessing autono­mous man, but he has not departed gracefully. He is conducting a sort of rear-guard action in which, unfortu­nately, he can marshal formidable support.…

The inner man is not seriously threatened by data obtained through casual observation or from studies of the structure of behavior, and many of these fields deal only with groups…

A tech­nology of operant behavior is, as we shall see, already well advanced, and it may prove to be commensurate with our problems. (p. 19)

The contingencies under investigation have become steadily more complex, and one by one they are taking over the explanatory func­tions previously assigned to personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of…

Behavior which operates upon the environ­ment to produce consequences ("operant" behavior) can be studied by arranging environments in which specific consequences are contingent upon it. (p. 18)

It is now clear that we must take into account what the environment does to an organism not only before but after it responds. Behavior is shaped and maintained by…

For thousands of years in the history of human thought the process of natu­ral selection went unseen in spite of its extraordinary im­portance. When it was eventually discovered, it became,…

We do feel certain states of our bodies associated with behav­ior, but as Freud pointed out, we behave in the same way when we do not feel them; they are…

Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need…

We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. (p. 15)

Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as…

The mental explanation brings curiosity to an end. We see the effect in casual discourse. If we ask some­one, "Why did you go to the theater?" and he says, "Be­cause…

For more than twenty-five hundred years close attention has been paid to mental life, but only re­cently has any effort been made to study human behavior as something more than…

The dimensions of the world of mind and the transition from one world to another do raise embarrassing prob­lems, but it is usually possible to ignore them, and this may…

Almost everyone who is concerned with human affairs—as political scientist, philosopher, man of letters, econo­mist, psychologist, linguist, sociologist, theologian, anthro­pologist, educator, or psychotherapist—continues to talk about human behavior in this…

Careless references to purpose are still to be found in both physics and biology, but good practice has no place for them; yet almost everyone attributes human behavior to intentions,…

The exciting thing about getting to the moon was its feasibility. Science and technology had reached the point at which, with one great push, the thing could be done. There…

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools? Or than constructing better kinds of living space for everyone? (p. 6)

It can always be argued that human behavior is a par­ticularly difficult field. It is, and we are especially likely to think so just because we are so inept in…

Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Soc­rates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. (p.…

Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or bi­ologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to…