Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"Ethics is mainly a matter of the conflict between immediate and remote consequences." (p. 6)

"Operant behavior, like natural selection, prepares the organism for a future, but it is only a future that is similar to the selecting past." (p. 3)

"The concept of purpose has been replaced by that of selection, which was first recognized by Darwin and Wallace in the natural selection of species." (p. 2)

"Why are we not more responsible or more intelligent? Why are we suffering from a failure of will? A better strategy is to look at our behavior and at the…

"... the earth grows steadily less habitable; and all this is exacerbated by a burgeoning population that resists control." (p. 1)

"Countercontrol is certainly effective, but it leads at best to a kind of uneasy equilibrium. The next step can be taken only through the explicit design of a culture which…

"The question Who will control? Is not to be answered with a proper name or by describing a kind of person (e.g., a benevolent dictator) or his qualifications (e.g., a…

" The struggle for freedom has not reduced or eliminated control; it has merely corrected it." (p. 197)

"When we punish bad behavior, we can give the individual credit for behaving well, but if we arrange conditions under which he “desires” to behave well, the conditions must get…

"Evidence recently acquired in the experimental analysis of operant conditioning . . . suggests that there are ways in which we could all feel freer than ever before." (p. 196)

"There are certain kinds of control under which people feel perfectly free." (p. 196)

"To say with John Stuart Mill, that “liberty consists in doing what one desires” is to neglect the determiners of desires." (p. 196)

"[In Beyond Freedom and Dignity] I was not discussing a philosophical entity called freedom but rather the behavior of those who struggle to be free." (pp. 195-196)

"[Many of my critics] have resorted to highly emotional terms, and a kind of hysterical blindness seems to have prevented some of them from reading what I actually wrote." (p.…

"The feeling of freedom is associated with doing the things a person wants to do. But why does he want to do them?" (p. 192)

"As Thoreau said, you don’t own things; things own you." (pp. 190-191)

"Hawthorne said that Thoreau made people feel guilty about their possessions, and I know what he meant. When I got my doctor’s degree, my family gave me a car, but…

"The linguist’s “deep structure,” like Freud’s “depth psychology,” is a spatial metaphor which serves several functions. It is useful in referring to the visibility in the determination of behavior. It…

"A dictionary does not give meanings of words, it gives other words having the same meanings." (p. 177)

"It is a rare person who picks up a hand of thirteen spades at bridge and views it as no less likely to occur than any of the other hands…

"When a response appears to have had an unlikely consequence, a fairly characteristic move is to repeat it immediately. If the same consequence follows, the response is further strengthened." (pp.…

"The fact that two basic types of superstitious behavior are commonly observed in such an “unintelligent” organism as a pigeon suggests that superstition must have been very widespread before corrective…

"The more “intelligent” the organism, the more likely it was to be superstitious." (p. 172)

"Vulnerability to coincidence must have increased as the process of operant conditioning accelerated, and when a single instance of response-and-consequence began to work a significant change, various kinds of superstitious…

"Coincidence is the heart of operant conditioning. A response is strengthened by certain kinds of consequences, but not necessarily because they are actually produced by it." (p. 172)

"Contingencies of reinforcement which shape ontogenic behavior can be arranged and studied in the laboratory. Most of the contingencies of survival responsible for phylogenic behavior observed in the field are…

"The experimental analysis of behavior is concerned with the contingent relations which prevail among three things—the situation in which behavior occurs, the behavior itself, and its rewarding or reinforcing consequences."…

"When it finds its most effective methods, education will be almost uniquely relevant to the task of setting up and maintaining a better way of life." (p. 148)

"The free school is no school at all. Its philosophy signalizes the abdication of the teacher." (p. 147)

"The natural, logical outcome of the struggle for personal freedom in education is that the teacher should improve his control of the student rather than abandon it." (p. 147)

"The teacher can often make the change from punishment to positive reinforcement in a surprisingly simple way—by responding to the student’s successes rather than his failures." (p. 145)

"What we may call the struggle for freedom in the Western world can be analyzed as a struggle to escape from or avoid punitive or coercive treatment." (p. 143)

"Individualized treatment removes the greatest source of inefficiency in traditional instruction—the requirement that large numbers of students advance at the same speed, which is almost necessarily the wrong speed for…

"The power of contingency management in the classroom is well established—though, again, it is not yet widely used." (p. 135)

"What has come to be called the “experimental analysis of behavior” has already given rise to an effective technology of teaching, although it is not yet widely known or used."…

"I am, of course, a radical rather than a methodological behaviorist. I do not believe that there is a world of mentation or subjective experience that is being, or must…

"My thesis was a sort of declaration of independence from the nervous system, and I restated the position in The Behavior of Organisms. It is not, I think, anti-physiological." (p.…

"In Verbal Behavior verbal operants are classified by reference to the contingencies of reinforcement maintained by a verbal community." (p. 123)

" [Verbal Behavior] will, I believe, prove to be my most important work." (p. 122)

"The lack of an identifiable eliciting stimulus in operant behavior raises a practical problem: we must wait for behavior to appear before we can reinforce it." (p. 120)

"We choose the wrong path at the very start when we suppose that our goal is to change the “minds and hearts of men and women” rather than the world…

"The cognitive constructs give physiologists a misleading account of what they will find inside." (p. 111)

"Those who see themselves thinking see little more than their perceptual and motor behavior, overt and covert." (p. 111)

"No one doubts that behavior involves internal processes: the question is how well they can be known through introspection." (p. 111)

"The very speed with which cognitive processes are invented to explain behavior should arose our suspicions." (p. 110)

"The mental apparatus studied by cognitive psychology is simply a rather crude version of contingencies of reinforcement and their effects." (p. 110)

"The body responds to the world, at the point of contact; making copies would be a waste of time." (p. 105)

"All operant behavior “stretches toward” a future even though the only consequences responsible for its strength have already occurred." (p. 103)

"Because controlling circumstances which lie in an organism’s history of reinforcement are obscure, the mental surrogate gets its chance." (p. 102)

"Suppose animals simply do what they feel like doing? What is the next step in explaining their behavior? Clearly, a science of animal behavior must be replaced by a science…