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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"Although no future ever has an effect on the present, there is a sense in which living things are affected by consequences. An “effect of the future” was first recognized…
"All we can change are the circumstances in which people live, and we want to change them in such a way that people will behave differently. We are on safer…
"Even for the mentalist the problem is to get people to act as if they were thinking about the future." (p. 18)
"In fact, are not the measures we say we take to change minds the very measures we take to change behavior?" (p. 18)
"Is it any easier to get people to think about the future than to get them to act with respect to it?" (p. 18)
"Thoughts, images, knowledge, ideas, and concepts are no explanations at all until they have been explained in turn." (p. 18)
"Human beings, it is said, differ from physical objects or non-human living things because they can think about the future . . . This is a mentalistic explanation of human…
"Final causes were soon ruled out of physics and eventually out of biology, but must we suppose that there is some way in which they function in the field of…
"What does it mean to say that a person “takes the future into account” or acts in a given way “because of” something that will happen in the future? Can…
"How can people be induced to take the future into account? That is a question to which, I think, an analysis of behavior is relevant." (p.17)
"Even the work with other species was relevant to human affairs, because it revealed the extraordinary role played by the environment in the determination of behavior. One did not have…
"I have always stressed the implications of an experimental analysis of behavior, an analysis which was, indeed, first carried out on lower species, but which was eventually extended to human…
"It is often said that in the end the question is who will control the controllers (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?), but the issue is not Who but What" (p. 14)
"The trouble is that any allusion to the control of human behavior evokes the challenge: who will control? – often with the implication that a technology of behavior will naturally…
"A fourth principle is not so widely recognized. Control of the people by people is likely to be disturbed by “noncontingent” reinforcers." (p. 12)
"The student who continues to turn to a teacher has not been successfully taught; the client who continues to consult a counselor has not been successfully counseled. The uncontrived reinforcers…
" There is nothing wrong with contrived reinforcers as such. Teachers and counselors need them to shape and strengthen behavior which the individual will find helpful in the natural contingencies…
"A second principle in improving the control of people by the people is the avoidance of contrived reinforcers. Here, again, there is a long history. We all live in a…
"The very substitution of positive reinforcement for aversive control is, of course, at the heart of the struggle for freedom." (p. 10)
"By “behavior modification” I mean what the term was introduced to mean – changing behavior through positive reinforcement." (p. 10)
"Can we design an environment in which people will treat each other well, keep the size of the population within bounds, learn to work and work productively, preserve and enhance…
"Welfare—either as a social measure or as a political philosophy—raises the problem of the noncontingent reinforcer ..." (p. 7)
"In short, the world has changed, and the processes through which we free ourselves from aversive stimulation, nonsocial and social, have begun to work against the survival of the culture…
"... a vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and…
"The processes through which organisms learn to escape from or avoid various kinds of physical damage have had an obvious survival value, but in what we call a civilized environment…
"No matter how essential to the survival of a species a process may once have been, it can become troublesome or even lethal when the environment changes, and this has…
"When our behavior is positively reinforced we say we enjoy what we are doing; we call ourselves happy." (p. 5)
"It is also easy to learn to treat others aversively because the results are especially quick." (p. 4)
"Aversive action also has a kind of genetic priority. Aggressive repertoires, as well as the capacity to acquire aggressive behavior readily, have had survival value." (p. 4)
"... why should governments confine themselves to aversive control? Why not use positive reinforcement? ... One answer may be that positive reinforcement is not well understood. Its effects are easily…
Skinner’s Quote of the Day Continues Dear Readers, Starting today, the B. F. Skinner Foundation continues its project Skinner’s Quote of the Day with quotes from Reflections on Behaviorism and…
Yesterday we published the last quote from the Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. More quotes are coming in the upcoming weeks. Meanwhile, the B. F. Skinner Foundation is…
"How are we to stop exhausting our resources, polluting the environment, and bearing too many children, and how are we to prevent nuclear holocaust? How, in short, are we to…
"Operant conditioners are said to be insular. They read each other’s papers and books, but few of those written by other psychologists. That favor is reciprocated. The trouble may have…
"I have not yet mentioned the most important by-product of The Behavior of Organisms—the work done by others using the same procedures according to much the same analysis . .…
"What one felt or introspected was not a “feeling” or a “thought” but a state of one’s body, and one came to talk about it only under certain verbal contingencies…
"How do we learn to talk about private events? Most of the first paragraph of Watson’s manifesto was an attack on introspection. Data obtained through introspection, said Watson, were not…
"Project Pigeon demonstrated my point about statistics beautifully. You cannot put the “average pigeon” into a missile. It must be one real pigeon, and it must behave precisely in a…
"Although I had said, “Let him extrapolate who will,” I was soon extrapolating." (p. 131)
"Unfortunately, I decided to use reflex as the word for any unit of behavior. In doing so, I no doubt contributed to the fact that you will still find a…
"A reflex was traditionally said to be “elicited” in the etymological sense of “drawn out.” Operant behavior was different, and I tried to emphasize the difference by saying that it…
"In spite of my insistence that behavior should be studied as a function of external variables apart from any reference to mental or physiological states or processes, I was not…
"We can predict and control behavior without knowing anything about what is happening inside. A complete account will nevertheless require the joint action of both [behavior and brain] sciences, each…
"I am afraid my argument that behavior should be recognized as a subject matter in its own right has been misunderstood. I have never questioned the importance of physiology or…
"It is often said . . . that Pavlov’s dog associated the bell with food but, as I have often pointed out, it was Pavlov who associated them in the…
"The light could have been called a cue or clue, of course, and cognitive psychologists, if there had been any, might have said that it conveyed information about when to…
"When a response was reinforced only in the presence of the light as an S Dee, the rat responded slowly in its absence (which, unfortunately, I called S Delta, hard…
"The effect of punishment, however, seems reasonably well explained in [The Behavior of Organisms]. When a response is followed by, say, a shock, an emotional reaction to the shock is…
"If we define a positive reinforcer as a stimulus that strengthens behavior when presented and a negative reinforcer as one that strengthens when removed, then punishment consists of presenting a…
"Many textbooks in psychology continue to describe operant conditioning as trial-and-error learning . . . The organism need not be trying to do anything. Many of the things Thorndike’s cats…