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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"I had unwittingly conditioned the sound of the dispenser as a reinforcer. When that was done, a single reinforcement was enough to condition pressing the lever as an operant. There…
"What remained to be done in a science of behavior seemed clear. I should look for other independent variables and observe their effects." (p. 125
"An operant was a kind of behavioral atom. True, I could take pressing a lever apart by extinguishing its parts separately (The Behavior of Organisms, 1938, p. 102), but even…
"In 1935 I published a paper called The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response in which I argued that a reflex was not something that could be…
"Rate of responding was also more useful as a measure because it could be said to show the probability that a response would be made at a given time. Nothing…
"Rate of responding has proved, in fact, to be a highly useful dependent variable. In a later paper I could report that it varied usefully over a range of at…
"... Pavlov (1927) could make a dog salivate, and that was control. Reflexes, however, were the behavior of only parts of an organism. Like Loeb I wanted to study the…
"Watson’s famous manifesto (1913) begins: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.”…
"I don’t believe I coined the term radical behaviorism, but when asked what I mean by it, I have always said, “the philosophy of a science of behavior treated as…
"Later I bought Russell’s Philosophy (1927), in which he treated a few mentalistic terms in a behavioristic way. Although I had never had a course in psychology, I became an…
" I bought Watson’s book and liked its campaigning style." (p. 121)
"Those who are unhappy about scientific solutions sometimes assure us that we shall solve our problems in other ways when they are bad enough, when the immediate consequences are no…
"Designs must be put into effect, and only by those who can do so effectively. That means governments, religions, and economic enterprises, which control most of the conditions under which…
"When I wrote [Beyond Freedom and Dignity] I thought that we could correct for the weakness of remote consequences simply by creating current surrogates to serve in their place .…
"Although the controlled use of fire may contribute to the survival of the culture of which it is a part, that consequence is too remote to reinforce the behavior of…
"The origin and transmission of a cultural practice are thus plausibly explained as the joint product of natural selection and operant conditioning. A culture, however, is the set of practices…
"When one animal imitates another, for example, it sometimes profits from the consequences of what the other is doing. The advantages are felt in both natural selection and operant conditioning,…
"Operant conditioning, too, has its limitations. It greatly extends the range of behavior, but it also prepares only for a future that resembles the selecting past. Moreover, only a small…
"Both natural selection and operant conditioning have been slow to make their way as scientific explanations because they conflict with well-established views. Selection replaces purpose, for example." (p. 115) (pp.…
"Natural selection prepares an organism only for a future that resembles the selecting past. That is a serious limitation, and to some extent it was corrected by the evolution of…
"Survival is only one kind of selective consequence, however. Most of what we do can be traced to two other kinds ..." (p. 114)
"Who would control human behavior, and who would control the controllers? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who is to control the authorities? I think that that question can be answered by…
"If people were actually free to do as they pleased, even if only occasionally, a science of behavior was impossible, and some critics dismissed my book out of hand on…
"I differed from both Tolman and Hull by following a strictly Machian line, in which behavior was analyzed as a subject matter in its own right as a function of…
"Data obtained through introspection would not suffice for a science because the privacy made it impossible to learn to introspect them accurately." (p. 110)
"I preferred radical behaviorism, which accepted the existence of private states, but as states of the body, the study of which should be left to physiology." (p. 110)
"In addition to the stimulus, I had called the conditions of which reflex strength was a function “third variables,” but Tolman called them “intervening.” That may have been the point…
"Students pay attention when doing so has reinforcing consequences. Compare a typical classroom with a roomful of bingo players. No one tells bingo players to pay attention, nor are the…
"Some 350 years ago Comenius said, “The more the teacher teaches the less the student learns,” but that is true only if it means “the less the student learns about…
"We do not learn by imitating, however, or because we are told what to do. Consequences must follow." (p. 99)
"Before we can show the child how to tie a knot, he or she must have learned to imitate, and that learning will have taken place through operant conditioning." (p.…
"I had explained [in How to Teach Animals, 1951] how to condition the sound of a clicker as a reinforcer." (p. 97)
"What is needed is to convince those who are now responsible for our schools that the structure of our present schools makes good teaching almost impossible. The views of governments,…
"As I have said so many times, (and will now say for the last time), we can teach twice as much as is now taught in the classroom in the…
"Cognitive psychologists also see no chance for students to be creative when learning from programmed instruction. Like pre-Darwinians they believe in a creative mind. But the origin of behavior, like…
"It is said, for example, that measures based on the study of nonhuman animals necessarily overlook what is essentially human. But we shall never know what is essentially human until…
"Cognitive psychologists reassure themselves by attacking behavioristic practices, but they have supplied little to put in their place." (p. 93)
"Cognitive psychology . . . was heralded as a return to the traditional study of the mind, and those who embarked on the improvement of our schools had never left…
"Modeling is a kind of teaching, but it has a lasting effect only when supported by positive or negative reinforcement." (p. 89)
"The fact is that neither rewards nor punishments have anything to do with teaching if they merely keep students in contact with teachers and books. They cannot teach, because they…
"Punishment, a standard way to suppress behavior, is almost the only way other animals control each other, and we have retained much of that practice." (p. 88)
"An extraordinary step in the evolution of the human species brought its vocal musculature under operant control. The social environments we call languages then evolved." (p. 87)
"Some young people are good students. They scarcely need to be taught. They learn in spite of the quality of teacher or school." (p. 86)
"Some people are good teachers; they would be good at almost anything they did. They can hold the attention, and even the affection, of large numbers of students." (p. 86)
"I claim the right to repeat. Whether or not what I have said has been understood or remembered, it certainly has not had much of an effect on American schools."…
"We need to construct relatively immediate consequences of human behavior which will act as the remoter consequences would act if they were here now." (p. 84)
" The contingencies under which people now live are maintained by governments, religions, and economic enterprises, but those institutions are in turn controlled by fairly immediate consequences which are increasingly…
"By rejecting feelings and states of mind as the initiating causes of behavior, and turning instead to the environmental conditions responsible both for what people do and feel while doing…
"Every advance in behavior therapy . . . begins by changing the world in which people live and then, only indirectly what they do and feel." (p. 84)
" One feels good who feels a body which has been positively reinforced." (p. 83)