Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"We dispossess the Inner Man by replacing him with genetic and environmental variables." (p. 273) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"As it increases its power, both as basic science and as the source of a technology, an analysis of behavior reduces the scope of dualistic explanations and should eventually dispense…

"No science of mental life stays within the world of the mind. Mentalists do not stay on their side of the fence, and because they have the weight of a…

"A radical behaviorism denies the existence of a mental world, not because it is  contentious or jealous of a rival, but because those who claim to be studying the other…

"Behaviorism, as we know it, will eventually die—not because it is a failure but because it is a success. As a critical philosophy of science, it will necessarily change as…

"In the early days of research on LSD, it was seriously argued that all psychiatrists should take the drug in order to see how it feels to be psychotic. We…

"A curious by-product of dualism is the belief that phenomena said to show extrasensory perception are parapsychological rather than paraphysical."  (pp. 249-250) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"It is a little too simple to paraphrase the behavioristic alternative by saying that there is indeed only one world and that it is the world of matter, for the…

"The behaviorist is often asked “What about the unconscious?” as if it presented an especially difficult problem, but the only problem is consciousness. All behavior is basically unconscious in the…

"A science of behavior does not, as is so often asserted, ignore awareness. On the contrary, it goes far beyond mentalistic psychologies in analyzing self-descriptive behavior. It has suggested better…

"Descartes could not begin, as he thought he could, by saying, “Cogito ergo sum.” He had to begin as a baby—a baby whose subsequent verbal environment eventually generated in him…

"The [mentalistic] formulation leads directly to a technology based on the manipulation of mental states. To change a man’s voting behavior, we change his opinions; to induce him to act,…

"So far as behavior is concerned, both sensation and perception may be analyzed as forms of stimulus control." (p. 235) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The heart of the behavioristic position on conscious experience may be summed up in this way: seeing does not imply something seen. We acquire the behavior of seeing under stimulation…

"Because the community cannot reinforce self-descriptive responses consistently, a person cannot describe or otherwise “know” events occurring within his own skin as subtly and precisely as he knows events in…

"The community is generally interested in what a man is doing, has done, or is planning to do and why, and it arranges contingencies which generate verbal responses which name…

"Instead of concluding that man can know only his subjective experiences—that he is bound forever to his private world and that the external world is only a construct—a behavioral theory…

"An adequate science of behavior must consider events taking place within the skin of the organism, not as physiological mediators of behavior, but as part of behavior itself. It can…

"Science often talks about things it cannot see or measure. When a man tosses a penny into the air, it must be assumed that he tosses the earth beneath him…

"Freud had devised, and never abandoned faith in, one of the most elaborate mental apparatuses of all time. He nevertheless contributed to the behavioristic argument by showing that mental activity…

"It was John B. Watson who made the first clear, if rather noisy, proposal that psychology should be regarded simply as a science of behavior. He was not in a…

"Almost all current textbooks compromise: rather than risk a loss of adoptions, they define psychology as the science of behavior and mental life." (p. 223)   Subscribe to RSS feed…

"If psychology is a science of mental life—of the mind, of conscious experience—then it must develop and defend a special methodology, which it has not yet done successfully. If it…

"In short, we can solve the problem of aggression by building a world in which damage to others has no survival value and, for that or other reasons, never functions…

"The environmental solution becomes more plausible the more we know about the contingencies." (p. 216)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Damage to others may be reinforcing for several reasons." (p. 210)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"If, through evolutionary selection, a given response becomes easier and easier to condition as an operant, then some phylogenic behavior may have had an ontogenic origin." (pp. 203-204)   Subscribe…

"Is a chimpanzee learning binary arithmetic in a laboratory (45) showing chimpanzee or human behavior? The chimpanzees who “manned” early satellites were conditioned under complex contingencies of reinforcement, and their…

"The basic issue is not whether behavior is instinctive or learned, as if these adjectives described essences, but whether we have correctly identified the variables responsible for the provenance of…

"The basic issue is not whether behavior is instinctive or learned, as if these adjectives described essences, but whether we have correctly identified the variables responsible for the provenance of…

"The vocal responses in the human child which are so easily shaped by operant reinforcement are not controlled by specific releasers. It was the development of an undifferentiated vocal repertoire…

"Konrad Lorenz’s recent book On Aggression (Lorenz, 1966) could be seriously misleading if it diverts our attention from relevant manipulable variables in the current environment to phylogenic contingencies which, in…

"Certainly no land mammal is now living in the environment which selected its principal genetic features, behavioral or otherwise. Current environments are almost as “unnatural” as a laboratory. In any…

"In the experimental analysis of behavior many species differences are minimized . . . species differences in sensory equipment, in effector systems, in susceptibility to reinforcement, and in possibly disruptive…

"It is often said that an analysis of behavior in terms of ontogenic contingencies “leaves something out of account,” and this is true. It leaves out of account habits, ideas,…

"Ontogenic contingencies remain ineffective until a response has occurred. The rat must press the lever at least once “for other reasons” before it presses it “for food.” (p. 175)  …

"The topography of an operant need not be completely fixed, but some defining property must be available to identify instances. An emphasis upon the occurrence of a repeatable unit distinguishes…

"Upon a given occasion we observe that an animal displays a certain kind of behavior—learned or unlearned. We describe its topography and evaluate its probability. We discover variables, genetic or…

"No reputable student of animal behavior has ever taken the position “that the animal comes to the laboratory as a virtual tabula rasa, that species differences are insignificant, and that…

"[Watson] was actually, as Gray (1963) has pointed out, “one of the earliest and one of the most careful workers in the area of animal ethology.” Yet, he is probably…

"Parts of the behavior of an organism concerned with the internal economy, as in respiration or digestion, have always been accepted as “inherited,” and there is no reason why some…

"A species which has developed the capacity to learn from one experience—to change its behavior as the result of a single reinforcement—is vulnerable to adventitious reinforcement. The reinforcer which follows…

"The conclusion to which a scientist comes at the end of an experiment was not necessarily in existence as a hypothesis before or during the experiment." (p. 153)   Subscribe…

"The difference between rule-following and contingency-shaped behavior may be observed as one passes from one to the other in “discovering the truth” of a rule." (p. 151)   Subscribe to…

"When operant experiments with human subjects are simplified by instructing the subjects in the operation of the equipment . . . , the resulting behavior may resemble that which follows…

"A rule is simply an object in the environment. Why should it be important? This is the sort of question which always plagues the dualist. Descartes could not explain how…

"Science is in large part a direct analysis of the reinforcing systems found in nature; it is concerned with facilitating the behavior which is reinforced by them." (p. 143)  …

"As a culture evolves, it encourages running comment [on contingencies] and thus prepares its members to solve problems most effectively. Cultures which divert attention from behavior to mental events said…

"It is particularly helpful to describe behavior which fails to satisfy contingencies, as in I let go too soon or I struck too hard. Even fragmentary descriptions of contingencies speed…