Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"We “like” a way of life to the extent that we are reinforced by it." (p. 39)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The important thing about the good things in life is what people are doing when they get them. “Goods” are reinforcers, and a way of life is a set of…

"Heavens are usually described by listing the good things to be found in them, but no one has ever designed a really interesting heaven on that principle." (p. 37)  …

"Everyone who went to heaven was to be happy, but it was not clear just why. No one, in fact, has ever portrayed a very interesting heaven." (p. 31)  …

"The interrelations among SD, R, and Srein compose the contingencies of reinforcement. All three terms must be specified." (p. 23)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Basic science always leads eventually to an improved technology, and a science of behavior is no exception. It should supply a technology of behavior appropriate to the ultimate utopian goal:…

"Political action is always a matter of manipulating contingencies of reinforcement, and an understanding of contingencies and their effects could bring a dramatic improvement." (p. 20)   Subscribe to RSS…

"Modern governments manipulate vast quantities of positive as well as negative reinforcers, but they seriously neglect the contingencies in both cases. The behavior to be reinforced is seldom defined, in…

"The wealth of a culture depends upon the productive behavior of its members. It is a natural resource which is shamefully neglected because a true economic technology has yet to…

"A particularly effective schedule is at the heart of all gambling devices. Consider a room full of people playing Bingo. The players sit quietly for many hours; they listen with…

"... when a craftsman spends a week in completing a given object, each of the parts produced during the week is likely to be automatically reinforcing because of its place…

"No one works on Monday morning because he is reinforced by a paycheck on Friday afternoon." (p. 18)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"When the psychotic shows an insensitivity to normal contingencies of reinforcement, an environment must be designed to which he is likely to respond." (p. 16)   Subscribe to RSS feed…

"The problem [with psychotic behavior] is not to find in the structure of the observed behavior some hint as to how it may be made to disappear, but rather to…

"Teaching is the arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement which expedite learning . . . Programmed instruction is a technique taken directly from the operant laboratory, and it is designed to…

"Practical control is already a commonplace in the operant laboratory, where behavior is frequently manufactured to specifications and changed almost at will." (p. 14)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"When the variables discovered in an experimental analysis prove to be manipulable, we can move beyond interpretation to the control of behavior." (p. 14)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"A culture is not the behavior of the people “living in it”; it is the “it” in which they live—the contingencies of social reinforcement which generate and sustain their behavior."…

"Eventually we must ask why people behave in their respective ways. It is not enough to say that a custom is followed simply because it is customary to follow it.…

"It is the contingencies which prevail in a given verbal community which “generate sentences.” They shape and maintain the phonemic and syntactical properties of verbal behavior and account for a…

"Verbal contingencies have the same status as contingencies maintained by laboratory equipment, but they involve the behavior of a second organism, the listener, and the behavior they generate therefore has…

"A language is not the words or sentences “spoken in it”; it is the “it” in which they are spoken—the practices of the verbal community which shape and maintain the…

"Verbal behavior is a field in which the concept of contingencies of reinforcement has proved particularly useful." (p. 10)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The principles of hedonism, utilitarianism, and adaptation were not wrong, they were simply not precise." (p. 10)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"... we no longer look at behavior and environment as separate things or events but at the interrelations among them. We look at the contingencies of reinforcement. We can then…

"It is only when we have analyzed behavior under known contingencies of reinforcement that we can begin to see what is happening in daily life." (p. 10)   Subscribe to…

"When we recall how long it took to recognize the causal action of the environment in the simple reflex, we should perhaps not be surprised that it has taken us…

"Suppose we ask an observer who knows nothing about the analysis of behavior to look into a typical experimental space when an experiment is in progress ... The fact remains…

"A more active form of attention is analyzed as a sequence of contingencies; paying attention is precurrent behavior having the effect of changing stimuli. A pigeon will change the shape…

"If a conspicuous stimulus does not have an effect, it is not because the organism has not attended to it or because some central gatekeeper has screened it out, but…

"The behavior generated by a given set of contingencies can be accounted for without appealing to hypothetical inner states or processes." (p. 8)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"An adequate formulation of the interaction between an organism and its environment must always specify three things: (1) the occasion upon which a response occurs, (2) the response itself, and…

"Any stimulus present when an operant is reinforced acquires control in the sense that the rate will be higher when it is present. Such a stimulus does not act as…

"The class of responses upon which a reinforcer is contingent is called an operant, to suggest the action on the environment followed by reinforcement. We construct an operant by making…

"By using rate of responding as a dependent variable, it has been possible to formulate the interaction between an organism and its environment more adequately. The kinds of consequences which…

"... by thoroughly adapting the rat to the box before the lever is made available, most of the competing behavior can be “stamped out” before the response to be learned…

"... the full significance of consequences was only slowly recognized. Possibly there was some uneasiness about final causes (How could something which followed behavior have an effect on it?), but…

"Every stimulus-response or input-output formulation of behavior suffers from a serious omission. No account of the interchange between organism and environment is complete until it includes the action of the…

"[The invention of concepts such as the total stimulus situation, cues, and releasers] was patchwork, designed to salvage the stimulus-response formula, and it had the effect of moving the determination…

"Some of the questions to which a different kind of theory may be addressed are as follows: what aspects of behavior are significant? Of what variables are changes in these…

"Many physiological explanations of behavior seem at the moment to call for hypotheses, but the future lies with techniques of direct observation which will make them unnecessary (see Chapter 9)".…

"If hypotheses commonly appear in the study of behavior, it is only because the investigator has turned his attention to inaccessible events—some of them fictitious, others irrelevant." (p. xi)  …

"Behavior is one of those subject matters which do not call for hypothetico-deductive methods. Both behavior itself and most of the variables of which it is a function are usually…

"To guess who is calling when the phone rings seems somehow more admirable than to pick up the phone and find out, although one picks up the phone to confirm…

"It is the environment which must be changed. A way of life which furthers the study of human behavior in its relation to that environment should be in the best…

"A distinguished social philosopher has said, “It is only through a change of consciousness that the world will be saved. Everyone must begin with himself.” But no one can begin…

"We cannot say that a science of behavior has failed, for it has scarcely been tried. And it will not be given a fair trial until its philosophy has been…

"When we say that science and technology have created more problems than they have solved, we mean physical and biological science and technology. It does not follow that a technology…

"Knowing the basic principles without knowing the details of a practical problem is no closer to a solution than knowing the details without knowing the basic principles." (p. 276)  …