Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"We are all so used to being controlled to our disadvantage that to call a person harmless is to imply that he is totally ineffective or feeble-minded." (p. 268)  …

"Contingencies designed for explicit purposes can be called manipulative, though it does not follow that they are exploitative; unarranged contingencies must be recognized as having equal power, and also possibly…

"[Behaviorism] provides an alternative account of the same facts [of daily life]. It does not reduce feelings to bodily states; it simply argues that bodily states are and always have…

"Man . . . is . . . breeding at a dangerous rate, exhausting the world’s resources, polluting the environment, and doing little to relieve the threat of a nuclear…

"But man remains what he has always been, and his most conspicuous achievement has been the design and construction of a world which has freed him from constraints and vastly…

"Behavior is the achievement of a person, and we seem to deprive the human organism of something which is his natural due when we point instead to the environmental sources…

" . . . we can scarcely deny that man is an animal, though a remarkable one. The complaint that Pavlov converted Hamlet’s “How like a god!” into “How like a…

"It has been said . . . that science has reached a limit beyond which it cannot establish the determinacy of physical phenomena, and it has been argued that this…

"No one thinks before he acts except in the sense of acting covertly before acting overtly." (p. 259)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Scientific knowledge is verbal behavior, though not necessarily linguistic. It is a corpus of rules for effective action, and there is a special sense in which it could be “true”…

"It would be absurd for the behaviorist to contend that he is in any way exempt from his analysis. He cannot step out of the causal stream and observe behavior…

"The disastrous results of common sense in the management of human behavior are evident in every walk of life, from international affairs to the care of a baby, and we…

"In spite of the fact that many people find them objectionable, punishment and aversive control are still common, and for a single reason: those who use them are usually immediately…

"The experimental analysis of behavior is a rigorous, extensive, and rapidly advancing branch of biology, and only those who are unaware of its scope can call it oversimplified." (p. 255)…

"A science of behavior is especially vulnerable to the charge of simplification because it is hard to believe that a fairly simple principle can have vast consequences in our lives.…

"Those who say that a science of behavior is oversimplified and naïve usually show an oversimplified and naïve knowledge of the science, and those who claim that what it has…

"Those who feel that they understand what is happening in the world at large may be tested in a very simple way: let them look at the organism as it…

"Obviously we cannot predict or control human behavior in daily life with the precision obtained in the laboratory, but we can nevertheless use results from the laboratory to interpret behavior…

"There are excellent reasons for beginning with simple cases and moving on only as the power of the analysis permits. If this means, as it seems to mean, that one…

"Nothing about the position taken in this book questions the uniqueness of each member of the human species, but the uniqueness is inherent in the sources. There is no place…

"A member of the human species has identity, in the sense that he is one member and no other. He begins as an organism and becomes a person or self…

"Contingencies of reinforcement also resemble contingencies of survival in the production of novelty . . . In both natural selection and operant conditioning the appearance of “mutations” is crucial." (pp.…

"Evolutionary theory moved the purpose which seemed to be displayed by the human genetic endowment from antecedent design to subsequent selection by contingencies of survival. Operant theory moved the purpose…

"No matter how defective a behavioral account may be, we must remember that mentalistic explanations explain nothing." (p. 246)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Not only does a behavioral analysis not reject any of these “higher mental processes”; it has taken the lead in investigating the contingencies under which they occur. What it rejects…

"It is hard to understand why it is so often said that behaviorism neglects innate endowment. Watson’s careless remark that he could take any healthy infant and convert him into…

"Must we conclude that all those who have speculated about consciousness as a form of self-knowledge—from the Greeks to the British empiricists to the phenomenologists—have wasted their time? Perhaps we…

"A completely independent science of subjective experience would have no more bearing on a science of behavior than a science of what people feel about fire would have on the…

"Other species are also conscious in the sense of being under stimulus control. They feel pain in the sense of responding to painful stimuli, as they see a light or…

"No special kind of mind stuff is assumed. A physical world generates both physical action and the physical conditions within the body to which a person responds when a verbal…

"Introspective knowledge of one’s body—self-knowledge—is defective for two reasons: the verbal community cannot bring self-descriptive behavior under the precise control of private stimuli, and there has been no opportunity for…

"Just as we cannot appeal to innate endowment to explain grammatical speech, logic, or mathematics because grammar, logic, and mathematics have not been part of the human environment for a…

"[A person] does not make contact with that vast nervous system that mediates his behavior. He does not because he has no nerves going to the right places. Trying to…

"[The physiologist of the future] will be able to show how an organism is changed when exposed to contingencies of reinforcement and why the changed organism then behaves in a…

"The physiologist of the future will tell us all that can be known about what is happening inside the behaving organism. His account will be an important advance over a…

"It is direct intervention and manipulation of the body which is most often cited today to illustrate the dangers of the control of behavior, but a much more effective control…

"The organism is, of course, not empty, and it cannot be adequately treated simply as a black box, but we must carefully distinguish between what is known about what is…

"A science of behavior must consider the place of private stimuli as physical things, and in doing so it provides an alternative account of mental life. The question, then is…

"It is true that we could trace human behavior not only to the physical conditions which shape and maintain it but also to the causes of those conditions and the…

"Attitudes, opinions, or intelligence, as states inferred from behavior, are also useless in control, but they permit us to predict one kind of behavior from another kind known to be…

"No one steps outside the causal stream. No one really intervenes. Mankind has slowly but erratically created environments in which people behave more effectively and no doubt enjoy the feelings…

"The notion of evolution is misleading—and it misled both Herbert Spencer and Darwin—when it suggests that the good represented by survival will naturally work itself out. Things go wrong under…

"There are remarkable similarities in natural selection, operant conditioning, and the evolution of social environments. Not only do all three dispense with a prior creative design and a prior purpose,…

"Man is born free,” said Rousseau, “and is everywhere in chains,” but no one is less free than a newborn child, nor will he become free as he grows older.…

"The control of behavior is concealed or disguised in education, psychotherapy, and religion, when the role of teacher, therapist, or priest is said to be to guide, direct, or counsel,…

"Control is concealed when it is represented as changing minds rather than behavior." (p. 218)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Compare two people, one of whom has been crippled by an accident, the other by an early environmental history which makes him lazy and, when criticized, mean. Both cause great…

". . . if we are asked, “Is a person moral because he behaves morally, or does he behave morally because he is moral?” we must answer, “Neither.” He behaves…

"A person who has been exposed to the promise of heaven and the threat of hell may feel stronger bodily states than one whose behavior is merely approved or censured…

"We sometimes say that we acted in a given way because we knew it was right or felt that it was right, but what we feel when we behave morally…