Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"We should not be surprised that the more we know about the behavior of others, the better we understand ourselves. It was a practical interest in the behavior of “the…

"It is . . . important to examine the reasons for one’s own behavior as carefully as possible because they are essential . . . to good self-management." (p. 188)…

"The shift from introspective to environmental evidence does not guarantee that self-knowledge will be accurate . . . [When evidence is sketchy,] we are likely to explain the inexplicable by…

"As the relevance of environmental history has become clearer, . . . practical questions have begun to be asked, not about feelings and states of mind, but about the environment,…

"The verbal community asks, “How do you feel?” rather than, “Why do you feel that way?” because it is more likely to get an answer." (p. 187-188)   Subscribe to…

"It is difficult to maintain an identity when conditions change, but a person may conceal from himself conflicting selves, possibly by ignoring or disguising one or more of them, or…

"Self-knowledge is of social origin, and it is useful first to the community which asks the questions. Later, it becomes important to the person himself—for example, in managing or controlling…

"All species except man behave without knowing that they do so, and presumably this was true of man until a verbal community arose to ask about behavior and thus to…

"A distinction between two selves in the same skin is made when we say that a tennis player “gets mad at himself” because he misses an easy shot . .…

"A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect. As such, he remains…

"The person who asserts his freedom by saying, “I determine what I shall do next,” is speaking of freedom in or from a current situation: the I who thus seems…

"Complex contingencies create complex repertoires, and . . . different contingencies create different persons in the same skin, of which so-called multiple personalities are only an extreme manifestation." (pp. 184-185)…

"In a behavioral analysis a person is an organism, a member of the human species, which has acquired a repertoire of behavior. It remains an organism to the anatomist and…

"It is often said that a science of behavior studies the human organism but neglects the person or self. What it neglect is a vestige of animism, a doctrine which…

"The argonauts of the psyche have for centuries sailed the stormy seas of the mind, never in sight of their goal, revising their charts from time to time in the…

"We need to know a great deal more about complex contingencies of reinforcement, and it will always be hard to deal with that particular set to which any one person…

"The psyche, like the mind, is a metaphor which is made plausible by the seeming relevance of what a person feels or introspectively observes but which is destined to remain…

"The objection to the inner workings of the mind is not that they are not open to inspection but that they have stood in the way of the inspection of…

"The extraordinary appeal of inner causes and the accompanying neglect of environmental histories and current setting must be due to more than a linguistic practice. I suggest that it has…

"Some people may have been born cautious in the sense that they learn very quickly to move cautiously or become excessively cautious even when not excessively punished, but the behavior…

"We tend to make nouns of adjectives and verbs and must then find a place for the things the nouns are said to represent." (p. 177)   Subscribe to RSS…

"By turning to the facts on which these expressions [about “intrapsychic life”] are based, it is usually possible to identify the contingencies of reinforcement which account for the intrapsychic activities."…

"What behaviorism rejects is the unconscious as an agent, and of course it rejects the conscious mind as an agent, too." (p. 169)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"To increase a person’s consciousness of the external world is simply to bring him under more sensitive control of that world as a source of stimulation." (p. 169)   Subscribe…

"It is often said, particularly by psychoanalysts, that behaviorism cannot deal with the unconscious. The fact is that, to begin with, it deals with nothing else. The controlling relations between…

"Freud’s analysis has seemed convincing because of its universality, but it is the environmental contingencies rather than the psyche which are invariant." (p. 167)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"A self or personality is at best a repertoire of behavior imparted by an organized set of contingencies." (p.164)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"How much more we should know if the prevailing contingencies had been described rather than the feelings and isms generated by them." (p. 162)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The facts and laws of science are descriptions of the world—that is, of prevailing contingencies of reinforcement. They make it possible for a person to act more successfully than he…

"It is often said that reinforcement conveys information, but this is simply to say that it makes a response not only more probable but more probable on a specific occasion."…

"In a simple sense of the word, I have understood what a person says if I can repeat it correctly. In a somewhat more complex sense, I understand it if…

"Perceptual responses which clarify stimuli and resolve puzzlement may automatically reinforcing. “Getting the meaning” of a difficult passage is similar." (p. 155)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The West is said to have made a fetish out of the control of nature. It is certainly not difficult to point to the unhappy consequences of many advances in…

"Knowledge which permits a person to describe contingencies is quite different from the knowledge identified with the behavior shaped by the contingencies. Neither form implies the other." (p. 153)  …

"It is often useful to speak of a repertoire of behavior which, like the repertoire of a musician or a company of players, is what a person or company is…

"Behavior exists only when it is being executed." (p.151)           Subscribe to RSS feed here

"We say that a newborn baby knows how to cry, suckle, and sneeze. We say that a child knows how to walk and how to ride a tricycle. The evidence…

"There is no way in which a verbal description of a setting can be absolutely true . . . Absolute truth can be found, if at all, only in rules…

"Certainly for thousands of years people spoke grammatically without knowing that there were rules of grammar." (p. 141)   Subscribe to RSS feed here

"We do not need to describe contingencies of reinforcement in order to be affected by them. Lower organisms presumably do not do so, nor did the human species before it…

"A person who is following directions, taking advice, heeding warnings, or obeying rules or laws does not behave precisely as one who has been directly exposed to the contingencies, because…

"By attempting to move human behavior into a world of nonphysical dimensions, mentalistic or cognitive psychologists have cast the basic issues in insoluble forms." (p. 131)   Subscribe to RSS…

"Both the mind and the brain are not far from the ancient notion of a homunculus—an inner person who behaves in precisely the ways necessary to explain the behavior of…

"It may be true that there is no structure without construction, but we must look to the constructing environment, not to a constructing mind." (p. 129)   Subscribe to RSS…

"Explicit ways of making it more likely that original behavior will occur by introducing “mutations” are familiar to writers, artists, composers, mathematicians, scientists, and inventors. Either the setting or the…

". . . at first glance, there seems to be no room for chance in any completely determined system . . . Yet the biographies of writers, composers, artists, scientists,…

"As accidental traits, arising from mutations, are selected by their contribution to survival, so accidental variations in behavior are selected by their reinforcing consequences." (p.126)   Subscribe to RSS feed…

"It is said that a person has made a choice when he has taken one of two or more seemingly possible courses of action." (p. 124)   Subscribe to RSS…

"The covert case [of problem solving], to which the term “thinking” is most likely to be applied, enjoys no special advantage beyond that of speed or confidentiality." (p. 124)  …

"Techniques of recall are not concerned with searching a storehouse of memory but with increasing the probability of responses." (p. 121)   Subscribe to RSS feed here