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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Behavior alters the environment through mechanical action, and its properties or dimensions are often related in a simple way to the effects produced ... Much of the time, however, a…
Men act upon the world, and change it, and are changed in turn by the consequences of their action. (p. 1)
Adithyan RajaramanTRIAD – The Autism Institute at Vanderbilt Kennedy CenterDepartment of Pediatrics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center I struggled my whole life to have a consistent fitness routine. Despite my elementary…
Allen NeuringerReed College Our choices are often repetitions: they are habits, the result of conditioning histories. What we do upon waking, the ways we greet one another, the music we…
John StaddonDuke University As I look back at my own research life, I am occasionally amazed to see things that seem absolutely obvious now but were completely unrecognized at an…
William M. BaumUniversity of California, Davis and University of New Hampshire I became convinced of the inadequacy of the standard model of operant behavior while still in graduate school in…
Julie Vargas, PhDChair, Archival Committee, B. F. Skinner Foundation A teacher goes to a student who has finished her work and says “Good work, Mary.” She tells you, “I reinforced…
Selecting Behaviors of Clinician and Community in Support of Sustainable Implementation Tim Moore, BCBA-DUniversity of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis MN “... we can introduce new cultural practices ... but we…
A better understanding of variation and selection will mean a more successful profession, but whether behavior analysis will be called psychology is a matter for the future to decide. (p.…
Because of its similarity to the vernacular, cognitive psychology was easy to understand and the so-called cognitive revolution was for a time successful. That may have accelerated the speed with…
Cognitive science is the creation science of psychology, as it struggles to maintain the position of a mind or self. (p. 672)
Intelligence, never introspectible, is clearly an inference from the behavior sampled in intelligence tests, and an analysis of different kinds of intelligence is an analysis of different kinds of behavior.…
What, then, are we to make of the fact that for 100 years psychologists have tried to build just such a science of mind? What about the brilliant analyses that…
In a scientific analysis, histories of variation and selection play the role of the initiator. There is no place in a scientific analysis of behavior for a mind or self.…
In face-to-face contact with another person, references to an initiating self are unavoidable. There is a ‘you,’ and there is an ‘I.’ I see what ‘you’ do and hear what…
The attempt to use the apparent references to an initiating mind and to convert the vernacular into the language of a science was ... a mistake. Watson and other early…
Many of the psychologists who have studied behavior have also neglected variation and selection. Thorndike’s Law of Effect came close, but his experiment suggested that variations were trials and consequences…
The role of variation and selection in the behavior of the individual is often simply ignored. Sociobiology, for example, leaps from socio- to bio-, passing over the linking individual. (p.…
[Of the three sciences of variation and selection,] only operant conditioning occurs quickly enough to be observed from beginning to end. For the same reason it is the only one…
It has . . . been said that variation and selection may occur in the brain, but although the brain, like any other part of the body, undergoes variations, the…
Early parts of behavior affect later parts, but it is the behavior as a whole that is the product of variation and selection. (p. 668)
The Greeks are said to have discovered the mind, but it is more likely that they were the first to talk at great length about what they saw within themselves…
Psychologists who are uneasy about the metaphysical nature of mental life often say that what we see through introspection must be the brain, but that is unlikely. We have no…
Although operant control of the vocal musculature is exclusive to the human species, it is seldom if ever cited as its distinguishing feature. The presence or absence of “consciousness” or…
The process of variation and selection has a third fault: Variations are random and contingencies of selection accidental. What evolved is not a single slowly developing species but millions of…
Cultural evolution is not a biological process, but as a kind of variation and selection it has the same faults. The fact that a culture prepares a group only for…
Modeling, telling, and teaching are the functions of the social environments called cultures. Different cultures emerge from different contingencies of variation and selection and differ in the extent to which…
Francesca degli Espinosa, PhD, BCBA-D, reflects on treatment adherence.
Other species imitate, but if they model behavior to be imitated, it is only as the product of natural selection. The consequence of modeling the behavior of the imitator is…
Operant conditioning must solve the “problem of the first instance”: How and why do responses occur before they have been reinforced? The problem was solved in part by the…
A second fault in variation and selection is critical for operant conditioning: Selection must wait upon variation. The process is therefore usually slow. That was not a problem for natural…
Species behavior is effective only in a world that fairly closely resembles the world in which the species evolved. That fault was corrected by the evolution of a second type…
All types of variation and selection have certain faults, and one of them is especially critical for natural selection: It prepares a species only for a future that resembles the…
The behavior of the organism as a whole is the product of three types of variation and selection. The first, natural selection, is responsible for the evolution of the species…
The brain is part of the body, and what it does is part of what the body does. What the brain does is part of what must be explained. (p.…
There was a graduate student from Korea in our department, a Mr. Kim. He had found it difficult to adjust to the mechanized life in America, and the sight of…
The following summer was unusually warm, and I increased the verisimilitude of the [running] wheel as an infinitely long running space by arranging a fan so that it blew into…
Facts and formulations of facts change as science progresses. The experimental spirit and the integrity of the scientist do not change. (p. 652)
The extension of the Pavlovian formulation to skeletal musculature raises especially difficult questions. To insist that the Pavlovian experiment is a useful prototype in formulating all learned behavior is not…
It was extraordinarily lucky that he began with the salivary reflex. There seems to be no other response quite so simple. Other glandular secretions, for example, tears or sweat, are…
Diverted from a strict formulation of behavioral facts as such, it was easy for Pavlov to believe that conditioned reflexes comprised the whole field of learned behavior, and to overlook…
A prestige attaches to the statement that inhibition has spread across the cortex, a prestige which is lacking in a mere recital of the facts upon which the statement is…
Pavlov’s physiological metaphors encouraged him to speculate about processes supposed to be going on behind his facts rather than about the facts themselves. Freud had done the same thing but…
In a teacher’s college in Tashkent the director told us that the college was interested in “higher nervous activities.” He meant simply that they were teaching teachers. (p. 651)
[Pavlov] turned too quickly to inferences about the nervous system. The subtitle of the Anrep translation is “An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex.” Pavlov never saw…
I think I can express my respect for Pavlov in a way which he would be most likely to approve if I indicate certain points on which I think he…
... whether or not the control was adequate [in Pavlov’s experiments], it was held to be of first importance. (p. 650)
I have always been suspicious of that experiment in which a dog, given food every 30 minutes without any signal, begins to salivate promptly 29 minutes after the previous delivery.…
Animal psychology at that time [when Pavlov’s book was published] was primarily concerned with the behavior of the average rat. The learning curves which appeared in textbooks were generated by…
On December 15, 1911, at exactly 1:55 in the afternoon, a dog secreted nine drops of saliva. To take that fact seriously, and to make one’s readers take it seriously,…