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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[An idea] is, in fact, often defined as something common to two or more expressions. But we shall not arrive at this “something” even though we express an idea in…
... the ideas for which sounds are said to stand as signs cannot be independently observed. If we ask for evidence of their existence, we are likely to be given…
It has generally been assumed that to explain behavior, or any aspect of it, one must attribute it to events taking place inside the organism. In the field of verbal…
Together with other disciplines concerned with verbal behavior, psychology has collected facts and sometimes put them in convenient order, but in this welter of material it has failed to demonstrate…
What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a question about human behavior and hence a question to be answered with the concepts and techniques of…
A science of behavior does not arrive at this special field to find it unoccupied. Elaborate systems of terms describing verbal behavior have been developed. The lay vocabulary abounds in…
The extent to which we understand verbal behavior in a “causal” analysis is to be assessed from the extent to which we can predict the occurrence of specific instances and,…
The basic processes and relations which give verbal behavior its special characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out…
It would be foolish to underestimate the difficulty of this subject matter, but recent advances in the analysis of behavior permit us to approach it with a certain optimism. (p.…
The behaviors of speaker and listener taken together compose what may be called a total verbal episode. There is nothing in such an episode which is more than the combined…
[The behavior of the listener] cannot, in fact, be distinguished from behavior in general, and an adequate account of verbal behavior need cover only as much of the behavior of…
A definition of verbal behavior as behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons needs, as we shall see, certain refinements. (p. 2)
The term “verbal behavior” has much to recommend it. Its etymological sanction is not too powerful, but it emphasizes the individual speaker and, whether recognized by the user or not,…
“Language” is now satisfactorily remote from its original commitment to vocal behavior, but it has come to refer to the practices of a linguistic community rather than the behavior of…
Unfortunately, the term “speech” emphasizes vocal behavior and is only awkwardly applied to instances in which the mediating person is affected visually, as in writing a note. (p. 2)
Behavior which is effective only through the mediation of other persons has so many distinguishing dynamic and topographical properties that a special treatment is justified and, indeed, demanded. (p. 2)
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…