Skinner’s Quote of the Day

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,…

Pavlov’s book proved to be enormously helpful in my graduate studies. Possibly the most important lesson I learned from it, and one easily overlooked, was respect for a fact. (p.…

H. G. Wells wrote an article for, I believe, the Sunday New York Times. In it he compared Pavlov and George Bernard Shaw. They looked rather alike, with their great…

I had majored in English and had planned to be a writer. It took me a year or two to discover that although I had learned how to write, I…

I bought Pavlov’s book and took it with me to Greenwich Village, where I spent several Bohemian months before going on to Harvard. I read Pavlov by day and sowed…

In the movie, Zorba the Greek, the French woman was never accepted by the islanders because she crossed herself from left to right, rather than right to left. I shall…

I still believe that the same kind of wide-ranging speculation about human affairs [as in Walden Two], supported by studies of compensating rigor, will make a substantial contribution toward that…

In the year which followed the termination of Project Pigeon I wrote Walden Two, a utopian picture of a properly engineered society. Some psychotherapists might argue that I was suffering…

Except with respect to its avowed goal, [Project Pigeon] was, as I see it, highly productive; and this was in large measure because my colleagues and I knew that, in…

Reacting against the excesses of psychological quackery, psychologists have developed an enormous concern for scientific respectability. They constantly warn their students against questionable facts and unsupported theories. As a result…

Our task [in Project Pigeon] forced us to emphasize prior experimental control, and its success in revealing orderly processes gave us an exciting glimpse of the superiority of laboratory practice…

Psychologists have too often yielded to the temptation to be content with hypothetical processes and intervening variables rather than press for rigorous experimental control. It is often intellectual laziness rather…

Something happened during the brief life of Project Pigeon which it has taken a long time to appreciate. The practical task before us created a new attitude toward the behavior…

Tests made with the birds salvaged from the old Project Pigeon showed that even after six years of inactivity a pigeon will immediately and correctly strike a target to which…

The ethical question of our right to convert a lower creature into an unwitting hero is a peacetime luxury. There were bigger questions to be answered in the late thirties.…

Man has always made use of the sensory capacities of animals, either because they are more acute than his own or more convenient. The watchdog probably hears better than his…

... on the side of the observer, it would be a mistake to identify the understanding of design with its enjoyment. The processes involved in reacting to design seem to…

Even though we may eventually achieve an exhaustive list of the processes involved in the practice of design, the production of a work of art will probably still require that…

The artist is not so much interested in the physical structure of a design as in the effect it has upon the one who looks at it. This happens also…

The title “Baby in a Box” was not mine; it was invented by the editors of the Journal. Nevertheless, the Air-Crib is a sort of box, and this is also…

The experiment should, of course, be repeated again and again with different babies and different parents. One case is enough, however, to disprove the flat assertion that it can’t be…

A few critics have objected that they would not like to live in such a compartment themselves—they feel that it would stifle them or give them claustrophobia. The baby obviously…

Before the baby was born, when we were still building the apparatus, some of the friends and acquaintances who had heard about what we proposed to do were rather shocked.…

Every effort should be made to discover just why a baby cries. But if the condition cannot be remedied, there is no reason why the family, and perhaps the neighborhood…

The discovery which pleased us most was that crying and fussing could always be stopped by slightly lowering the temperature. During the first three months, it is true, the baby…

Raising or lowering the temperature by more than a degree or two produces a surprising change in the baby’s condition and behavior. This response is so sensitive that we wonder…

After a little experimentation we found that our baby, when first home from the hospital, was completely comfortable and relaxed without benefit of clothing at about 86° F. As she…

When we decided to have another child, my wife and I felt that it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problems of the nursery…

The remedy [when a child’s voice has become annoyingly high] is simply for the mother to make sure that she responds with attention and affection to most if not all…

The mother may unwittingly promote the very behavior she does not want. For example, when she is busy she is likely not to respond to a call or request made…