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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"The reinforcing consequences generated by the group easily exceed the sums of the consequences which could be achieved by the members acting separately. The total reinforcing effect is enormously increased.…
"The [behavior of the] man attired in full uniform, parading smartly down the street, is reinforced by the acclaim of the crowd even though it would not be forthcoming if…
"Situations [where behaving as others behave is likely to be reinforcing] multiplied a thousandfold generate and sustain an enormous tendency to behave as others are behaving." (p. 312) Subscribe to…
"The group may reinforce the individual for telling the truth, helping others, returning favors, and reinforcing others in turn for doing the same. The Golden Rule is a generalized statement…
"Although many . . . interlocking social systems are stable, others show a progressive change. A trivial example is the behavior of a group of people who enter an unfamiliar…
"Social behavior arises because one organism is important to another as part of its environment. A first step, therefore, is an analysis of the social environment and of any special…
Skinner's Quote of the Day will be back on Monday, November 28.
"The principal realm of the symbol is the dream which occurs when we are asleep. This is a species of private event which is extremely difficult to study and is,…
"It has been argued that one cannot describe behavior after the fact which one could not have described at the time. This appears to explain our inability to recall the…
"It is easy to overestimate the unity of a group of responses, and unfortunately personification encourages us to do so . . . [and] may lead us to expect consistencies…
"The best way to dispose of any explanatory fiction is to examine the facts upon which it is based . . . In the present case it appears that a…
"We may quarrel with any analysis which appeals to a self or personality as an inner determiner of action, but the facts which have been represented with such devices cannot…
"The self is most commonly used as a hypothetical cause of action. So long as external variables go unnoticed or are ignored, their function is assigned to an originating agent…
"The problem of privacy may . . . eventually be solved by technical advances. But we are still faced with events which occur at the private level and which are…
"We may think before we act in the sense that we may behave covertly before we behave overtly, but our action is not an "expression" of the covert response or…
"Private problem-solving usually consists of a mixture of discriminative and manipulative responses . . . In mental arithmetic one multiplies, divides, transposes, and so on, seeing the result in each…
"A discriminative [operant] response which can be made when the appropriate stimulus is absent has certain advantages. It does not require the sometimes troublesome precurrent behavior which generates an external…
"The practical task of generating conditioned stimuli of special effectiveness is an important one, as the artist, writer, and composer know. If it is possible to reinforce a man with…
"A man may see or hear "stimuli which are not present" on the pattern of the conditioned reflex: he may see X, not only when X is present, but when…
"Verbal behavior, however, can occur at the covert level because it does not require the presence of a particular physical environment for its execution. Moreover, it may remain effective at…
"Another possibility [than control by private events] is that when an individual appears to describe unemitted behavior, he is actually describing a history of variables which would enable an independent…
"I was on the point of going home" may be regarded as the equivalent of "I observed events in myself which characteristically precede or accompany my going home." (p. 262)…
"Such responses as "I'm strongly inclined to go home" or "I shall go home in half an hour" also describe states of affairs which appear to be accessible only to…
"An important verbal repertoire describes one's own behavior. It is generated by a community which insists upon answers to such questions as "What did you say?" "What are you doing?"…
"Now, self-observation is also the product of discriminative contingencies, and if a discrimination cannot be forced by the community, it may never arise. Strangely enough, it is the community which…
"The environment, whether public or private, appears to remain undistinguished until the organism is forced to make a distinction." (p. 260) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"There is no effective answer to the student who insists, after being corrected, that that was what he "meant to say," but the existence of this private event is not…
"Verbal responses which are acquired with respect to public events may be transferred to private events on the basis of common properties. It has often been pointed out that many…
"The community may resort to public accompaniments of the private event. For example, it may establish a verbal response to an aching tooth by presenting or withholding reinforcement according to…
"The verbal response "red" is established as a discriminative operant by a community which reinforces the response when it is made in the presence of red stimuli and not otherwise.…
"The contribution which a science of behavior can make in suggesting an alternative [to the psychophysical dualism] point of view is perhaps one of its most important achievements. No discussion…
"The picture which emerges is almost always dualistic. The scientist humbly admits that he is describing only half the universe, and he defers to another world—a world of mind or…
"These questions [of private events] may not be of interest to all readers . . . Fortunately, the issue is seldom crucial in the practical control of human behavior. The…
"In studying behavior we may have to deal with the stimulation from a tooth as an inference rather than as a directly observable fact. But if some of the independent…
"We need not suppose that events which take place within an organism's skin have special properties for that reason. A private event may be distinguished by its limited accessibility but…
"When we say that behavior is a function of the environment, the term "environment" presumably means any event in the universe capable of affecting the organism. But part of the…
"The present analysis should lead to an improvement in educational practices. If our account of thinking is essentially correct, there is no reason why we cannot teach a man how…
"So long as originality is identified with spontaneity or an absence of lawfulness in behavior, it appears to be a hopeless task to teach a man to be original or…
"A formulation of creative thinking within the framework of a natural science may be offensive to those who prize their conception of the individual in control of the world about…
"James Watt's invention of the steam engine seems much less miraculous when we have once learned about the earlier forms of the engine upon which his contribution was based." (pp.…
"The question of originality can be disposed of, however, by providing plausible accounts of the way in which a given idea might have occurred." (p. 255) Subscribe to RSS feed…
"Educational agencies established by the group provide for the transmission of the results of environmental contingencies from one individual to another, and it becomes possible for the individual to acquire…
"As time passes men react to more and more subtle features of the world about them and in more and more effective ways. The accumulation of behavior is made possible…
"Reinforcing contingencies shape the behavior of the individual, and novel contingencies generate novel forms of behavior. Here, if anywhere, originality is to be found." (p. 255) Subscribe to RSS feed…
"Man is now in much better control of the world than were his ancestors, and this suggests a progress in discovery and invention in which there appears to be a…
"We may . . . acknowledge the emergence of novel ideas, in the sense of responses never made before under the same circumstances, without implying any element of originality in…
"When a pattern of manipulation has never been applied to a particular case before, the result is, in a sense, new . . . We reserve the term "original" for…
"We saw that self-control rests ultimately with the environmental variables which generate controlling behavior and, therefore, originates outside the organism. There is a parallel issue in the field of ideas.…
"The artistic exploration of a medium may, however, proceed in the absence of any explicit problem . . . The general problem is simply to come up with something new."…
"Instances have been described in which a mathematician abandons a problem after working on it for a long time, only to have the solution "pop into his head" quite unexpectedly…