Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"The discovery that part of the behavior of an organism was under the control of the environment led, as we have seen, to an unwarranted extension of the notion of…

"Our "perception" of the world—our "knowledge" of it —is our behavior with respect to the world. It is not to be confused with the world itself or with other behavior…

". . . "interpretation" is like . . . "attention" . . . we need not find a particular form of behavior to be identified with it. We "interpret" a…

"We operate in one world—the world of physics. Organisms are part of that world, and they react to it in many ways. Responses may be consistent with each other or…

"Responses to some forms of stimulation are more likely to be "right" than responses to others, in the sense that they are more likely to lead to effective behavior. Naturally…

"What happens when an organism responds "as if" a stimulus had other properties? Such behavior seems to indicate that the "perceptual" world—the world as the organism experiences it—is different from…

"Stimulus induction on the basis of a "relation" presents no difficulty in a natural science if the relation can be described in physical terms. Where this appears not to be…

"Actually it is possible to condition an organism either to choose the larger of two objects or to choose a particular size no matter what the size of an accompanying…

"An adequate solution [of the problem of induction from one sensory field to another] would require an experimental analysis of the various auxiliary processes through which stimulus control can be…

"An organism will not acquire an abstract response until a reinforcing agency sets up the required contingency. There are no "natural" contingencies which reinforce a response in the presence of…

"Abstraction, too, is not a form of action on the part of the organism. It is simply a narrowing of the control exercised by the properties of stimuli. The controlling…

"We are interested, of course, only in conditions or events which have an effect upon behavior. The electromagnetic radiation of radio and television has no effect upon the unequipped organism,…

"No matter what our philosophy of behavior may be, we are not likely to deny that the world about us is important. We may disagree as to the nature or…

"Just as we may attend to an object without looking at it, so we may look at an object without attending to it. We need not conclude that we must…

"Attention is a controlling relation—the relation between a response and a discriminative stimulus. When someone is paying attention he is under special control of a stimulus." (p. 123) Subscribe to…

"The control exerted by a discriminative stimulus is traditionally dealt with under the heading of attention. This concept reverses the direction of action by suggesting, not that a stimulus controls…

"Although imitative responses approach a continuous field, that condition is probably never reached. The duplication of the stimulus is often not precise, and the “grain” of the repertoire with which…

"When we learn the names of a large number of people, we do not expect either the visual patterns which the people present or their names to form continuous fields.…

"In the behavior of reaching toward and touching a spot in the visual field, each position which the spot may occupy requires a particular combination of reaching and touching movements…

"Behavior is the coherent, continuous activity of an integral organism. Although it may be analyzed into parts for theoretical or practical purposes, we need to recognize its continuous nature in…

"We do not hold people responsible for their reflexes—for example, for coughing in church. We hold them responsible for their operant behavior— for example, for whispering in church or remaining…

"It is not so easy to determine whether we can condition purely reflex responses in striped muscles through operant reinforcement. The difficulty is that an operant response may arise which…

"Since we ordinarily lack anything like adequate knowledge of all these [historical] variables, it is simpler to assume that the behavior is determined by the guest's will—that he will come…

"It is natural that the “will” as an inner explanation of behavior should have survived longer in the study of operant behavior, where the control exercised by the environment is…

"The distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior is a matter of the kind of control." (p. 112) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"To ask whether someone can turn a handspring is merely to ask whether there are circumstances under which he will do so." (p. 112) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"In the present analysis we cannot distinguish between involuntary and voluntary behavior by raising the issue of who is in control. It does not matter whether behavior is due to…

"The relation between the discriminative operant and its controlling stimulus is very different from elicitation. Stimulus and response occur in the same order as in the reflex, but this does…

"We use operant discrimination in two ways. In the first place, stimuli which have already become discriminative stimuli are manipulated in order to change probabilities . . . In the…

"The three-term contingency is evident in teaching a child to read, when a given response is reinforced with ”right or “wrong” according to the presence or absence of the appropriate…

"Verbal behavior fits the pattern of the three-term contingency and supplies many illuminating examples. We learn to name objects by acquiring an enormous repertoire of responses each of which is…

"It is obviously advantageous that a response occur only when it is likely to be reinforced . . . The social environment contains vast numbers of such contingencies. A smile…

"We describe the contingency by saying that a stimulus . . .  is the occasion upon which a response . . . is followed by reinforcement . . . All…

"Most operant behavior, however, acquires important connections with the surrounding world . . . But the relation is fundamentally quite different [from the reflex]. It has a different history and…

"Stimuli are always acting upon an organism, but their functional connection with the operant behavior is not like that in the reflex. Operant behavior, in short, is emitted, rather than…

"Operant conditioning may be described without mentioning any stimulus which acts before the response is made. In reinforcing neck-stretching in the pigeon, it was necessary to wait for the stretching…

"Schedules of pay in industry, salesmanship, and the professions, and the use of bonuses, incentive wages, and so on, could also be improved from the point of view of generating…

"The long-term net gain or loss is almost irrelevant in accounting for the effectiveness of this [variable ratio] schedule." (p. 104) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"We get rid of the pauses after reinforcement on a fixed ratio schedule by adopting essentially the same practice as in variable-interval reinforcement: we simply vary the ratios over a…

"Under ratios of reinforcement which can be sustained, the behavior eventually shows a very low probability just after reinforcement, as it does in the case of fixed-interval reinforcement." (p. 103)…

"The high rate of responding and the long hours of work generated by this [fixed ratio] schedule can be dangerous to health. This is the main reason why piecework pay…

"Since [intermittent reinforcement] is a technique for “getting more responses out of an organism” in return for a given number of reinforcements, it is widely used." (pp 99-100) Subscribe to…

"A large part of behavior . . . is reinforced only intermittently. A given consequence may depend upon a series of events which are not easily predicted. We do not…

"In general, behavior which acts upon the immediate physical environment is consistently reinforced." (p. 99) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"One reason the term “learning” is not equivalent to “operant conditioning” is that traditionally it has been confined to the process of learning how to do something . . .…

"The reinforcement which develops skill must be immediate. Otherwise, the precision of the differential effect is lost." (p. 96) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"The contingency which improves skill is the differential reinforcement of responses possessing special properties." (p. 95) Subscribe to RSS feed here

"Verbal behavior supplies especially good examples of the need to consider these atoms . . . A rigorous analysis shows that the word is by no means the functional unit.…

"The traditional explanation of transfer asserts that the second response is strengthened only insofar as the responses "possess identical elements." This is an effort to maintain the notion of a…

"But if we are to account for many of its quantitative properties, the ultimately continuous nature of behavior must not be forgotten. Neglect of this characteristic has been responsible for…