Skinner’s Quote of the Day

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…

A familiar problem is that of the child who seems to take an almost pathological delight in annoying its parents. In many cases this is the result of conditioning which…

A scientific analysis can ... bring about a better understanding of personal relations. We are almost always reinforcing the behavior of others, whether we mean to be or not. (p.…

Unfortunately the science of behavior is not yet as successful in controlling emotion as it is in shaping practical behavior. (p. 611)

All this [differential reinforcement] may be easily used—and just as easily misused—in our relations with other people. (p. 611)

Important among human reinforcements are those aspects of the behavior of others, often very subtle, which we call “attention,” “approval” and “affection.” Behavior which is successful in achieving these reinforcements…

... the human infant can be reinforced by very trivial environmental events; it does not need such a reward as food. Almost any “feedback” from the environment is reinforcing if…

When relevant conditions have been controlled, the behavior of the organism is fully determined. (p. 610)

The increased precision of the laboratory also makes it possible to guarantee performance up to the point of almost complete certainty. (p. 610)

... you can make it appear that a pigeon can be taught to read. You simply use two printed cards bearing the words PECK and DON’T PECK, respectively. By reinforcing…

To be effective a reinforcement must be given almost simultaneously with the desired behavior; a delay of even one second destroys much of the effect. (p. 606)

[Reinforcement] makes it possible to shape an animal’s behavior almost as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay. (p. 606)

The second thing you will need [to test a teaching technique] is something your subject wants, say food. This serves as a reward or—to use a term which is less…

“Catch your rabbit” is the first item in a well-known recipe for rabbit stew. Your first move, of course, [to test a teaching technique] is to choose an experimental subject.…

It takes rather subtle laboratory conditions to test an animal’s full learning capacity, but the reader may be surprised at how much he can accomplish even under informal circumstances at…

We have already discovered enough about the nature of learning to devise training techniques which are much more rapid and give more reliable results than the rule-of-thumb methods of the…

Teaching, it is often said, is an art, but we have increasing reason to hope that it may eventually become a science. (p. 605)

... Watson was to be remembered for a long time, by both laymen and psychologists alike, for a too narrow interpretation of self-observation, for an extreme environmentalism, and for a…

[Watson] thought he saw the seeds of many behavior problems in early home experiences, and in his Psychological Care of the Infant and Child—a book he later publicly regretted—he cautioned…

The same taste for polemics led him into an extreme environmentalistic position . . . Like all those who want to do something about behavior, he had emphasized the possibility…

In the controversy which followed [his book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist], Watson’s taste for, and skill in, polemics led him into extreme positions from which he never…

In his most important book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, published in 1919, Watson defined the field he wanted to see studied and assembled available techniques and facts.…

In dispensing with mentalistic explanations of behavior, Watson cleared the way for a scientific analysis. (p. 601)

In establishing the continuity of species Darwin had attributed mental processes to lower organisms . . . The inevitable reaction was epitomized in the writings of Lloyd Morgan, who argued…

[John Broadus Watson’s] place in the history of science, and something of his stature, are indicated by three names—Darwin, Lloyd Morgan, and Watson—which represent three critical changes in our conception…

If, on the other hand, reinforcements happen to occur relatively infrequently in the presence of A, a discrimination will develop in the opposite direction, as the result of which the…

. . . a stimulus present when a response is reinforced may acquire discriminative control over the response even though its presence at reinforcement is adventitious . . . This…

When we arrange a clock to present food every 15 sec., we are in effect basing our reinforcement upon a limited set of responses which frequently occur 15 sec. after…

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although…

Whenever we present a state of affairs which is known to be reinforcing at a given level of deprivation, we must suppose that conditioning takes place even though we have…

To say that a reinforcement is contingent upon a response may mean nothing more than that it follows the response . . . conditioning takes place presumably because of the…

One difficulty lies in accounting for behavior which arises in “anticipation” of a future event. Since a stimulus which has not yet occurred cannot act as a cause, we must…

Anxiety has at least two defining characteristics: (1) it is an emotional state, somewhat resembling fear, and (2) the disturbing stimulus which is principally responsible does not precede or accompany…

... the magnitude of the response in an operant is not a measure of its strength. Some other measure must be devised, and from the definition of an operant it…

But there is also a kind of response which occurs spontaneously in the absence of any stimulation with which it may be specifically correlated ... It is the nature of…

There is, first, the kind of response which is made to specific stimulation, where the correlation between response and stimulus is a reflex in the traditional sense. I shall refer…

Our rule that the generic term may be used only when its experimental reality has been verified will not admit the possibility of an ancillary principle, available in and peculiar…

. . . the difficulty [with traditional psychological terms] will become apparent whenever his experiments are repeated by someone with another set of private defining properties . . . (p.…

[The] restriction upon the use of the popular vocabulary in behaviorism is often not felt because the partial legitimacy of the popular term frequently results in some experimental consistency. (pp.…

. . . the existence of a popular term does create some presumption in favor of the existence of a corresponding experimentally real concept. But this does not free us…

The generic nature of stimulus and response is in no sense a justification for the broader terms of the popular vocabulary. We may lay it down as a general rule…