B. F. Skinner was born March 20, 1904. The B. F. Skinner Foundation celebrates his birthday by offering the PDF version his first book, The Behavior of Organisms (1938) for free. It is a Name-Your-Price product. That means that while $0 is the minimum you can select, what you actually pay is up to you. Every dollar you add on top of the minimum price is a charitable donation that will be used to keep B. F. Skinner’s books in print, convert more works into e-book formats, provide free access to more and more articles, photographs, audio- and video files and other archival material through our website www.bfskinner.org.
With the publication The Behavior of Organisms eighty years ago, B. F. Skinner launched a new science based on selection by consequences as the mechanism through which behavior changes during the lifetime of the individual. The book summarizes nearly ten years of research, spanning the years of Skinner’s graduate school days at Harvard through his three years as a member of the Society of Fellows. In the book, Skinner defines his basic unit of behavior, which he named the operant, proposes rate as the basic datum, and describes his research program to identify the variables of which behavior is a function.
This e-book edition features a foreword by W. H. Morse. You can find the PDF here: https://www.bfskinner.org/product/the-behavior-of-organisms-pdf/.
