“How are we to stop exhausting our resources, polluting the environment, and bearing too many children, and how are we to prevent nuclear holocaust? How, in short, are we to take the future of the world into account? Natural contingencies of reinforcement will not do it, nor will contingencies maintained by governments, religions, and capitalistic systems. We need surrogate contingencies of reinforcement under which people will behave as if the future were acting now. Can we design them and put them into effect? In a preface written for a new printing of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, I say that I am no longer sure, but I remain quite sure that if we ever do, it will be with the help of a psychology that is, as Watson put it, “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science.”” (pp. 134-135)
