Skinner’s Quote of the Day
Cumulative Record. Chapter 47: Baby in a Box. Quote 4
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 would also cry when wet or hungry, but in that case she would stop when changed or fed. (p. 615)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 47: Baby in a Box. Quote 3
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 how a comfortable temperature is ever reached with clothing and blankets. (p. 615)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 47: Baby in a Box. Quote 2
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 grew older, it was possible to lower the temperature by easy stages. (p. 615)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 47: Baby in a Box. Quote 1
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 result was an inexpensive apparatus in which our baby daughter has now been living for eleven months. Her remarkable good health and happiness […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 19
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 responses of the child which are of acceptable intensity and tone of voice and that she never reinforces the annoying forms of behavior. (pp. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 18
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 in a quiet tone of voice. She may answer the child only when it raises its voice. (p. 611)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 13
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 may come to dominate the repertoire of the individual. (p. 611)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 9
… 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 responses to PECK and blacking out when the bird pecks DON’T PECK, it is quite easy to train the bird to obey the commands on […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 5
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 likely to be misunderstood—a “reinforcement” for the desired behavior. (p. 605)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 46: How to Teach Animals. Quote 4
“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. Any available animal—a cat, a dog, a pigeon, a mouse, a parrot, a chicken, a pig—will do. (p. 605)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 8
… 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 coldly detached theory of child care, no one of which was a necessary part of his original program. His brilliant glimpse of the need for, […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 7
[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 parents against the unconsidered display of affection. (Current “mother love” theories are the other swing of that pendulum.) (p. 603)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 6
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 of environmental modification, and this was widely misunderstood. Under the stress of battle he was led at last to the well-known cry: “Give me a […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 2
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 that such evidences of mental processes could be explained in other ways. A third step was inevitable, and it was Watson who took it: If […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 45: John Broadus Watson, Behaviorist. Quote 1
[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 of behavior. (p. 601)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 41: A Second Type of “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 2
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 rate in the presence of A will be relatively low—a sort of negative sensory superstition. (p. 576)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 41: A Second Type of “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 1
. . . a stimulus present when a response is reinforced may acquire discriminative control over the response even though its presence at reinforcement is adventitious . . . This might be called a positive sensory superstition. (p. 575)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 4
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 reinforcement. When a response has been strengthened (and this may result from one reinforcement), the setting of the clock implies an even more restricted contingency. […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 3
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 such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. (p. 573)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 2
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 paid no attention to the behavior of the organism in making the presentation. (p. 570)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 40: “Superstition” in the Pigeon. Quote 1
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 temporal relation only, expressed in terms of the order and proximity of response and reinforcement. (p. 570)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 39: Some Quantitative Properties of Anxiety. Quote 1
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 state but is “anticipated” in the future. (p. 559)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 35: Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type. Quote 3
… 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 is easy to arrive at the rate of occurrence of the response. This measure has been shown to be significant in a large number of […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 35: Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type. Quote 2
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 this kind of behavior that it should occur without an eliciting stimulus, although discriminative stimuli are practically inevitable after conditioning. It is not necessary to […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 35: Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo-type. Quote 1
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 to such a reflex as a respondent and use the term also as an adjective in referring to the behavior as a whole. (p. 537)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 6
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 to the study of behavior, leading to the definition of concepts through some other means than the sort of experimental procedure here outlined. (p. 521)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 4
[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. 520-521)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 3
. . . 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 from the necessity of defining the class and of demonstrating the reality if the term is to be used for scientific purposes. It has still […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 2
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 that no property is a valid defining property of a class until its experimental reality has been demonstrated. This excludes a great many terms commonly […]
Cumulative Record. Chapter 34: The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. Quote 1
The analysis of behavior is not an act of arbitrary subdividing, and we cannot define the concepts of stimulus and response quite as simply as “parts of behavior and environment” without taking account of the natural lines of fracture along which behavior and environment actually break. (p. 504)
Cumulative Record. Chapter 33: The Concept of the Reflex in the Description of Behavior. Quote 6
… we may now take that more humble view of explanation and causation which seems to have been first suggested by Mach and is now a common characteristic of scientific thought, wherein, in a word, explanation is reduced to description and the notion of function substituted for that of causation. (pp. 494-495)