February 2018
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 34
“Basic science always leads eventually to an improved technology, and a science of behavior is no exception. It should supply a technology of behavior appropriate to the ultimate utopian goal: an effective culture.” (p. 22) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 32
“Modern governments manipulate vast quantities of positive as well as negative reinforcers, but they seriously neglect the contingencies in both cases. The behavior to be reinforced is seldom defined, in either domestic or international affairs.” (p. 20) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 31
“The wealth of a culture depends upon the productive behavior of its members. It is a natural resource which is shamefully neglected because a true economic technology has yet to be devised. The basic principles are available in an experimental analysis of behavior.” (pp. 19-20) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 30
“A particularly effective schedule is at the heart of all gambling devices. Consider a room full of people playing Bingo. The players sit quietly for many hours; they listen with great care as numbers and letters are called out; they arrange markers on cards rapidly and accurately; and they respond instantly when a particular pattern […]
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 29
“… when a craftsman spends a week in completing a given object, each of the parts produced during the week is likely to be automatically reinforcing because of its place in the completed object.” (p. 18) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 26
“The problem [with psychotic behavior] is not to find in the structure of the observed behavior some hint as to how it may be made to disappear, but rather to build up the behavior which is missing.” (p. 16) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 25
“Teaching is the arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement which expedite learning . . . Programmed instruction is a technique taken directly from the operant laboratory, and it is designed to maximize the reinforcement associated with successful control of the environment . . . An equally important advance is the arrangement of contingencies of reinforcement in […]
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 21
“Eventually we must ask why people behave in their respective ways. It is not enough to say that a custom is followed simply because it is customary to follow it. Nor is it enough to say that people behave as they do because of the ways in which they think.” (p. 12) Subscribe to […]
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 20
“It is the contingencies which prevail in a given verbal community which “generate sentences.” They shape and maintain the phonemic and syntactical properties of verbal behavior and account for a wide range of functional characteristics —from poetry to logic. They do so without the help of the mind of speaker or listener (141 [Skinner’s 1957 […]
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 19
“Verbal contingencies have the same status as contingencies maintained by laboratory equipment, but they involve the behavior of a second organism, the listener, and the behavior they generate therefore has many unusual characteristics.” (p. 12) Subscribe to RSS feed here
Contingencies of Reinforcement. Chapter 1: The Role of the Environment. Quote 18
“A language is not the words or sentences “spoken in it”; it is the “it” in which they are spoken—the practices of the verbal community which shape and maintain the behavior of speakers.” (p. 12) Subscribe to RSS feed here