Monthly Archives: December 2020

The B. F. Skinner Foundation wishes you happy, healthy, and productive 2021! Skinner's Quote of the Day will return in January.

I think the experimental analysis of behavior can best proceed as it started, until the control of the behavior of an organism in an experimental space is very nearly total.…

It is unlikely that a remote consequence of any kind can reinforce operant behavior in the absence of mediating events. (p. 200)

Choice is something to be explained, not to be used in the analysis of basic processes. (p. 199)

To return to choice and especially to regard a single response as a choice between responding and not responding are, I think, steps backward. (p. 199)

When W.H. Heron and I built our twenty-four-box Behemoth, I wrote to Tolman that we had put in two levers and hoped to get around soon to some problems involving…

The contrived contingencies of both education and therapy must eventually be terminated. Teacher or therapist must withdraw from the life of the student or client before teaching or therapy can…

In general, by allowing natural contingencies to take control whenever possible we generate behavior that is more likely to be appropriate to any occasion upon which it may occur again,…

As friends, lovers, and acquaintances we modify the behavior of each other. The only thing that is new is the better understanding of how we do so derived from an…

The experimental analysis of behavior is alive and well. Psychology needs it. (p. 172)

So-called objections to operant theory need not detain us. There is work to be done. (p. 171)

Pavlov’s dog is said to have associated the bell and the food, but as I have pointed out, it was Pavlov who associated them, that is, who put them together…

Another source of misunderstanding of the relation between operant conditioning and natural selection is the strong inclination to look inside a system to see what makes it tick. Those who…

Several writers have recently implied that organisms may have been sensitive to an increase in the mere probability of reinforcement when no reinforcer is immediately contingent upon a response. I…

Organisms differ from physical things because they show selection by consequences. (p. 165)

I see no reason why there should not be a drift toward phylogenic behavior [in experiments on superstition]. It would be something like the Breland Effect unopposed by operant contingencies.…

I am quite sure of my original observation [of “superstition in the pigeon”]. I have repeated it many times, often as a surefire lecture demonstration. Deliver food every twenty seconds…

The effect of an accidentally contingent reinforcer offers some of the best evidence of the power of operant conditioning, and possibly for that reason it has been challenged—as, for example,…

When Keller Breland first told the Harvard “Pigeon Staff” about [the “Breland Effect”] in 1960, we were impressed. Contrary to certain claims, we were far from ‘disturbed.’ (p. 163)

The experimental analysis of behavior . . . is steadily building upon its past and proceeding in a reasonably ordered way to embrace more and more of what people are…

Psychology as a science is, in fact, in shambles. (p. 160)

If you are still struggling to be successful, flattery will more often than not put you on the wrong track by reinforcing useless behavior. (p. 157