Author: B. F. Skinner Foundation

Thank you for your interest in B. F. Skinner and his works. Quote of the Day will be back in September with a new set of quotes!

We do not always need listeners if our verbal behavior has been strongly reinforced or reinforced on an intermittent schedule. The witty response at a cocktail party occurs again and…

Internal dialogues ... are often called thinking, but all behavior is thinking, as I argue in the last chapter in Verbal Behavior. (p. 515)

Those who have been directly exposed to contingencies behave more subtly and effectively than those who have merely been told, taught, or advised to behave or who follow rules. (pp.…

If cognitive psychologists were correct in saying that rules are in the contingencies, it would not matter whether we learned them from the contingencies or from the rule—in other words,…

The rules of games describe invented contingencies of reinforcement. There are natural contingencies in which running faster than another person is reinforced, but the contingencies in a marathon are contrived.…

Instructional contingencies in schools and colleges are designed to prepare students for contingencies of reinforcement which they will encounter at some later time. Few, if any, natural reinforcers are therefore…

I “believe” a small object on my desk is a pen, in the sense that I tend to pick it up when I am about to write something. I do…

The mand frees us from making a response. The tact replaces the discriminative stimulus controlling a response. (p. 506)

Five kinds of operants—mand, tact, intraverbal, echoic, and textual—are distinguished by their respective contingencies of reinforcement. They are maintained by verbal environments or cultures—that is, by listeners. (p. 505)

A language is a kind of behavior (English, Arabic, and so on). It exists even though no one is speaking it. (No one need speak it at all if it…

We say that we reinforce a response when we make a reinforcer contingent upon it, but we do not change that particular response. What we reinforce, in the sense of…

When we say that behavior is controlled by the environment, we mean two very different things. The environment shapes and maintains repertoires of behavior, but it also serves as the…

Most of my book, Verbal Behavior, was about the speaker . . . But if listeners are responsible for the behavior of speakers, we need to look more closely at…

A minor problem will be illustrated in what follows. In using modern English, you find yourself implying the traditional view in the very act of challenging it. Only at special…

In a behavioral account, the direction of action is exactly reversed. Speakers do not take in the world and put it into words; they respond to it in ways which…

The [current] paper is speculative, but the speculation is under the restraint imposed by a commitment to the established principles of an operant analysis. (p. 501)

There is a good chance that [laughing and crying] evolved at about the same time as vocal behavior, but they are not operants, although they can be simulated as such—as…

... we could say that other primates have engaged in verbal behavior in artificial verbal environments created by scientists but have not developed a language [in the sense of a…

Verbal behavior is behavior that is reinforced through the mediation of other people, but only when the other people are behaving in ways that have been shaped and maintained by…

What is reinforced in the sense of being followed by a given type of consequence is a response; it is the operant that is reinforced in the quite different sense…

It is easy to understand the primitive view that behavior is inside the organism before it comes out. Perhaps there is a touch of the primitive in saying that behavior…

As we would put it today, autoclitics have evolved as instructions to the listener that help him behave in ways more likely to have reinforcing consequences and hence more likely…

The possibility of recombining the elements of vocal responses ... accounts for much of the power and scope of verbal behavior. (p. 496)

The crucial question is what happens when a person says something he or she has never said before. Novel behavior occurs on novel occasions, and an occasion is novel in…

There are two types of mand. Pull is an action-mand, reinforced when the listener does something . . . An object-mand is more likely to occur in the presence of…

When tacts are taught as “the names of things,” teachers use a generalized reinforcer—such as “Good!” or some other social reinforcer. (p. 495)

We do not say that fish means or refers to fish when it is an echoic, textual, or intraverbal response. If we tend to say so when it is a…

. . . if we are to call Uh either a mand or a tact: The consequences must be generalized. (p. 494)

. . . the evolution of operant conditioning appears to have been accompanied by the evolution of a pool of behavior that played no other part in natural selection and…

One learns to gesture through movement duplication but to speak through product duplication, which is more precise. (p. 491)

Vocal behavior must have had several advantages in natural selection. Sounds are effective in the dark, around corners, and when listeners are not looking, and they can be made when…

The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive…

It is often said that bees have a language, that they “tell each other where good forage is to be found,” that the dance “conveys information,” and so on. Such…

It was only after a tendency to imitate had evolved that contingencies existed for the evolution of the reciprocal process of modeling. (p. 489)

The plausibility of a reconstruction [of evolution] depends in part upon the size of the variations that are assumed to have occurred. The smaller the variations, the more plausible the…

Because a verbal environment is composed of listeners, it is understandable that linguists emphasize the listener. (p. 487)

Strictly speaking, verbal behavior does not evolve. It is the product of a verbal environment, or what linguists call a language, and it is the verbal environment that evolves. (p.…

Verbal behavior left no artifacts until the appearance of writing, and that was at a very late stage. We shall probably never know precisely what happened, but we ought to…

Evolutionary theory has always been plagued by scantiness of evidence. We see the products of evolution but not much of the process. (p. 487)

And now my labor is over. I have had my lecture. I have no sense of fatherhood. If my genetic and personal histories had been different, I should have come…

To deny a creative contribution does not destroy man qua man or woman qua woman any more than Butler’s phrase [“A hen is only an egg's way of making another…

The poet often knows that some part of his history is contributing to the poem he is writing. He may, for example, reject a phrase because he sees that he…

Selection is a special kind of causality, much less conspicuous than the push-pull causality of nineteenth-century physics, and Darwin’s discovery may have appeared so late in the history of human…

The key term in Darwin’s title is Origin. Novelty could be explained without appeal to prior design if random changes in structure were selected by their consequences. It was the…

A biologist has no difficulty in describing the role of the mother. She is a place, a locus in which a very important biological process takes place . . .…

Something does seem to be taken away from the poet when his behavior is traced to his genetic and personal histories. Only a person who truly initiates his behavior can…

Does the poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? (p. 479)

Verbal Behavior was criticized in a different way by an old friend, I. A. Richards, whose interest in the field goes back, of course to the Meaning of Meaning .…

... I agreed to participate [in a BBC television discussion with Chomsky] only if the moderator could guarantee equal time. I suggested that we use chess clocks. My clock would…