" There is nothing wrong with contrived reinforcers as such. Teachers and counselors need them to shape and strengthen behavior which the individual will find helpful in the natural contingencies…
"A second principle in improving the control of people by the people is the avoidance of contrived reinforcers. Here, again, there is a long history. We all live in a…
"The very substitution of positive reinforcement for aversive control is, of course, at the heart of the struggle for freedom." (p. 10)
"By “behavior modification” I mean what the term was introduced to mean – changing behavior through positive reinforcement." (p. 10)
"Can we design an environment in which people will treat each other well, keep the size of the population within bounds, learn to work and work productively, preserve and enhance…
"Welfare—either as a social measure or as a political philosophy—raises the problem of the noncontingent reinforcer ..." (p. 7)
"In short, the world has changed, and the processes through which we free ourselves from aversive stimulation, nonsocial and social, have begun to work against the survival of the culture…
"... a vast technology has been developed to prevent, reduce, or terminate exhausting labor and physical damage. It is now dedicated to the production of the most trivial conveniences and…
"The processes through which organisms learn to escape from or avoid various kinds of physical damage have had an obvious survival value, but in what we call a civilized environment…
"No matter how essential to the survival of a species a process may once have been, it can become troublesome or even lethal when the environment changes, and this has…
"When our behavior is positively reinforced we say we enjoy what we are doing; we call ourselves happy." (p. 5)
"It is also easy to learn to treat others aversively because the results are especially quick." (p. 4)
"Aversive action also has a kind of genetic priority. Aggressive repertoires, as well as the capacity to acquire aggressive behavior readily, have had survival value." (p. 4)
"... why should governments confine themselves to aversive control? Why not use positive reinforcement? ... One answer may be that positive reinforcement is not well understood. Its effects are easily…
Skinner’s Quote of the Day Continues Dear Readers, Starting today, the B. F. Skinner Foundation continues its project Skinner’s Quote of the Day with quotes from Reflections on Behaviorism and…
Yesterday we published the last quote from the Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. More quotes are coming in the upcoming weeks. Meanwhile, the B. F. Skinner Foundation is…
"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…
The Technology of Teaching is published in Italian.
"Operant conditioners are said to be insular. They read each other’s papers and books, but few of those written by other psychologists. That favor is reciprocated. The trouble may have…
"I have not yet mentioned the most important by-product of The Behavior of Organisms—the work done by others using the same procedures according to much the same analysis . .…
"What one felt or introspected was not a “feeling” or a “thought” but a state of one’s body, and one came to talk about it only under certain verbal contingencies…
"How do we learn to talk about private events? Most of the first paragraph of Watson’s manifesto was an attack on introspection. Data obtained through introspection, said Watson, were not…
"Project Pigeon demonstrated my point about statistics beautifully. You cannot put the “average pigeon” into a missile. It must be one real pigeon, and it must behave precisely in a…
"Although I had said, “Let him extrapolate who will,” I was soon extrapolating." (p. 131)
"Unfortunately, I decided to use reflex as the word for any unit of behavior. In doing so, I no doubt contributed to the fact that you will still find a…
"A reflex was traditionally said to be “elicited” in the etymological sense of “drawn out.” Operant behavior was different, and I tried to emphasize the difference by saying that it…
"In spite of my insistence that behavior should be studied as a function of external variables apart from any reference to mental or physiological states or processes, I was not…
"We can predict and control behavior without knowing anything about what is happening inside. A complete account will nevertheless require the joint action of both [behavior and brain] sciences, each…
"I am afraid my argument that behavior should be recognized as a subject matter in its own right has been misunderstood. I have never questioned the importance of physiology or…
"It is often said . . . that Pavlov’s dog associated the bell with food but, as I have often pointed out, it was Pavlov who associated them in the…
"The light could have been called a cue or clue, of course, and cognitive psychologists, if there had been any, might have said that it conveyed information about when to…
"When a response was reinforced only in the presence of the light as an S Dee, the rat responded slowly in its absence (which, unfortunately, I called S Delta, hard…
"The effect of punishment, however, seems reasonably well explained in [The Behavior of Organisms]. When a response is followed by, say, a shock, an emotional reaction to the shock is…
"If we define a positive reinforcer as a stimulus that strengthens behavior when presented and a negative reinforcer as one that strengthens when removed, then punishment consists of presenting a…
"Many textbooks in psychology continue to describe operant conditioning as trial-and-error learning . . . The organism need not be trying to do anything. Many of the things Thorndike’s cats…
"I had unwittingly conditioned the sound of the dispenser as a reinforcer. When that was done, a single reinforcement was enough to condition pressing the lever as an operant. There…
"What remained to be done in a science of behavior seemed clear. I should look for other independent variables and observe their effects." (p. 125
"An operant was a kind of behavioral atom. True, I could take pressing a lever apart by extinguishing its parts separately (The Behavior of Organisms, 1938, p. 102), but even…
"In 1935 I published a paper called The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response in which I argued that a reflex was not something that could be…
"Rate of responding was also more useful as a measure because it could be said to show the probability that a response would be made at a given time. Nothing…
"Rate of responding has proved, in fact, to be a highly useful dependent variable. In a later paper I could report that it varied usefully over a range of at…
"... Pavlov (1927) could make a dog salivate, and that was control. Reflexes, however, were the behavior of only parts of an organism. Like Loeb I wanted to study the…
"Watson’s famous manifesto (1913) begins: “Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.”…
"I don’t believe I coined the term radical behaviorism, but when asked what I mean by it, I have always said, “the philosophy of a science of behavior treated as…
"Later I bought Russell’s Philosophy (1927), in which he treated a few mentalistic terms in a behavioristic way. Although I had never had a course in psychology, I became an…
" I bought Watson’s book and liked its campaigning style." (p. 121)
"Those who are unhappy about scientific solutions sometimes assure us that we shall solve our problems in other ways when they are bad enough, when the immediate consequences are no…
"Designs must be put into effect, and only by those who can do so effectively. That means governments, religions, and economic enterprises, which control most of the conditions under which…
"When I wrote [Beyond Freedom and Dignity] I thought that we could correct for the weakness of remote consequences simply by creating current surrogates to serve in their place .…
"Although the controlled use of fire may contribute to the survival of the culture of which it is a part, that consequence is too remote to reinforce the behavior of…