"An adequate formulation of the interaction between an organism and its environment must always specify three things: (1) the occasion upon which a response occurs, (2) the response itself, and…
"Any stimulus present when an operant is reinforced acquires control in the sense that the rate will be higher when it is present. Such a stimulus does not act as…
"The class of responses upon which a reinforcer is contingent is called an operant, to suggest the action on the environment followed by reinforcement. We construct an operant by making…
"By using rate of responding as a dependent variable, it has been possible to formulate the interaction between an organism and its environment more adequately. The kinds of consequences which…
"... by thoroughly adapting the rat to the box before the lever is made available, most of the competing behavior can be “stamped out” before the response to be learned…
"... the full significance of consequences was only slowly recognized. Possibly there was some uneasiness about final causes (How could something which followed behavior have an effect on it?), but…
"Every stimulus-response or input-output formulation of behavior suffers from a serious omission. No account of the interchange between organism and environment is complete until it includes the action of the…
"[The invention of concepts such as the total stimulus situation, cues, and releasers] was patchwork, designed to salvage the stimulus-response formula, and it had the effect of moving the determination…
"Some of the questions to which a different kind of theory may be addressed are as follows: what aspects of behavior are significant? Of what variables are changes in these…
"Many physiological explanations of behavior seem at the moment to call for hypotheses, but the future lies with techniques of direct observation which will make them unnecessary (see Chapter 9)".…
"If hypotheses commonly appear in the study of behavior, it is only because the investigator has turned his attention to inaccessible events—some of them fictitious, others irrelevant." (p. xi) …
"Behavior is one of those subject matters which do not call for hypothetico-deductive methods. Both behavior itself and most of the variables of which it is a function are usually…
"To guess who is calling when the phone rings seems somehow more admirable than to pick up the phone and find out, although one picks up the phone to confirm…
Dear Readers, Starting today, the B. F. Skinner Foundation continues its project Skinner's Quote of the Day with Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969. As before, the selected quotes will be published…
"It is the environment which must be changed. A way of life which furthers the study of human behavior in its relation to that environment should be in the best…
"A distinguished social philosopher has said, “It is only through a change of consciousness that the world will be saved. Everyone must begin with himself.” But no one can begin…
"We cannot say that a science of behavior has failed, for it has scarcely been tried. And it will not be given a fair trial until its philosophy has been…
"When we say that science and technology have created more problems than they have solved, we mean physical and biological science and technology. It does not follow that a technology…
"Knowing the basic principles without knowing the details of a practical problem is no closer to a solution than knowing the details without knowing the basic principles." (p. 276) …
"We are all so used to being controlled to our disadvantage that to call a person harmless is to imply that he is totally ineffective or feeble-minded." (p. 268) …
"Contingencies designed for explicit purposes can be called manipulative, though it does not follow that they are exploitative; unarranged contingencies must be recognized as having equal power, and also possibly…
"[Behaviorism] provides an alternative account of the same facts [of daily life]. It does not reduce feelings to bodily states; it simply argues that bodily states are and always have…
"Man . . . is . . . breeding at a dangerous rate, exhausting the world’s resources, polluting the environment, and doing little to relieve the threat of a nuclear…
"But man remains what he has always been, and his most conspicuous achievement has been the design and construction of a world which has freed him from constraints and vastly…
"Behavior is the achievement of a person, and we seem to deprive the human organism of something which is his natural due when we point instead to the environmental sources…
" . . . we can scarcely deny that man is an animal, though a remarkable one. The complaint that Pavlov converted Hamlet’s “How like a god!” into “How like a…
"It has been said . . . that science has reached a limit beyond which it cannot establish the determinacy of physical phenomena, and it has been argued that this…
"No one thinks before he acts except in the sense of acting covertly before acting overtly." (p. 259) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"Scientific knowledge is verbal behavior, though not necessarily linguistic. It is a corpus of rules for effective action, and there is a special sense in which it could be “true”…
"It would be absurd for the behaviorist to contend that he is in any way exempt from his analysis. He cannot step out of the causal stream and observe behavior…
"The disastrous results of common sense in the management of human behavior are evident in every walk of life, from international affairs to the care of a baby, and we…
"In spite of the fact that many people find them objectionable, punishment and aversive control are still common, and for a single reason: those who use them are usually immediately…
"The experimental analysis of behavior is a rigorous, extensive, and rapidly advancing branch of biology, and only those who are unaware of its scope can call it oversimplified." (p. 255)…
"A science of behavior is especially vulnerable to the charge of simplification because it is hard to believe that a fairly simple principle can have vast consequences in our lives.…
"Those who say that a science of behavior is oversimplified and naïve usually show an oversimplified and naïve knowledge of the science, and those who claim that what it has…
"Those who feel that they understand what is happening in the world at large may be tested in a very simple way: let them look at the organism as it…
"Obviously we cannot predict or control human behavior in daily life with the precision obtained in the laboratory, but we can nevertheless use results from the laboratory to interpret behavior…
"There are excellent reasons for beginning with simple cases and moving on only as the power of the analysis permits. If this means, as it seems to mean, that one…
"Nothing about the position taken in this book questions the uniqueness of each member of the human species, but the uniqueness is inherent in the sources. There is no place…
"A member of the human species has identity, in the sense that he is one member and no other. He begins as an organism and becomes a person or self…
"Contingencies of reinforcement also resemble contingencies of survival in the production of novelty . . . In both natural selection and operant conditioning the appearance of “mutations” is crucial." (pp.…
"Evolutionary theory moved the purpose which seemed to be displayed by the human genetic endowment from antecedent design to subsequent selection by contingencies of survival. Operant theory moved the purpose…
"No matter how defective a behavioral account may be, we must remember that mentalistic explanations explain nothing." (p. 246) Subscribe to RSS feed here
"Not only does a behavioral analysis not reject any of these “higher mental processes”; it has taken the lead in investigating the contingencies under which they occur. What it rejects…
"It is hard to understand why it is so often said that behaviorism neglects innate endowment. Watson’s careless remark that he could take any healthy infant and convert him into…
"Must we conclude that all those who have speculated about consciousness as a form of self-knowledge—from the Greeks to the British empiricists to the phenomenologists—have wasted their time? Perhaps we…
"A completely independent science of subjective experience would have no more bearing on a science of behavior than a science of what people feel about fire would have on the…
"Other species are also conscious in the sense of being under stimulus control. They feel pain in the sense of responding to painful stimuli, as they see a light or…
"No special kind of mind stuff is assumed. A physical world generates both physical action and the physical conditions within the body to which a person responds when a verbal…
"Introspective knowledge of one’s body—self-knowledge—is defective for two reasons: the verbal community cannot bring self-descriptive behavior under the precise control of private stimuli, and there has been no opportunity for…