Skinner’s Quote of the Day

Only under special kinds of verbal contingencies do we respond to certain features of our body. (p. 28)

Chemistry suggests ways in which living things could have emerged from nonliving, and biologists explain the origin of species, including homo sapiens, through natural selection. There is less for a…

... we have only begun to construct a science needed to analyze the complex interactions between the environment and the body and the behavior to which it gives rise. (p.…

We can trace a small part of human behavior, and a much larger part of the behavior of other species, to natural selection and the evolution of the species, but…

No account of what is happening inside the human body, no matter how complete, will explain the origins of human behavior. What happens inside the body is not a beginning.…

Whether or not the cognitive revolution has restored mind as the proper subject matter of psychology, it has not restored introspection as the proper way of looking at it. The…

Unfortunately, we cannot report any internal event, physical or metaphysical, accurately. The words we use are words we learned from people who did not know precisely what we were talking…

To think is to do something that makes other behavior possible. Solving a problem is an example. A problem is a situation that does not evoke an effective response; we…

In a behavioral analysis, contingencies of reinforcement change the way we respond to stimuli. It is a changed person, not a memory, that has been “stored.”

Like pre-Darwinian evolution (where to evolve meant to unroll as one unrolled a scroll), developmentalism is a form of creationism. (p. 16)

Since the observable effects of reinforcement are usually not immediate, we often overlook the connection. Behavior is then often said to grow or develop. Develop originally meant to unfold, as…

Since behavior analysts deal only with complete instances of behavior, the sensing part is out of reach of their instruments and methods and must ... be left to physiologists. (p.…

The world takes control of behavior when either survival or reinforcement has been contingent upon it. (p. 16)

We do what we do because of what has happened, not what will happen. Unfortunately, what has happened leaves few observable traces, and why we do what we do and…

As an experimental analysis has shown, behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences, but only by consequences that lie in the past. (p. 15)

What is felt when one has a feeling is a condition of one’s body, and the word used to describe it almost always comes from the word for the cause…

The inspection or introspection of one’s own body is a kind of behavior that needs to be analyzed, but as the source of data for a science it is largely…

For at least 3,000 years ... philosophers, joined recently by psychologists, have looked within themselves for the causes of their behavior. For reasons which are becoming clear, they have never…

On the point of offering a friend a glass of water, we do not ask, “How long has it been since you last drank any water?” or “If I offer…

Cognitive psychologists are among those who most often criticize behaviorism for neglecting feelings, but they themselves have done very little in the field. The computer is not a helpful model.…

Psychoanalysis is largely concerned with discovering and changing feelings. An analysis sometimes seems to work by extinguishing the effects of old punishments. (p. 10)

In his remarkable book, Émile, Rousseau described what is now called desensitization. If a baby is frightened when plunged into cold water (presumably an innate response), begin with warm water…

Feelings are most easily changed by changing the settings responsible for what is felt ... When a setting cannot be changed, a new history of reinforcement may change its effect.…

Presumably we are more likely to avoid hurting animals if what they would do resembles what we would do when hurt in the same way ... It is a rare…

All words for feelings seem to have begun as metaphors, and it is significant that the transfer has always been from public to private. No word seems to have originated…

Good behaviorists would say, “You reinforce my behavior” rather than “You reinforce me,” because it is behavior, not the behaving person, that is being reinforced in the sense of being…

The very privacy which suggests that we ought to know our own bodies especially well is a severe handicap for those who must teach us to know them. (p. 4)

Methodological behaviorists, like logical positivists, argued that science must confine itself to events that can be observed by two or more people; truth must be truth by agreement ... That…

Behaviorists are not supposed to have feelings, or at least to admit that they have them. Of the many ways in which behaviorism has been misunderstood for so many years,…

In 2018, we published a selection of quotes from Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. Since then, the Foundation has published an Extended Edition of the book, featuring two…

In 2018, we published a selection of quotes from Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. Since then, the Foundation has published an Extended Edition of the book, featuring two…

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…