On January 4, 2016, the B. F. Skinner Foundation launched a new project – Skinner’s Quote of the Day. Quotes from B. F. Skinner’s works, selected by renowned scientists, appear daily Monday-Friday in order, starting with Chapter 1 of each book and running all the way through the last chapter. We started with the Science and Human Behavior (January-December 2916), followed by About Behaviorism (January-November 2017), Contingencies of Reinforcement (January-October 2018), Recent Issues (October 2018-May 2019), Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (May 2019-February 2020), and now moving on to Upon Further Reflection (from February 10 2020).
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The simple fact is that psychologists have never made a thoroughgoing renunciation of the inner man. He is surreptitiously appealed to from time to time in all our thinking, especially…
A proper theory must be able to represent the multiplicity of response systems. It must do something more: it must abolish the conception of the individual as a doer, as…
The integrity or unity of the individual has been assumed, perhaps because the organism is a biological unit. But it is quite clear that more than one person, in the…
Since we have not clearly identified the significant data of a science of behavior, we do not arrive well prepared at the second stage of theory building, at which we…
It may be that the notion of a unit of response is at fault and that a final statement will reflect the fluidity and continuity of behavior as a whole.…
The current theoretical practice which is objectionable is the use of a hypothetical neural structure, the conceptual nervous system, as a theory of behavior. The neurological references introduced into such…
The other current explanatory theory flourishes with greater prestige and presumably in more robust health. This is the physiological theory of behavior. The inner man is given neurological properties, with…
In psychiatry the score would be almost a hundred to one in favor of an appeal to psychic determiners of behavior. (p. 348)
Whether particular experimental psychologists like it or not, experimental psychology is properly and inevitably committed to the construction of a theory of behavior. (p. 348)
Facts and theories do not stand in opposition to each other. The relation, rather, is this: theories are based upon facts; they are statements about organizations of facts. (p. 348)
There is no more pathetic figure in psychology today than the mere collector of facts, who operates, or thinks he operates, with no basis for selecting one fact as against…
It is not true that human behavior is not controlled. At least we cannot proceed very far as scientists on that assumption. To have a science of psychology at all,…
It is a familiar complaint that the kind of control possible in the laboratory is impossible in the world at large . . . This position is bound to grow…
Correlational techniques have been extensively used in pure research, and the reason they have dominated the science of psychology in its application to education, industry, public affairs, and elsewhere is…
The two approaches represent different scientific plans and lead to different results. It is curious that our definition should single out the kind of result which has been traditionally accepted…
One interesting consequence of defining experimental psychology as a branch of the science in which we control the variables which govern behavior is that we thus exclude most investigations using…
In more formal terms we manipulate certain “independent variables” and observe the effect upon a “dependent variable.” In psychology the dependent variable, to which we look for an effect, is…
In psychology, as in any science, the heart of the experimental method is the direct control of the thing studied. When we say, “Let us try an experiment,” we mean,…
To simplify the material of a science is one of the purposes of a laboratory, and simplification is worthwhile whenever it does not actually falsify. But the experimental psychologist has…
Sympathetic understanding may suggest the design of a reinforcing environment, but it will not specify details. What is needed is technical knowledge of the effects of the environment on human…
Help is charity only for the helpless. We do not help those who can help themselves when we make it unnecessary for them to do so. Instead, we deprive them…
We have developed more and more efficient ways of getting the things we need, and in doing so we have deprived ourselves of some powerful reinforcers. We have built a…
The human organism has evolved under conditions in which great effort has been needed for survival, and a person is in a very real sense less than human when he…
Given unlimited power it is possible that we should all become selfish monsters. (p. 334)
Fortunately, there are those who are inclined to do something about the mistreatment of children, the aged, prisoners, psychotics, and retardates. We say that they care, but it is important…
It would be difficult for a normal child to develop normally under many forms of institutional care. (p. 333)
Compassion will not explain action until the compassion has in turn been explained. (p.331)
When someone mistreats us, we may feel angry or enraged, but if we call him bad and his behavior wrong or take more effective action, it is not because of…
A person responds to the physical world around him and, with a rather different set of nerves, to the no less physical world within his skin. (p. 330)
A behavioristic reformulation does not ignore feelings; it merely shifts the emphasis from the feeling to what is felt. (p. 330)
The words “Good!” and “Bad!” eventually become social reinforcers in their own right. Comparable social contingencies are implied by the concepts of duty and obligation. We are likely to speak…
If our feelings do not explain our behavior, some other explanation for right or wrong or good or bad conduct must be found. Ethical and moral principles must then be…
The basic researcher has, in fact, a tremendous advantage. Any slight advance in our understanding of human behavior which leads to improved practices in behavior modification will eventually work for…
The first behavior which needs to be modified is obviously that of the teacher, administrator, or philosopher of education. (p. 328)
Prevailing practices [in American elementary and high school education] are derived from unscientific “philosophies of education” and from the personal experiences of administrators and teachers, and the results are particularly…
The experimental analysis of behavior is more than measurement. It is more than testing hypotheses. It is an empirical attack upon the manipulable variables of which behavior is a function.…
Behavior modification is environment modification, but this is not widely recognized. Very little current “behavioral science” is really behavioral, because prescientific modes of explanation still flourish, but behavior modification is…
The genetic history is at the moment beyond control, but the environmental history, past and present, can be supplemented and changed, and that is what is done in a genuine…
The theory which accompanies an experimental analysis is particularly helpful in justifying practice because behavior modification often means a vast change in the way in which we deal with people…
Techniques of behavior modification often seem, after the fact, like the plainest of common sense, but we should remember that they remained undiscovered or unused for a long time and…
The amenable conditions of the laboratory are likely to bring the researcher under the control of deferred consequences and to maintain his behavior when it is only intermittently reinforced. (p.…
The effects of reinforcement are often deferred and need to be mediated, and this is particularly true when reinforcement is used in place of punishment because the latter has quicker…
A contribution ... — from basic to applied — would traditionally be described as the “confidence” with which contingencies are now designed in solving practical problems. Laboratory successes generalize to…
... an important difference [between basic and applied research] lies in the reasons why research is undertaken and supported. The applied researcher is under the influence of a special kind…
It is hard to see the contingencies of reinforcement which prevail in daily life and hence to understand the behavior they generate.4 Laboratory research tells us what to look for…
The behavior modification of the future will also make a far more extensive use of the control exerted by the current environment, of deprivation and satiation, of the conditioning of…
Another useful principle discovered in basic research has to do with the maintenance of behavior . . . Schedules are now widely used to solve what are essentially practical problems—for…
Evidently it is hard for a rat to acquire the operant of “letting go.” It lets go of an object when it is either punished or not reinforced for holding…
An early effort to shape complex behavior was suggested by an experiment in which a chimpanzee used poker chips to operate a sort of vending machine.1 It was implied by…
Most improvements in technology now come from what is essentially basic research. Behavior modification is an example. Its origins lay in a relatively “pure” experimental analysis. (p. 322)