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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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)
The first scientific laws were probably the rules of craftsmen. In other words, science seems to have emerged from efforts to solve practical problems ... As science advances, however, the…
It is not inconceivable that the mental apparatus and all that it implies will be forgotten. It will then be more than a mere working hypothesis to say. . .…
Terms which refer to private events tend to be used inexactly. Most of them are borrowed in the first place from descriptions of external events. (Almost all the Vocabulary of…
It is easy to teach a child to distinguish between colors by presenting different colors and reinforcing his responses as right or wrong accordingly, but it is much more difficult…
That a small part of the universe is enclosed within the skin of each of us, and that this constitutes a private world to which each of us has a…
. . . we should probably remain blind if visual stimuli were never of any importance to us, just as we do not hear all the separate instruments in a…
Philosophers have often insisted that we are not aware of a difference until it makes a difference, and experimental evidence is beginning to accumulate in support of the view that…
A comprehensive set of causal relations stated with the greatest possible precision is the best contribution which we, as students of behavior, can make in the co-operative venture of giving…
The task of physiology is not to find hungers, fears, habits, instincts, personalities, psychic energy, or acts of willing, attending, repressing, and so on . . . Its task is…
The practical criteria of prediction and control will force us to take into account the complete causal chain in every instance. Such a program is not concerned with establishing the…
What is needed is an operational definition of terms. This means more than simple translation. The operational method is commonly misused to patch up and preserve concepts which are cherished…
No matter how we may wish to represent such a sequence of causal events, we cannot satisfy the requirements of interpretation, prediction, or control unless we go back to events…
Although speculation about what goes on within the organism seems to show a concern for completing a causal chain, in practice it tends to have the opposite effect. Chains are…
A man may walk down the street in precisely the same way upon two occasions, although in one instance he is out for exercise and in another he is going…
In any event, the newly conceived organism begins at once to be influenced by its environment; and when it comes into full contact with the external world, environmental forces assume…
Among the conditions which affect behavior, hereditary factors occupy a primary position, at least chronologically. (p. 308)