Skinner’s Quote of the Day

"Before we can show the child how to tie a knot, he or she must have learned to imitate, and that learning will have taken place through operant conditioning." (p.…

"I had explained [in How to Teach Animals, 1951] how to condition the sound of a clicker as a reinforcer." (p. 97)

"What is needed is to convince those who are now responsible for our schools that the structure of our present schools makes good teaching almost impossible. The views of governments,…

"As I have said so many times, (and will now say for the last time), we can teach twice as much as is now taught in the classroom in the…

"Cognitive psychologists also see no chance for students to be creative when learning from programmed instruction. Like pre-Darwinians they believe in a creative mind. But the origin of behavior, like…

"It is said, for example, that measures based on the study of nonhuman animals necessarily overlook what is essentially human. But we shall never know what is essentially human until…

"Cognitive psychologists reassure themselves by attacking behavioristic practices, but they have supplied little to put in their place." (p. 93)

"Cognitive psychology . . .  was heralded as a return to the traditional study of the mind, and those who embarked on the improvement of our schools had never left…

"Modeling is a kind of teaching, but it has a lasting effect only when supported by positive or negative reinforcement." (p. 89)

"The fact is that neither rewards nor punishments have anything to do with teaching if they merely keep students in contact with teachers and books. They cannot teach, because they…

"Punishment, a standard way to suppress behavior, is almost the only way other animals control each other, and we have retained much of that practice." (p. 88)

"An extraordinary step in the evolution of the human species brought its vocal musculature under operant control. The social environments we call languages then evolved." (p. 87)

"Some young people are good students. They scarcely need to be taught. They learn in spite of the quality of teacher or school." (p. 86)

"Some people are good teachers; they would be good at almost anything they did. They can hold the attention, and even the affection, of large numbers of students." (p. 86)

"I claim the right to repeat. Whether or not what I have said has been understood or remembered, it certainly has not had much of an effect on American schools."…

"We need to construct relatively immediate consequences of human behavior which will act as the remoter consequences would act if they were here now." (p. 84)

" The contingencies under which people now live are maintained by governments, religions, and economic enterprises, but those institutions are in turn controlled by fairly immediate consequences which are increasingly…

"By rejecting feelings and states of mind as the initiating causes of behavior, and turning instead to the environmental conditions responsible both for what people do and feel while doing…

"Every advance in behavior therapy . . .  begins by changing the world in which people live and then, only indirectly what they do and feel." (p. 84)

" One feels good who feels a body which has been positively reinforced." (p. 83)

"... for every behavior therapist who, upon discovering some fact about behavior, then looks for a physiological explanation, there is one fewer therapist to make further studies of behavior itself.…

"We are not yet ready to replace a police force or close the Pentagon. Applied behavior analysis has contributed to alternative measures, however, and we may hope that the problems…

" Too ready an acceptance of aversive measures blocks progress along better lines." (p. 80)

"The word control raises a familiar issue. What right has a therapist to manipulate the conditions of which a person’s behavior is a function? The question is more often asked…

" The argument for operant behavior therapy is essentially this: What are felt as feelings or introspectively observed as states of mind are states of the body, and they are…

" Therapists have been as much concerned with what people do as with what they feel. Behavior therapists trace what is done to two kinds of selective consequences, innate behavior…

" Troublesome behavior is caused by troublesome contingencies of reinforcement, not by troublesome feelings or states of mind, and we can correct the trouble by correcting the contingencies." (p. 74)

"It has always been difficult to do very much with feelings and states of mind because of their inaccessibility. The environmental variables are often within reach." (p. 74)

"As more and more of the variables of which behavior is a function are identified and their role analyzed, less remains to be explained in mentalistic ways." (pp. 73-74)

" ... cognitive psychologists no longer observe the mental processes they talk about. The processes are hypotheses, to be confirmed either by inferences from the behavior they are said to…

"Psychology has much to gain by confining itself to its accessible subject matter and leaving the rest of the story to physiology." (p. 71)

"Unfortunately, references to feelings and states of mind have an emotional appeal which behavioral alternatives usually lack." (p. 70)

"No one should try to beat a “path from information to action,” because action is the problem and contingencies are the solution." (p. 69)

"To judge from the psychological literature, there are either many conceptions, largely incompatible, or no clear conception at all." (p. 68)

"By their very nature, the anti-science stance of humanistic psychology, the practical exigencies of the helping professions, and the cognitive restoration of the Royal House of Mind have worked against…

"Cognitive psychologists like to say that “the mind is what the brain does,” but surely the rest of the body plays a part. The mind is what the body does.…

" ... psychology may find it dangerous to turn to neurology for help. Once you tell the world that another science will explain what your key terms really mean, you…

"[In an operant analysis,] the environment takes over the control formerly assigned to an internal, originating agent." (p. 64)

" Gaps are inevitable in a behavioral account. Stimulus and response are separated in time and space, for example, and so are a reinforcement on one day and stronger behavior…

"Astronomers interpret the waves and particles reaching Earth from outer space by using what has been learned under controllable conditions in the laboratory—for example, in high energy physics. In a…

"The analysis [of verbal contingencies] does not “ignore consciousness” or bring it back into a behavioral science; it simply analyzes the way in which verbal contingencies of reinforcement bring private…

"Prompted by Pavlov’s emphasis on the control of conditions, I made sure that all Thorndike’s “errors” were eliminated before a successful response could be made. A single “reinforcing” consequence was…

"Perhaps what is wrong is that behavior has seldom been thought of as a subject matter in its own right but rather as the mere expression or symptom of more…

"Behavioral scientists observe three things: the action of the environment on an organism, the action of the organism on the environment, and changes which then follow. There are gaps in…

"Very little genetic change can have occurred “in response to cultural history.” Most of science and technology, for example, has evolved during the past 2,500 years. Must we suppose that…

"Because no other species has acquired operant control of the vocal musculature, it must have appeared very late, when human genetics had reached essentially its present state." (p. 54)  …

"The state of the brain due to reinforcement may resemble the state due to natural selection (the observed behaviors can be indistinguishable), but one is due to a gene, in…

"Once the process of shaping has been recognized, behavior once attributed to feelings and states of mind can be traced to simpler and more readily identified sources." (p. 50)  …

"Although the evolution of behavior remains largely a matter of inference, operant conditioning is studied experimentally, and complex repertoires of behavior are shaped and maintained in strength with appropriate contingencies…

"Internal dialogues . . . are often called thinking, but all behavior is thinking, as I argue in the last chapter in Verbal Behavior (1957)." (p. 46)   Subscribe to…