Skinner’s Quote of the Day

On December 15, 1911, at exactly 1:55 in the afternoon, a dog secreted nine drops of saliva. To take that fact seriously, and to make one’s readers take it seriously,…

Pavlov’s book proved to be enormously helpful in my graduate studies. Possibly the most important lesson I learned from it, and one easily overlooked, was respect for a fact. (p.…

H. G. Wells wrote an article for, I believe, the Sunday New York Times. In it he compared Pavlov and George Bernard Shaw. They looked rather alike, with their great…

I had majored in English and had planned to be a writer. It took me a year or two to discover that although I had learned how to write, I…

I bought Pavlov’s book and took it with me to Greenwich Village, where I spent several Bohemian months before going on to Harvard. I read Pavlov by day and sowed…

In the movie, Zorba the Greek, the French woman was never accepted by the islanders because she crossed herself from left to right, rather than right to left. I shall…

I still believe that the same kind of wide-ranging speculation about human affairs [as in Walden Two], supported by studies of compensating rigor, will make a substantial contribution toward that…

In the year which followed the termination of Project Pigeon I wrote Walden Two, a utopian picture of a properly engineered society. Some psychotherapists might argue that I was suffering…

Except with respect to its avowed goal, [Project Pigeon] was, as I see it, highly productive; and this was in large measure because my colleagues and I knew that, in…

Reacting against the excesses of psychological quackery, psychologists have developed an enormous concern for scientific respectability. They constantly warn their students against questionable facts and unsupported theories. As a result…

Our task [in Project Pigeon] forced us to emphasize prior experimental control, and its success in revealing orderly processes gave us an exciting glimpse of the superiority of laboratory practice…

Psychologists have too often yielded to the temptation to be content with hypothetical processes and intervening variables rather than press for rigorous experimental control. It is often intellectual laziness rather…

Something happened during the brief life of Project Pigeon which it has taken a long time to appreciate. The practical task before us created a new attitude toward the behavior…

Tests made with the birds salvaged from the old Project Pigeon showed that even after six years of inactivity a pigeon will immediately and correctly strike a target to which…

The ethical question of our right to convert a lower creature into an unwitting hero is a peacetime luxury. There were bigger questions to be answered in the late thirties.…

Man has always made use of the sensory capacities of animals, either because they are more acute than his own or more convenient. The watchdog probably hears better than his…

... on the side of the observer, it would be a mistake to identify the understanding of design with its enjoyment. The processes involved in reacting to design seem to…

Even though we may eventually achieve an exhaustive list of the processes involved in the practice of design, the production of a work of art will probably still require that…

The artist is not so much interested in the physical structure of a design as in the effect it has upon the one who looks at it. This happens also…

The title “Baby in a Box” was not mine; it was invented by the editors of the Journal. Nevertheless, the Air-Crib is a sort of box, and this is also…

The experiment should, of course, be repeated again and again with different babies and different parents. One case is enough, however, to disprove the flat assertion that it can’t be…

A few critics have objected that they would not like to live in such a compartment themselves—they feel that it would stifle them or give them claustrophobia. The baby obviously…

Before the baby was born, when we were still building the apparatus, some of the friends and acquaintances who had heard about what we proposed to do were rather shocked.…

Every effort should be made to discover just why a baby cries. But if the condition cannot be remedied, there is no reason why the family, and perhaps the neighborhood…

The discovery which pleased us most was that crying and fussing could always be stopped by slightly lowering the temperature. During the first three months, it is true, the baby…

Raising or lowering the temperature by more than a degree or two produces a surprising change in the baby’s condition and behavior. This response is so sensitive that we wonder…

After a little experimentation we found that our baby, when first home from the hospital, was completely comfortable and relaxed without benefit of clothing at about 86° F. As she…

When we decided to have another child, my wife and I felt that it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problems of the nursery…

The remedy [when a child’s voice has become annoyingly high] is simply for the mother to make sure that she responds with attention and affection to most if not all…

The mother may unwittingly promote the very behavior she does not want. For example, when she is busy she is likely not to respond to a call or request made…

A familiar problem is that of the child who seems to take an almost pathological delight in annoying its parents. In many cases this is the result of conditioning which…

A scientific analysis can ... bring about a better understanding of personal relations. We are almost always reinforcing the behavior of others, whether we mean to be or not. (p.…

Unfortunately the science of behavior is not yet as successful in controlling emotion as it is in shaping practical behavior. (p. 611)

All this [differential reinforcement] may be easily used—and just as easily misused—in our relations with other people. (p. 611)

Important among human reinforcements are those aspects of the behavior of others, often very subtle, which we call “attention,” “approval” and “affection.” Behavior which is successful in achieving these reinforcements…

... the human infant can be reinforced by very trivial environmental events; it does not need such a reward as food. Almost any “feedback” from the environment is reinforcing if…

When relevant conditions have been controlled, the behavior of the organism is fully determined. (p. 610)

The increased precision of the laboratory also makes it possible to guarantee performance up to the point of almost complete certainty. (p. 610)

... you can make it appear that a pigeon can be taught to read. You simply use two printed cards bearing the words PECK and DON’T PECK, respectively. By reinforcing…

To be effective a reinforcement must be given almost simultaneously with the desired behavior; a delay of even one second destroys much of the effect. (p. 606)

[Reinforcement] makes it possible to shape an animal’s behavior almost as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay. (p. 606)

The second thing you will need [to test a teaching technique] is something your subject wants, say food. This serves as a reward or—to use a term which is less…

“Catch your rabbit” is the first item in a well-known recipe for rabbit stew. Your first move, of course, [to test a teaching technique] is to choose an experimental subject.…

It takes rather subtle laboratory conditions to test an animal’s full learning capacity, but the reader may be surprised at how much he can accomplish even under informal circumstances at…

We have already discovered enough about the nature of learning to devise training techniques which are much more rapid and give more reliable results than the rule-of-thumb methods of the…

Teaching, it is often said, is an art, but we have increasing reason to hope that it may eventually become a science. (p. 605)

... Watson was to be remembered for a long time, by both laymen and psychologists alike, for a too narrow interpretation of self-observation, for an extreme environmentalism, and for a…

[Watson] thought he saw the seeds of many behavior problems in early home experiences, and in his Psychological Care of the Infant and Child—a book he later publicly regretted—he cautioned…

The same taste for polemics led him into an extreme environmentalistic position . . . Like all those who want to do something about behavior, he had emphasized the possibility…

In the controversy which followed [his book, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist], Watson’s taste for, and skill in, polemics led him into extreme positions from which he never…