Skinner’s Quote of the Day

Skinner’s Quote of the Day is the project of the B. F. Skinner Foundation, copyright holder for Skinner’s works. On January 4, 2016, we started with Science and Human Behavior, followed by About Behaviorism, Contingencies of Reinforcement, Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior, Reflections on Behaviorism and Society, Upon Further Reflection, and Cumulative Record. Quotes are selected by renowned scientists and published every workday (Monday through Friday). The daily quote is also posted on the Facebook forum. RSS feed for “Skinner’s Quote of the Day” is available here: http://www.bfskinner.org/category/quotes/feed/. Please use the Archives function below to access previous quotes, or to search by a keyword.

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Recent Quotes:

• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 9
  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 so because when I have picked up similar objects in the past they have proved to be pens. (p. 507)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 8
  The mand frees us from making a response. The tact replaces the discriminative stimulus controlling a response. (p. 506)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 7
  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)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 6
  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 is a dead language.) (p. 505)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 5
  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 strengthen, is the operant, the probability that similar responses will occur in the future. (p. 504)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 4
  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 occasion upon which behavior occurs. (p. 504)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 3
  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 what they do. (p. 504)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 2
  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 times can you be technical and correct. The rest of the time everyday English must suffice, and you must expect to be accused of inconsistency.… Read more: Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 2
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 1
  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 have been shaped and maintained by special contingencies of reinforcement. (p. 503)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 24
  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)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 23
  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 in crying to get attention, for example, or laughing politely at an unfunny joke. (p. 500)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 22
  … 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 environment] of their own. (p. 500)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 21
  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 an evolved verbal environment, or language. (p. 500)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 20
  What is reinforced in the sense of being followed by a given type of consequence is a response; it is the operant that is reinforced in the quite different sense of being strengthened. (p. 497)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 19
  It is easy to understand the primitive view that behavior is inside the organism before it comes out. Perhaps there is a touch of the primitive in saying that behavior is “emitted,” but we speak of the emission of light, from a hot filament though the light is not in the filament. (p. 497)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 18
  As we would put it today, autoclitics have evolved as instructions to the listener that help him behave in ways more likely to have reinforcing consequences and hence more likely to promote reciprocally reinforcing consequences for the speaker. (p. 497)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 17
  The possibility of recombining the elements of vocal responses … accounts for much of the power and scope of verbal behavior. (p. 496)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 16
  The crucial question is what happens when a person says something he or she has never said before. Novel behavior occurs on novel occasions, and an occasion is novel in the sense that its features have not appeared together before in the same arrangement. (p. 495)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 15
  There are two types of mand. Pull is an action-mand, reinforced when the listener does something . . . An object-mand is more likely to occur in the presence of the object, because it has more often been reinforced in the presence of that object. We are much more likely to ask for the tings… Read more: Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 15
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Evolution of Verbal Behavior. Quote 14
  When tacts are taught as “the names of things,” teachers use a generalized reinforcer—such as “Good!” or some other social reinforcer. (p. 495)

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