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:

• Recent Issues: Extended Edition. Chapter 1: The Place of Feeling in the Analysis of Behavior. Quote 5.
  All words for feelings seem to have begun as metaphors, and it is significant that the transfer has always been from public to private. No word seems to have originated as the name of a feeling. (p. 8).
• Recent Issues: Extended Edition. Chapter 1: The Place of Feeling in the Analysis of Behavior. Quote 4.
  Good behaviorists would say, “You reinforce my behavior” rather than “You reinforce me,” because it is behavior, not the behaving person, that is being reinforced in the sense of being strengthened; but they would say much more. (p. 5)
• Recent Issues: Extended Edition. Chapter 1: The Place of Feeling in the Analysis of Behavior. Quote 3.
  The very privacy which suggests that we ought to know our own bodies especially well is a severe handicap for those who must teach us to know them. (p. 4)
• Recent Issues: Extended Edition. Chapter 1: The Place of Feeling in the Analysis of Behavior. Quote 2.
  Methodological behaviorists, like logical positivists, argued that science must confine itself to events that can be observed by two or more people; truth must be truth by agreement … That was not a very satisfactory position, of course … Radical behaviorism has never taken that line. (p. 3)
• Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior: Extended Edition. Chapter 1: The Place of Feeling in the Analysis of Behavior. Quote 1.
  Behaviorists are not supposed to have feelings, or at least to admit that they have them. Of the many ways in which behaviorism has been misunderstood for so many years, that is perhaps the commonest. (p. 3)
• Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior: Extended Edition
  In 2018, we published a selection of quotes from Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. Since then, the Foundation has published an Extended Edition of the book, featuring two additional papers: The World of Our Own and Can Psychology Be a Science of Mind? We decided to revisit the title with a new selection… Read more: Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior: Extended Edition
• Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior: Extended Edition
  In 2018, we published a selection of quotes from Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. Since then, the Foundation has published an Extended Edition of the book, featuring two additional papers: The World of Our Own and Can Psychology Be a Science of Mind? We decided to revisit this title with a new selection… Read more: Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior: Extended Edition
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 16
  We do not always need listeners if our verbal behavior has been strongly reinforced or reinforced on an intermittent schedule. The witty response at a cocktail party occurs again and again before we go to sleep that night, and we need not ask who the listener is, any more than we need ask what the… Read more: Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 16
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 15
  Internal dialogues … are often called thinking, but all behavior is thinking, as I argue in the last chapter in Verbal Behavior. (p. 515)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 13
  Those who have been directly exposed to contingencies behave more subtly and effectively than those who have merely been told, taught, or advised to behave or who follow rules. (pp. 512-513)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 12
  If cognitive psychologists were correct in saying that rules are in the contingencies, it would not matter whether we learned them from the contingencies or from the rule—in other words, from acquaintance or description. The results, however, are obviously different. (p. 512)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 11
  The rules of games describe invented contingencies of reinforcement. There are natural contingencies in which running faster than another person is reinforced, but the contingencies in a marathon are contrived. (p. 510)
• Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition. Supplemental Material: The Behavior of the Listener. Quote 10
  Instructional contingencies in schools and colleges are designed to prepare students for contingencies of reinforcement which they will encounter at some later time. Few, if any, natural reinforcers are therefore available, and reinforcers must be contrived. (p. 508)
• 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)

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