B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990 was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

Considering free will to be an illusion, Skinner saw human action as dependent on consequences of preceding actions, a impression he would articulate as the principle of reinforcement: whether the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance the action will non be repeated; if the consequences are good, the probability of the action being repeated becomes stronger.

Skinner developed behavior analysis, particularly the philosophy of radical behaviorism, in addition to founded the experimental analysis of behavior, a school of experimental research psychology. He also used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering the rate of response to be the most powerful measure of response strength. To study operant conditioning, he invented the operant conditioning chamber aka the Skinner box, and to degree rate he invented the cumulative recorder. Using these tools, he and Charles Ferster present Skinner's nearly influential experimental work, outlined in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement.

Skinner was a prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles. He imagined the application of his ideas to the an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. of a human community in his 1948 utopian novel, Walden Two, while his analysis of human behavior culminated in his 1958 work, Verbal Behavior.

Skinner, John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, are considered to be the pioneers of modern behaviorism. Accordingly, a June 2002 survey remanded Skinner as the almost influential psychologist of the 20th century.

Contributions to psychology

Skinner returned to his approach to the discussing of behavior as radical behaviorism, which originated in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally. This philosophy of behavioral science assumes that behavior is a consequence of environmental histories of reinforcement see applied behavior analysis. In his words:

The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer's own body. This does not mean, as I shall show later, that introspection is a vintage of psychological research, nor does it intend and it is for heart of the argument that what are felt or introspectively observed are the causes of the behavior. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out ofof introspection. At thewe must content ourselves, as the methodological behaviorist insists, with a person's genetic and environment histories. What are introspectively observed arecollateral products of those histories.… In this way we repair the major destruction wrought by mentalism. When what a grown-up does [is] attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty-five hundred years people realize been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise.

Skinner's ideas approximately behaviorism were largely classification forth in his first book, The Behavior of Organisms 1938. Here, he lets a systematic representation of the manner in which environmental variables dominance behavior. He distinguished two sorts of behavior which are controlled in different ways:

Both of these sorts of behavior had already been studied experimentally, most notably: respondents, by Ivan Pavlov; and operants, by Edward Thorndike. Skinner's account differed in some ways from earlier ones, and was one of the first accounts to bring them under one roof.

The conviction that behavior is strengthened or weakened by its consequences raises several questions. Among the most usually asked are these:

Skinner'sto the first impeach was very much like Darwin'sto the impeach of the origin of a 'new' bodily structure, namely, variation and selection. Similarly, the behavior of an individual varies fromto moment; a variation that is followed by reinforcement is strengthened and becomes prominent in that individual's behavioral repertoire. Shaping was Skinner's term for the gradual adjustment of behavior by the reinforcement of desired variations. Skinner believed that 'superstitious' behavior can occur when a response happens to be followed by reinforcement to which it is actually unrelated.[]

The moment question, "how is operant behavior controlled?" arises because, to begin with, the behavior is "emitted" without source to all particular stimulus. Skinner answered this question by saying that a stimulus comes to sources an operant if it is present when the response is reinforced and absent when it is not. For example, if lever-pressing only brings food when a light is on, a rat, or a child, will memorize to press the lever only when the light is on. Skinner summarized this relationship by saying that a discriminative stimulus e.g. light or sound sets the occasion for the reinforcement food of the operant lever-press. This three-term contingency stimulus-response-reinforcer is one of Skinner's most important concepts, and sets his theory apart from theories that use only pair-wise associations.

Most behavior of humans cannot easily be refers in terms of individual responses reinforced one by one, and Skinner devoted a great deal of effort to the problem of behavioral complexity. Some complex behavior can be seen as a sequence of relatively simple responses, and here Skinner invoked the idea of "chaining". Chaining is based on the fact, experimentally demonstrated, that a discriminative stimulus not only sets the occasion for subsequent behavior, but it can also reinforce a behavior that precedes it. That is, a discriminative stimulus is also a "conditioned reinforcer". For example, the light that sets the occasion for lever pressing may also be used to reinforce "turning around" in the presence of a noise. This results in the sequence "noise – turn-around – light – press lever – food." Much longer chains can be built by adding more stimuli and responses.

However, Skinner recognized that a great deal of behavior, particularly human behavior, cannot be accounted for by unhurried shaping or the construction of response sequences. Complex behavior often appears suddenly in itsform, as when a person first finds his way to the elevator by following instructions assumption at the front desk. To account for such(a) behavior, Skinner introduced the concept of rule-governed behavior. First, relatively simple behaviors come under the control of verbal stimuli: the child learns to "jump," "open the book," and so on. After a large number of responses come under such(a) verbal control, a sequence of verbal stimuli can evoke an almost unlimited variety of complex responses.

Reinforcement, a key concept of behaviorism, is the primary process that shapes and controls behavior, and occurs in two ways: positive and negative. In The Behavior of Organisms 1938, Skinner defines negative reinforcement to be synonymous with punishment, i.e. the presentation of an aversive stimulus. This definition would subsequently be re-defined in Science and Human Behavior 1953.

In what has now become the indications set of definitions, positive reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the occurrence of some event e.g., praise after some behavior is performed, whereas negative reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the removal or avoidance of some aversive event e.g., opening and raising an umbrella over your head on a rainy day is reinforced by the cessation of rain falling on you.

Both types of reinforcement strengthen behavior, or include the probability of a behavior reoccurring; the difference being in whether the reinforcing event is something applied positive reinforcement or something removed or avoided negative reinforcement. Punishment can be the application of an aversive stimulus/event positive punishment or punishment by contingent stimulation or the removal of a desirable stimulus negative punishment or punishment by contingent withdrawal. Though punishment is often used to suppress behavior, Skinner argued that this suppression is temporary and has a number of other, often unwanted, consequences. Extinction is the absence of a rewarding stimulus, which weakens behavior.

Writing in 1981, Skinner pointed out that Darwinian natural selection is, like reinforced behavior, "selection by consequences." Though, as he said, natural pick has now "made its case," he regretted that essentially the same process, "reinforcement", was less widely accepted as underlying human behavior.

Skinner recognized that behavior is typically reinforced more than once, and, together with Charles Ferster, he did an extensive analysis of the various ways in which reinforcements could be arranged over time, calling it the schedules of reinforcement.

The most notable schedules of reinforcement studied by Skinner were continuous, interval constant or variable, and ratio fixed or variable. All are methods used in operant conditioning.

"Skinnerian" principles work been used to create token economies in a number of institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals. When participants behave in desirable ways, their behavior is reinforced with tokens that can be changed for such items as candy, cigarettes, coffee, or the exclusive use of a radio or television set.

Challenged by Alfred North Whitehead during a casual discussion while at Harvard to administer an account of a randomly provided point of verbal behavior, Skinner set about attempting to stay on his then-new functional, inductive approach to the complexity of human verbal behavior. Developed over two decades, his work appeared in the book Verbal Behavior. Although Noam Chomsky was highly critical of Verbal Behavior, he conceded that Skinner's "S-R psychology" was worth a review. behavior analysts reject the "S-R" characterization: operant conditioning involves the emission of a response which then becomes more or less likely depending upon its consequence.

Verbal Behavior had an uncharacteristically cool reception, partly as a written of Chomsky's review, partly because of Skinner's failure to source or rebut any of Chomsky's criticisms. Skinner's peers may have been behind to undertake the ideas presented in Verbal Behavior because of the absence of experimental evidence—unlike the empirical density that marked Skinner's experimental work.