Skinner, B. F.
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Core ideas
Asked about Freud, Skinner credits him as a determinist who showed that slips and accidents are lawful, but rejects the "mental apparatus" Freud used to fill the gap between childhood events and adult behaviour. The unconscious, feelings and memories are for him fictions or "primitive animism". Awareness itself is a product of society, which keeps asking us why we do things. He also rejects homeostatic models of motivation, needs and drives (including McClelland's "need for achievement") as mushy substitutes for describing behaviour. What matters is the rate of a response as a function of manipulable variables. Food reinforces not because it reduces a need, and a pigeon or a child becomes a "high achiever" through schedules of reinforcement, not by altering needs. Emotions are changes in the probability of kinds of behaviour: anger as a heightened probability of attack, fear of flight, love of doing good to another. Psychosomatic theories he calls "mostly nonsense". He has no objection to physiology studying what happens inside, but insists there is no "copy" of the world in the body. Perception should wait, and Gestalt illusions remain as unexplained as in 1912.
Skinner distinguishes operant behaviour, which acts on the environment and is defined by its consequences ("the purpose of an act is the consequence it has had"), from Pavlov's conditioned reflex. He prefers "contingencies of reinforcement" to Guthrie's contiguity. His early experiments suggested that punishment suppresses behaviour only temporarily and breeds escape, truancy, apathy and emotional side effects. Positive reinforcement has no such by-products, yet law, religion, morality and schooling remain built on aversive control, because its results are immediate. Personal responsibility, he notes, only makes sense under a punitive system. He favours reinforcing incompatible behaviour and "errorless" learning over extinction. The teaching machine simply arranges contingencies more effectively than a teacher can alone: it shapes a pigeon into a figure eight in minutes, brings behaviour under stimulus control, and stretches schedules until a pigeon pecks thousands of times for a little food. Anything that can be verbalized, even epistemology, can be programmed. In mental hospitals and institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, contrived simplified environments could make lives happier and more productive.
On Walden Two, Skinner insists it is a genuine utopia. He thinks hostile critics such as Life and Joseph Wood Krutch object only that it was designed by someone, and argues that despotism fails because it weakens the group, which is why his fictional founder Frazier suppresses himself. He predicts that education will become individualized, teaching ways of thinking and a lasting "love of reading" rather than set texts, and that homework will one day be a reward rather than a punishment. He reads Freud's defence mechanisms as ways of escaping aversive control. He calls himself a theorist only in the sense of seeking general formulations, not explanations by mental or neural "other universes", and rejects hypothetico-deductive method and experimental design as accounts of how science is done. His main contribution, he says, is the cumulative record of response rate. He also interprets law, economics, games, religion and "paleo-behavior" as systems of contingencies. Against charges of degrading human dignity, he argues that a determined man can still control his future by changing his environment, and he denies being a propagandist, pointing to his debates with Carl Rogers and the friendly culture of operant researchers.
Excerpts
B. F. Skinner on Freud's legacy:
“I think Freud made some very important contributions as a determinist uh he convinced a good many people that things which had been dismissed as accidents Caprice slips and so on were actually lawful and I think he was right on that but he unfortunately had to fill in the gap between the events which he causely related and he chose to do it by constructing or piecing together and modifying an elaborate conception of something going on inside the organism”
B. F. Skinner on needs versus reinforcement:
“I could uh make a a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a certain schedule and I can make a child a high achiever by reinforcing it on a given schedule I can't do it by altering a needs I don't know how to alter needs you don't there are no way in which you can put a key in a slot and twist a need in a person”
B. F. Skinner on responsibility and aversive control:
“the notion of personal responsibility only makes sense under an aversive system when you say an individual is responsible for his action you mean simply that he can be justly punished when he fails to act and if you turn to positive reinforcement there's no comparable notion of responsibility at all”