Burrhus Frederic Skinner Biography

B.F. Skinner was an American psychologist and an influential advocate of behaviorism, which views human behavior in terms of physiological responses to the environment and regards the controlled, scientific study of response as the most direct means of studying human behavior.

Skinner was attracted to psychology through the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov on conditioned response, articles on behaviorism by Bertrand Russell, and the ideas of John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1931, he remained there as a researcher until 1936, when he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he wrote The Behavior of Organisms (1938).

As professor of psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington (1945-48), Skinner gained public attention through his invention of the Air-Crib, a large, soundproof, germ-free, air-conditioned box designed to serve as a mechanical baby tender, supposed to provide an optimal environment for child growth during the first two years of life. In 1948 he published one of his most controversial works, Walden Two, a novel of life in a utopian community modeled on his own principles of social engineering.

As a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1948 to 1974, Skinner's influence among his peers and students grew. A new generation of psychologists and psychological theory was born. Using various kinds of experimental equipment that he devised, he trained laboratory animals to perform complex and sometimes quite exceptional actions. A striking example was his pigeons that learned to play table tennis. One of his best-known inventions, the Skinner box, has been adopted in pharmaceutical research for observing how drugs may modify animal behavior.

The Skinner Box was actually an adaptation of an earlier device invented by Edward L. Thorndike. Thorndike's invention, the "puzzle box," was an apparatus from which the animal could escape and obtain food only by pressing a panel, opening a catch, or pulling on a loop of string. Thorndike measured the speed with which the subject animal gained its release from the box on successive trials. He observed that on early trials the animal would behave aimlessly or even frantically, stumbling on the correct response purely by chance. However, with repeated trials, the animal eventually would execute the correct response proficiently within a few seconds of being placed in the box.

Skinner's refinement was to deliver food to the animal while still inside the box via an automatic delivery device and thus the probability rate at which the animal performed the designated response could be recorded over long periods of time without having to handle the animal. He also adopted some of Pavlov's terminology, referring to his procedure as instrumental, or operant, conditioning, and to the food reward as a reinforcer of conditioning. Skinner named the decline in response when the reward was no longer available as extinction. In Skinner's original experiments, a laboratory rat had to press a small lever protruding from one wall of the box in order to obtain a pellet of food. Subsequently, the "Skinner box" was adapted for use with pigeons, who were required to peck at a small, illuminated disk on one wall of the box in order to obtain some grain. With pigeons, Skinner developed the ideas of "operant conditioning and "shaping behavior. Operant conditioning is the rewarding of a partial behavior or a random act that approaches the desired behavior. If the goal is to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the pigeon catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the pigeon has turned a complete circle before getting the reward. Skinner compared this learning with the way children learn to talk. They are rewarded for making a sound that is similar to a word until in fact they can say the word. Skinner believed other, more complicated tasks could be broken down in this way and taught. Indeed, these experiences in the step-by-step training of research animals led Skinner to formulate the principles of programmed learning.

Programmed learning in its most basic form deduces a subject into its component parts and arranges the parts in a sequential learning order. At each step in learning, the student is required to make a response and is told immediately whether or not the response is correct. The program is structured so that correct answers are likely to be extremely frequent (sometimes as much as 95% of the time). The theory is that this continual reward of correct responses encourages the student and serves as a motivator to continue. Reinforcement is the key element in Skinner's theories about learning. A reinforcer is anything that strengthens the desired response. It could be verbal praise, a good grade or a feeling of accomplishment or satisfaction.

The teaching machine itself is merely the device that provides the questions (stimulus) that require an answer (response) before the learner is allowed to continue. All teaching machines depend on a program, that is, a series of questions presented that provide a student with a certain amount of challenge as well as a chance to learn.

Unlike other psychologists before him (most notably Sigmund Freud) Skinner was not at all interested in understanding the human psyche. He sought only to determine how behavior is caused by external forces. He believed everything we do and are is shaped by our individual experiences of punishment and reward. He believed that the "mind" (as opposed to the brain) and other such subjective phenomena were simply matters of language and didn't really exist.

In addition to his widely read Science and Human Behavior (1953), Skinner wrote a number of other books, including Verbal Behavior (1957), The Analysis of Behavior (with J.G. Holland, 1961), and Technology of Teaching (1968). Another work that generated considerable controversy, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), argued that concepts of freedom and dignity may lead to self-destruction and promoted the idea of a study of behavior comparable to that of the physical and biological sciences. Skinner published an autobiography in three parts: Particulars of My Life (1976), The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979), and A Matter of Consequences (1983). The year before his death, Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior (1989) was published.