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“Education is what remains when everything learned is forgotten.”
Burres Frederick Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania on March 20, 1904.
Family
He was brought up in a warm and well-desired family atmosphere, where, however, great attention was paid to the strict observance of discipline.
The general positive attitude was achieved due to the fact that parents did not abuse punishments, but, on the contrary, maintained discipline and order, each time encouraging and rewarding deeds that deserved it.
Childhood and youth
In childhood and adolescence, the interests of the future psychologist were extremely diverse.
He was fond of experimenting with mechanical devices, tried to make a homemade air gun, and once even designed a sophisticated multi-block structure in order to neatly hang his own pajamas.
While at school, Skinner was fond of literature. When he was 14 years old, based on a rigorous analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, he put forward his own hypothesis about their authorship, which he attributed to Francis Bacon.
In addition, Burres was a good musician: he played the saxophone in the school band.
Education
Burres Skinner received his higher education at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in New York State.
He majored in English and Literature and intended to devote himself to writing in the future.
Relationships with fellow students Skinner often participated in student pranks, and after several risky pranks organized on his initiative, the young man was almost expelled from college. He still managed to graduate from college, and in 1926 he received a bachelor’s degree.
Skinner’s interest in psychology arose after graduating from college. In 1928 he entered Harvard University in the department of psychology.
During his studies, he set himself a very strict study regimen, so, he spent 15 minutes a day on extracurricular activities.
Scientific creativity
After three years of such hard work, Skinner received his doctorate and in the same 1931 published his first serious scientific study. This publication, which brought him fame, was a small article The concept of a reflex in descriptions of behavior, in which Burres Skinner put forward a new interpretation of the conditioned reflex. He understood it not as a real act of life activity inherent in it in itself, but as a derivative of the experimenter’s operations.
skinner box
From 1931 to 1936, Skinner did research work at Harvard, concentrating on the study of animal behavior. At this time, he invented an experimental box, later called, despite the protests of the inventor himself, Skinner’s. While in this box, a rat or a pigeon, pressing a lever or a button, received a reinforcement, by which Skinner meant any pleasant consequences. The lever was connected to a recorder that recorded movement. The pressure on the lever was considered as a sample and an independent unit of the operant reaction, very convenient for fixation, since it can always be unambiguously determined whether it occurred or not. Additional devices made it possible to connect reinforcements with various signals (sound, light, etc.).
Do not confuse different conditioned reflexes!
Skinner distinguished between two types of conditioned reflexes — S and R. He referred to type S those reflexes in which the reaction occurs only in response to the impact of some stimulus, i.e. irritant. The behavior created in this way is called the respondent. The reflexes recorded in the Skinner box were assigned to type R. Here the animal first produces a reaction, and then the reaction is reinforced. Skinner called this behavior operant. During the experiments, significant differences were established between the dynamics of reactions of the R and S types.
Skinner spoke of the limitations of the traditional behavioral stimulus-response formula, which, in his opinion, is that it does not take into account the influence of the results of the reaction on subsequent behavior. The reaction is considered only as a derivative of the stimulus, only as a consequence, but not as a possible determinant that transforms the organism. These relationships are incomparably more complex than the relationship between stimulus and response.
Thus, the key difference between operant conditioning and classical conditioning is that in the case of operant conditioning, a living organism, by its behavior, actively influences the environment and faces certain consequences. In the case of the formation of a conditioned reflex, such an effect is not observed. In this sense, operant behavior is active and is aimed at exploring the surrounding world, respondent behavior is reactive and only follows certain influences that, in the process of classical conditioning, have acquired a certain signal effect for the organism.
Operant reactions in Skinner’s sense should be distinguished from automatic, purely reflex reactions associated with unconditioned and conditioned reflexes. An operant reaction is an arbitrary and purposeful action. However, Skinner defines goal-directedness in terms of feedback (that is, the impact on behavior of its consequences), and not in terms of goals, intentions, or other internal states — mental or physiological. In his opinion, the use in psychology of these «intrinsic variables» involves the introduction of questionable assumptions that add nothing to the empirical laws that relate observed behavior to observed environmental influences. It is these laws that are the real means of predicting and controlling the behavior of humans and animals. Skinner emphasized that «the objection to internal states is not that they do not exist, but that they are irrelevant to functional analysis.» In this analysis, the probability of an operator reaction appears as a function of external influences, both past and present.
According to Skinner, operant conditioning can be used not only to control the behavior of others, but also to control one’s own behavior. Self-control can be achieved by creating conditions for the desired behavior to be reinforced.
Application of operant conditioning and later career
In 1936, he took a teaching position at the University of Minnesota and worked there until 1945. Here he developed in detail the technique of operant conditioning, which was widely used in practice in the United States of America. It was used in the education of mentally retarded children, the treatment of neurotics and the mentally ill. In all cases, behavior modification was achieved here through gradual reinforcement: for example, the patient is rewarded for each action leading step by step to the goal provided for by the treatment regimen.
In the fall of 1945, he became chairman of the psychology department at Indiana State University, a post he held until 1947, after which he returned to Harvard as a lecturer, where he remained until his retirement in 1974.
In 1948, Skinner’s book Walden 2 was published, causing a huge amount of controversy. In this social utopia, Skinner portrayed in fiction the prospect of creating a new just social order through the technique of operant conditioning. The analogy with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was clearly visible in this book. Based on this, criticism began to reproach the author for almost fascism.
Programmed learning
On November 11, 1953, Skinner attended an arithmetic class at his daughter’s school. This impressed him so much that he began to try to apply his theory of reinforcement to improve the teaching of school subjects. The result of this attempt was the design of a series of teaching machines. So there was a direction called programmed learning. It was based on the principle of dividing any learning task into separate operations, each of which was controlled by a reinforcement that served as a feedback signal.
In his experiments, Skinner clearly preferred experimenting on animals, mainly pigeons and rats, believing that the difference between humans and animals is actually not at all fundamental.
Skinner had a negative attitude towards statistical generalizations, believing that only a careful fixation of the reactions of an individual organism would solve the main problem of psychology — to predict and control the behavior of specific individuals. Curves were the best way for him to capture these reactions. So, in the work Reinforcement Plans, carried out by B. Skinner together with C. Foerster, published in 1957, data on 250 million reactions continuously produced by experimental pigeons for 70 hours were collected in 000 diagrams.
Also in 1957, Burres Skinner published another book, Verbal Behavior. In it, he developed the idea that mastery of speech occurs according to the general laws of the formation of operant conditioned reflexes. When one organism produces speech sounds, the other reinforces them (positively or negatively), thereby controlling the process of acquiring stable meanings for these sounds.
Skinner died on August 18, 1990 from leukemia.
In 1990, a few weeks before his death, Skinner gave a CBS radio interview. When a reporter asked Skinner if he was afraid of death, Skinner replied, «I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.»
Results
Skinner’s scientific bibliography is very extensive: for half a century he has written 19 major monographs and many articles.
His theory and practical research results are widely used in pedagogy and medicine. In addition, they have also found expression in the world of business. So, for example, organizations use the practice of the existence of an environment of instant reinforcement of actions that are valuable for the organization. In addition, the principle of small gifts and accumulated bonuses is widely used in advertising practice.
In 1972, the American Psychological Association (which already had about a hundred thousand members at that time) named the most prominent psychologists of the XNUMXth century. According to their almost unanimous opinion, this honorary list was headed by the then-living B. F. Skinner, ahead of even Freud (who was named second).
Sources: 100 great psychologists. — M.: Veche, 2004 — 432 p.; Stepanov S.S. — Psychology in faces. — M .: Publishing House of EKSMO-Press, 2001. — 384 p.