There he built a device capable of precisely measuring and recording the number of times a rat pressed a bar to receive a food pellet. This box, along with the attached recording equipment, provided a way to collect more objective data about behavior than scientists had been able to gather before. The device came to be known as the "Skinner box"
Skinner's innovations were viewed with both admiration and suspicion by The Harvard faculty. Introspective psychology was dominant at Harvard, and behaviorism appeared to belittle studies of the inner workings of the mind. The head of the Harvard psychology department, Edwin Boring, was uncomfortable with the direction in which Fred Skinner's studies were going. To Boring's credit, he consciously tried not to be an obstacle to Fred Skinner's advancement.
In 1931, Fred Skinner received his PhD from Harvard. He remained there for several more years, conducting research. In 1937, he was offered a teaching / research position at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. He had met Yvonne Blue, his future wife, the previous year. In November of 1937, shortly before moving to Minneapolis to begin his new career, the two were married.
Skinner's brand of behaviorism was becoming more radical with time. It was fortunate that the University of Minnesota was not dominated by any particular school of psychology, and was therefore somewhat open to his brand of behaviorism.
Basically, Fred Skinner modified the tenets of behaviorism to fit his own discoveries, which involved what he called "operant conditioning." "Conditioning" is the scientific term for learning. "Operant" refers to Fred Skinner's idea that any organism "operates" on his environment - that is, performs actions that change the environment around it for better or for worse. Operant psychology is based on the idea that an action taken by a person or an animal often has consequences that occur naturally in the environment. This principal is called "operant conditioning". Reinforcement is something that makes it more likely that a given behavior will be repeated. The consequences of a given action either reinforce the behavior or do not.
For example, if a child makes faces at the teacher in school, the laughter of the other children may serve to reinforce his behavior. If the teacher punishes him by making him write, "I will not make faces" one hundred times on the chalkboard, the child may avoid such antics in the future. Thus, the child initiates the behavior, and factors in the environment either reward or punish his behavior.
Fred Skinner did not worry much about which consequence was the stronger one. He believed that if a behavior was reinforced, it was apt to be repeated. Fred Skinner believed that positive reinforcement was more effective than punishment. He also believed that the reinforcement must come swiftly.
Experimenters using Fred Skinner's techniques have taught birds and animals to perform any number of unnatural actions. We have all seen chickens playing toy pianos or dogs climbing ladders, acting like firemen. These peculiar behaviors are taught through a process called "shaping."
For example, a chicken is at first rewarded if it turns slightly in the direction of the piano. As it begins to turn toward the piano more frequently, it begins to be rewarded only when it looks directly at the piano or moves toward it. Eventually it is rewarded only when it touches the piano, and so forth.
This shaping of behavior or "successive approximation" has proven to be a very successful teaching technique. It has been adapted to teach people to overcome phobias or other disruptive behaviors.
Fred Skinner's beliefs and techniques were not radical enough in themselves to cause the storm of controversy that eventually began to swirl around him. One factor contributing to this storm was the "baby tender".
The baby tender was a device Fred Skinner invented to keep his second daughter, Deborah in a safe, thermostatically controlled environment while he worked. It was the high-tech equivalent of a playpen, but was misunderstood and construed as a diabolical device that Fred Skinner was using to experiment upon his hapless child. He was accused of keeping Deborah, who became known as "the baby in the box" inside the baby tender for three years, depriving her of fresh air and human companionship. Although this was far from the truth, magazine articles painted Fred Skinner as an unfeeling, inhumane parent.
In 1971, Fred Skinner published a book that would prove to be even more shocking to the American public. In "Beyond Freedom and Dignity", Fred Skinner challenged the very foundation of the American belief system. He dismissed the notion that individual freedom existed. Man's actions were nothing more than a set of behaviors that were shaped by his environment, over which he had no control.
Such views, even if they had been completely understood in the context of Fred Skinner's work, flew in the face of what most Americans held dear. They removed admired attributes from man -- free will, dignity, and conscious thought -- and replaced them with behaviors that were shaped by an environment over which individual man had little or no control.
Fred Skinner's penchant for substituting his own special vocabulary for words that he felt might be misunderstood probably contributed to the controversies that flared up around him. Since most people had no idea what he was talking about, these words did not clarify his ideas, but rather confused his listeners.
When he advocated the use of operant conditioning techniques to control and engineer human behavior, the idea smacked of tyranny and abuse of power. Fred Skinner responded that all behavior is already controlled by factors in the environment, and that society needed to manage some of those factors. Therapists have taken Fred Skinner's ideas and used them to help people overcome phobias and other maladaptive behavior. They are helping people control their actions without using the emotionally charged language that got Fred Skinner into so much hot water.
Psychologists have disproven the idea that a cat can always be trained to perform the same tasks as a pigeon. Instead, certain species seem to be pre-wired to perform certain types of tasks, while other species may be unable to learn them, despite their physical ability to do so.
Immediate rewards are no longer considered to be the best reinforces under all conditions, although they play an important role in many types of learning. Today, scientists acknowledge that learning involves more complicated combinations of factors. Sometimes a delayed reward is more effective than an immediate one. A combination of reward and punishment can also speed learning.
Programmed teaching materials providing immediate feedback to students' responses are utilized in today's classrooms to effectively teach certain types of material. Skinner's ideas have also been adopted to teach mentally retarded and autistic children, are used in industry to reduce job accidents, and are used in numerous applications in health-related fields.
Fred Skinner died of leukemia on August 18, 1990, at the age of 86.
In spite of some flaws in Fred. Skinner's views, the principles of operant conditioning still play an important role in the way we approach learning and behavior modification today.
Steve Eversole said: On
As a behaviour analyst with an Ed.D. And certification (BCBA-D), said “It is true that we focus on observable behaviour, but we acknowledge that cognitive activities occur. It is just that these activities are understood to be governed by the same principles that govern observable behaviour. When I solve a problem by thinking it through, I’m engaging in a verbal dialogue with myself. This dialogue is shaped by reinforcement and punishment just like any other behaviour.” When I read this statement I realised I do the same.
This brings us to the point about behaviourism not being able to explain language patterns arising without reinforcement. A developing infant will make babbling sounds, likely the result of automatic reinforcement. Parents shape these sounds over time into phonetic sounds, then words, sentences, etc. and this is how we learn to talk and engage.
The comment about animals adapting to new information is due to generalization, a phenomenon that has empirical support stretching back over 30 years.
Conclusion –
While it is true that behaviour analysis pretty much “owns” autism and anti-social behaviour, it has also developed very sophisticated technologies of instruction. “Direct Instruction” (DI) is one example. There was a very large federally funded study in (I believe) the 70s—Project Follow Through–that compared DI to several other models of instruction. DI outperformed all of the other models. However, the education establishment has yet to adopt DI for a variety of political and other reasons. The point is that contributions of behaviour analysis to instruction are legion
In some respects, behaviourism is simple. It is based on a few basic principles, yet it could explain the acquisition of language, how to teach complex concepts, and yes, how to stop a child’s tantrums. I invite people to read the writings of B.F. Skinner (particularly “About Behaviourism”), Karen Pryor (Don’t Shoot the Dog), and Julie Vargas (Behaviour Analysis for Effective Teaching).
Cognitive behavioural research on locus of control and self-efficacy has produced an extensive body of empirical results that might prove useful to psychoanalytic researchers endeavoring to strengthen the empirical foundation of psychoanalytic therapy. Cognitive-behaviorists and psychoanalysts share a common interest in the importance of perspectives and belief systems and their impact on individual freedom, and comparative research on therapeutic effectiveness could yield benefits for both therapeutic approaches.
Locus of control and self-efficacy are central elements in cognitive-behavioral psychology, and they play an important role in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Although the psychoanalytic approach does not explicitly employ those concepts, psychoanalytic therapists are obviously concerned with problems of effective action and internal obstacles to action. Attention to these two perspectives and their overlapping interest’s offers potential benefits for both the cognitive-behavioral and the psychodynamic approaches to psychological research and therapy.
One potential benefit is the development of useful tools for advancing empirically based research on psychoanalysis. As Lehrer (1999) states, it is advantageous to ground psychoanalysis in "firm empirical evidence whenever possible." Although there have obviously been significant positive steps in that direction (Singer 2003; Weiss 1995, 1988; Weiss and Sampson 1986), psychoanalytic researchers have recognized that one source of difficulty is in finding clearly measurable research objectives and hypotheses, freedom, locus of control, psychoanalysis, self-efficacy, volition.
After writing this essay I have realised I still have much to learn and there are many types of therapy approaches and to be a successful therapist you must have a good understanding of a variety of approaches.
Bibliography
Carpenter, Finley. The Skinner Primer: Behind Freedom and Dignity. New York: The Free Press, a Division of Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1974:
Bjork, Daniel W. B. F. Skinner: A Life. New York: BasicBooks, a Division of Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 1993
Hunt, Morton. The Story of Psychology. New York: Doubleday, 1993.