47 Facts About BF Skinner

Burrhus Frederic BF Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher.

BF Skinner was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

BF Skinner developed behavior analysis, especially the philosophy of radical behaviorism, and founded the experimental analysis of behavior, a school of experimental research psychology.

BF Skinner used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering the rate of response to be the most effective measure of response strength.

BF Skinner imagined the application of his ideas to the design of a human community in his 1948 utopian novel, Walden Two, while his analysis of human behavior culminated in his 1958 work, Verbal Behavior.

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BF Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to Grace and William BF Skinner, the latter of whom was a lawyer.

BF Skinner became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to assuage his fear of the hell that his grandmother described.

BF Skinner's closest friend as a young boy was Raphael Miller, whom he called Doc because his father was a doctor.

Doc and BF Skinner became friends due to their parents' religiousness and both had an interest in contraptions and gadgets.

BF Skinner attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer.

BF Skinner found himself at a social disadvantage at the college because of his intellectual attitude.

BF Skinner was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.

BF Skinner wrote for the school paper, but, as an atheist, he was critical of the traditional mores of his college.

BF Skinner became disillusioned with his literary skills despite encouragement from the renowned poet Robert Frost, concluding that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write.

BF Skinner received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher for some years.

In 1973, BF Skinner was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

BF Skinner referred to his approach to the study 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.

BF Skinner distinguished two sorts of behavior which are controlled in different ways:.

BF Skinner's account differed in some ways from earlier ones, and was one of the first accounts to bring them under one roof.

BF Skinner believed that 'superstitious' behavior can arise when a response happens to be followed by reinforcement to which it is actually unrelated.

BF Skinner answered this question by saying that a stimulus comes to control an operant if it is present when the response is reinforced and absent when it is not.

However, BF Skinner recognized that a great deal of behavior, especially human behavior, cannot be accounted for by gradual shaping or the construction of response sequences.

BF 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.

BF Skinner designed it for use with the operant chamber as a convenient way to record and view the rate of responses such as a lever press or a key peck.

BF Skinner invented the device to help his wife cope with the day-to-day tasks of child rearing.

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In 2004 therapist Lauren Slater repeated unfounded rumors that BF Skinner had used his baby daughter in some of his experiments, and that she had subsequently committed suicide.

BF Skinner pioneered the use of teaching machines in the classroom, especially at the primary level.

Early in his career BF Skinner became interested in "latent speech" and experimented with a device he called the verbal summator.

BF Skinner recommended bringing students' behavior under appropriate control by providing reinforcement only in the presence of stimuli relevant to the learning task.

BF Skinner was convinced that, to learn, a student must engage in behavior, and not just passively receive information.

BF Skinner believed that effective teaching must be based on positive reinforcement which is, he argued, more effective at changing and establishing behavior than punishment.

BF Skinner suggested that the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment.

Teachers are primarily responsible for modifying student behavior, BF Skinner argued that teachers must learn effective ways of teaching.

BF Skinner is popularly known mainly for his books Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, .

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, BF Skinner suggests that a technology of behavior could help to make a better society.

BF Skinner offers alternatives to punishment, and challenges his readers to use science and modern technology to construct a better society.

Indeed, one of BF Skinner's goals was to prevent humanity from destroying itself.

BF Skinner saw political activity as the use of aversive or non-aversive means to control a population.

BF Skinner described his novel as "my New Atlantis", in reference to Bacon's utopia.

BF Skinner's going to be free, but he's going to find himself in hell.

One of BF Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon.

BF Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals", and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:.

Furthermore, Chomsky had aimed at delivering a definitive refutation of BF Skinner by citing dozens of animal instinct and animal learning studies.

BF Skinner has been repeatedly criticized for his supposed animosity towards Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and psychodynamic psychology.

Some have argued that BF Skinner shared several of Freud's assumptions, and that he was influenced by Freudian points of view in more than one field, among them the analysis of defense mechanisms, such as repression.

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BF Skinner is not an originating force and he had no choice in saying the things he said or doing the things he did.

Staddon has argued the compatibilist position; BF Skinner's determinism is not in any way contradictory to traditional notions of reward and punishment, as he believed.