Chapter 5

Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Modified: 2025-01-20 7:24 PM CST

Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism survives to the present, mostly as a self-isolated subfield of psychology. Its proponents often label themselves as behavior analysts or applied behavior analysts. Nevertheless, its accomplishments have been many starting with the operant chamber (Skinner Box) and the cumulative recorder. Applied behavior analysis moved Radical Behaviorism out of the laboratory and into homes, classroom, businesses, and hospitals. Its discoveries of schedules of reinforcement, the partial reinforcement extinction effect, and shaping are covered in all introductory psychology texts. Less influential have been Skinner’s contributions to the study of language acquisition and his utopian desire to transform the world for the better using Radical Behaviorism.

Skinner defined psychology as a science of behavior. For him, biology was psychology’s nearest neighbor. He used operant conditioning to explain much (but not all) of the behavior of organisms. He also wrote extensively about how cultures operate to select long-standing practices through the action of verbal communities. Most telling, however, was his environmental determinism along with his overarching definition of the environment. For him, the environment extended “inside the skin,” a move that displaced any cognitive components and any arguments for free will or individual autonomy. Of these three neobehaviorist approaches, only Skinner’s survives to the present day (although it includes only a relatively small proportion of contemporary psychologists).

• After the World War II, Skinner made an Air Crib in which he and his wife, Yvonne, raised their second daughter. He made the Air Crib for their second child, Deborah, partly to keep her warm in the Minnesota weather without having to bundle her with layers of clothing.
  • The Air Crib
• Skinner attempted to market the device but it never caught on, especially following an article in the Ladies Home Journal magazine (Skinner, 1945) that described it as an experiment in child rearing. Urban legends circulated that Deborah had either gone crazy or committed suicide. Those legends were untrue; she was a well-adjusted child and a successful adult (Joyce & Faye, 2010).
• Skinner invented two pieces of laboratory apparatus that were instrumental in the development of Radical Behaviorism. One was the operant conditioning chamber or Skinner Box. The other was the cumulative recorder. He constructed Skinner boxes suitable for rats and pigeons. In rat chambers the response was usually a lever press b). A small bit of food or water served as the reinforcer. The chamber itself was the discriminative stimulus but other discriminative stimuli (e.g., lights or tones) could be added. The dependent variable in a Skinner Box was the rate of response (number of responses over time) which was measured by the cumulative recorder. The Skinner Box made the discovery of schedules of reinforcement and shaping possible (see below).
  Rat Operant Chamber
  Pigeon Operant Chamber
• Cumulative Recorder (video)

Radical Behaviorism

• As far as radical behaviorists are concerned no border exists between psychology and biology.
  • In fact, they consider Radical Behaviorism to be a part of biological science.
• Borrowing the mechanism of selection from evolutionary theory, they argue that it operates at three levels.
  • The first level is Darwin’s natural selection that selects organisms whose genes allow them to reproduce and become more numerous. Innate behaviors come from this level.
  • The second level is operant conditioning that selects organisms’ emitted behaviors (or operants) through the action of the environment. Those selected behaviors also “reproduce” and become more numerous. Learned behaviors in animals and humans come from this level.
  • The final level is cultural where humans’ verbal responses (also considered to be operants) are selected through the action of the linguistic communities people live in. The verbal responses selected by the linguistic community a person lives in also become more numerous. Culturally based behaviors in humans come from this level.
    
• Radical Behaviorism interprets each type of selection at its own level with each possessing its own time frame.
  • So, phylogenetically based innate behaviors evolved over millions of years.
  • Learned behaviors in animals and humans develop over the course of the lifetimes of individual species members.
  • Culturally based behaviors also evolve over long periods, from as little as several lifetimes to thousands of years.
• In terms of theory, radical behaviorists confine themselves to the last two levels but take pains to demonstrate that at all three levels either genes, behaviors, or verbal behaviors are being selected mechanistically according to environmental consequences operating at their respective levels.
  

Token Economies in the Classroom

• Token economies, a type of applied behavior analysis, have been created for a wide variety of natural situations.
  • All varieties are similar in that they use tokens (e.g., arbitrary items such as poker chips or stickers) as conditioned reinforcers.
  • The tokens may be cashed in for primary reinforcers such as food according to published schedules.
• A classroom token economy is a form of contingency management where students may earn tokens for following explicit, behaviorally based classroom rules.
  • Little and Akin-Little (2008) revealed that 73% of teachers surveyed had created their own set of classroom rules. Maggin et al. (2011) reviewed 24 studies of classroom token economies and concluded (p. 22),
    • “students generally respond to these types of interventions” but that “practitioners need to be aware that the use of token economies in schools and classrooms likely requires careful oversight and systematic protocols for delivering generalized conditioned and secondary reinforcement”
  • They also called for more rigorous research that better reported student characteristics and contexts in which token economies are designed and delivered. Despite the fact that managing behavioral contingencies in the real world is more difficult than doing so in the laboratory, many teachers do so successfully every day.

mentalism: explaining behavior by recourse to variables such as cognitions, memories, or motivations.

• Skinner Shaping a Pigeon
• B. F. Skinner

Kardas on Skinner (full text)

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