B. F. Skinner

Originator of Behaviourism

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, social philosopher and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called radical behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in interest experimentally and in applied settings.

Skinner discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement. In a June, 2002 survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. He was a prolific author who published 21 books and 180 articles.

• List of awards and positions
• Bibliography
• B.F. Skinner Archives

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Early Years:

B.F. Skinner described his Pennsylvania childhood as "warm and stable." As a boy, he enjoyed building and inventing things; a skill he would later use in his own psychological experiments. He received a B.A. in English literature in 1926 from Hamilton College, and spent some time as a struggling writer before discovering the writings of Watson and Pavlov. Inspired by these works, Skinner decided to abandon his career as a novelist and entered the psychology graduate program at Harvard University.

Skinner married Yvonne Blue in 1936, and the couple went on to have two daughters, Julie and Deborah.

Career:

In 1945, Skinner moved to Bloomington, Indiana and became Psychology Department Chair and the University of Indiana. In 1948, he joined the psychology department at Harvard University where he remained for the rest of his life. He became one of the leaders of behaviorism and his work contributed immensely to experimental psychology. He also invented the 'Skinner box,' in which a rat learns to obtain food by pressing a lever.

Awards:

• 1966 Edward Lee Thorndike Award, American Psychological Association
• 1968 - National Medal of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson
• 1971 - Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation
• 1972 - Human of the Year Award
• 1990 - Citation for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology

Research:

B.F. Skinner is famous for his research on operant conditioning and negative reinforcement. He developed a device called the "cumulative recorder," which showed rates of responding as a sloped line. Using this device, he found that behavior did not depend on the preceding stimulus as Watson and Pavlov maintained. Instead, Skinner found that behaviors were dependent upon what happens after the response. Skinner called this operant behavior.

(Source: about.com)

Writer, Psychologist. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. While a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1920s, he studied animal behavior, including positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, and memory. He created a box with a simple control that could be manipulated by animals, such as a lever or disk, and trained animals to respond to stimuli with rewards (such as food) or punishment (such as shocks). This box is known as an operant conditioning chamber, or a Skinner Box. He received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher until 1936. He publicized his behavioral theory in his first book, Behavior of Organisms, published in 1938, describing how environment controls behavior. He taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946–1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. In his book Science and Human Behavior, published in 1953, he redefined negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the occurrence of some event, and negative reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the removal or avoidance of some aversive event. He believed that effective teaching must be based on positive reinforcement which is, he argued, more effective at changing and establishing behavior than punishment, as the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment. This view had implications for the practice of rote learning and punitive discipline in education. He also wrote Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, for which he made the cover of TIME Magazine. Walden Two describes a fictional "experimental community" in 1940s United States, where the residents practice scientific social planning and use operant conditioning in raising their children. His public exposure increased in the 1970s, and he remained active in social causes until his death. Ten days before his death, he was given the lifetime achievement award by the American Psychological Association and gave a talk in an auditorium concerning his work.