The novel Walden II, written by behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, takes place around the 1950’s, just after the end of World War II. The story begins as the narrator, Professor Burris, describes the visit of a former student who goes by his last name, Rodgers. He brought along with him a friend named Steve Jamnick. As they begin to talk, Rodgers mentions a professor who spoke of a utopian society and Burris realizes that he is speaking of a former classmate of his named T.E. Frazier. Burris eventually searches Frazier’s name in a directory, learns that he lives in a small community named Walden II, and decides to write him a letter, requesting any information possible. Frazier soon replies and invites Burris and anyone else who was interested, to visit him in his society. Within a day or so, the group, which included Burris, Jamnick, Rodgers, along with their girlfriends Mary Grove and Barbara Macklin, and Augustine Castle a philosopher who is interested …show more content…
Frazier’s main focus in building Walden II as well as the other Walden communities is behavioral engineering. Behavioral engineering is defined as a type of engineering used to identify issues associated with technology and the humans that operate and design practices that utilize the strengths as well as the limitations of those human operators. Basically, behavioral engineering, in this sense, is first identifying the major technologies and their functions and instead of improving them, they are using the natural talents of man to combine the two, improving not only the technology but also increasing the possibility of positive outcome. Frazier noticed that many things such as unnecessary work, over exposure, as well as negative emotion negatively impact the every-day community so when he created Walden II, he would focus on eliminating these negative aspects of life. This is the reason for the separate rooms for spouses, the similar environments for children, the credit system, etc, were