Bf Skinner Biography

Josh Veyssi

Professor Akers

PSYC

6 February 2015

B.F. Skinner There have been many great psychologists throughout history. Many of whom have made their mark in the field, through their research, studies, and other forms of work. B.F. Skinner, a profound and well-known psychologist, is among them. The research and studies that B.F. Skinner has conducted have played a pivotal role in psychology. On March 20, 1904, Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His mother, a stay at home mother, cared for him and his younger brother, while his father was a lawyer. As a child, Skinner had an interest in building little gadgets. He was creative and enjoyed coming up with little contraptions. “Skinner attended a small

What he came up with is now known as the Skinner Box, or as Skinner called it, an operant conditioning apparatus. With this, he would bring about his own philosophy of science known as “radical behaviorism”. The Skinner Box allowed him to study the way an animal interacts with its environment. The box would have a lever that when pressed would allow a rat to feed itself. A rat would be placed in the box where it would run around in search of food. The rat would eventually find the correct spot, press the lever, and receive food. The rat would continue to repeat this process until it satisfied its hunger. With pigeons, he coined the ideas of “operant conditioning” and “shaping behavior”. Operant conditioning is the rewarding of partial behavior or an act that approaches a desired behavior. For example, if his goal was to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the right, then any movement to the right would warrant a reward. The pigeon would begin to catch on and would only receive a reward for more drastic movements to the right, until eventually completing a full turn to receive a reward. “Skinner came to to the conclusion that some form of reinforcement was crucial in learning new behaviors”

Skinner would receiver his first teaching job at the University of Minnesota. “Skinner published the results of his operant conditioning experiments in The Behavior of Organisms (1938)” (Bio.com). In 1944, Skinner wanted to help during World War II. He proposed the thought of attempting to train pigeons to guide bombs. The military would show no interest in his efforts with the release of the radar. Skinner would go on to become the Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Indiana in 1945. He would end up leaving the University of Indiana to go back to Harvard where he would be a professor, where he would remain for the rest of his career. He would also go on to write another novel in 1948. The novel entitled Walden Two, a fictional book that was based on some of his views from the studies that he conducted, about a society which was based on positive reinforcement to control human