The Story of Psychology (52 page)

So he must have been one of the great contributors to humankind’s quest for self-understanding, right?

Far from it.

Human self-understanding, at least as sought by philosophers and psychologists for so many centuries, was no part of Skinner’s aim or contribution. Throughout his long life he held fast to his extreme behaviorist view that “subjective entities” such as mind, thought, memory, and reasoning do not exist but are only “verbal constructs, grammatical traps into which the human race in the development of language has fallen,” “explanatory entities” that themselves are unexplainable.
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Skinner’s goal was not to understand the human psyche but to determine how behavior is created by external causes. He had no doubt about the correctness of his views; as he wrote in a short autobiography—he also wrote a three-volume one—“[Behaviorism] may need to be clarified, but it does not need to be argued.”
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Nor did he add much to psychological theory; he considered theories of learning unnecessary and claimed not to have one. Such theory as he did hold can be summed up in the statement that everything we do and are is determined by our history of rewards and punishments; the details of the theory, as he developed them through research, consisted of such principles as the partial reinforcement effect described above, concerning the circumstances that cause behavior to be acquired and those that cause it to be extinguished.

What, then, made him so well known?

Like Watson he was by nature a controversial man, a provocateur, and a superb publicist. On his very first TV appearance he posed a dilemma originally propounded by Montaigne—“Would you, if you had to choose, burn your children or your books?”—and said that he himself would burn his children, since his contribution to the future would be greater through his work than through his genes.
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Predictably, he elicited outrage—and many invitations for further appearances.

At other times he seemed to take pleasure in offending thoughtful people by deriding the terms in which they talked about and comprehended human behavior:

He consistently pooh-poohed the effort to understand the inner person:

All we need to know or can know, he said, are the external causes of behavior and the observable results of that behavior; these will yield “a comprehensive picture of the organism as a behaving system.”

Consonant with that view, he was a rigorous determinist: “We are what we are because of our history. We like to believe we can choose, we can act… [but] I don’t believe a person is either free or responsible.” The “autonomous” human being is an illusion; the good person is one who has been conditioned to behave that way, and the good society would be one based on “behavioral engineering”—the scientific control of behavior through methods of positive reinforcement.
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Skinner was a deft showman and popularizer; he was fluent, lucid, unabashedly egotistic, and charming. To demonstrate the power of his own technique of conditioning, he taught a pigeon to peck out a tune on a toy piano, and a pair of pigeons to play a kind of table tennis in which they rolled a ball back and forth with their beaks; millions who have seen these performances on TV documentaries think of Skinner as a Svengali, at least of animals. He presented his vision of the ideal, scientifically controlled society in the form of a utopian novel,
Walden Two
(1948), picturing a small society in which, from birth onward, children are rigorously conditioned by rewards (positive reinforcement) to be cooperative and sociable; all behavior is controlled, but for the good and the happiness of all. Despite wooden dialogue and a labored plot, it became a cult book and perennial favorite with undergraduates, and has sold well over two million copies.

But his fame with the public was greater than his standing with fellow professionals. As one admirer, the psychologist Norman Guttman, wrote in
The American Psychologist
some years ago:

Skinner was born in 1904 in a small Pennsylvania railroad town, where his father was a lawyer. As a boy, he had a great aptitude for building Rube Goldberg contraptions; later, as a psychologist, he would invent and build remarkably effective apparatuses for animal experimentation. In school and college he aspired to become a writer, and after college spent a year, much of it in Greenwich Village, trying to write. Although he closely observed the manifold forms of human behavior all around him, he discovered after a while that he had nothing to say about what he saw and, deeply dejected, gave up the effort.

But he soon found another and, for him, more practicable way to understand human behavior. In his reading he came across discussions of Watson’s and Pavlov’s work, read books by each of them, and decided that his future lay in a scientific approach to human behavior, particularly the study of conditioning. “I was very bitter about my failure in literature,” he told an interviewer in 1977, “and I was sure that writers never really understood anything. And that was why I turned to psychology.”
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He proceeded to Harvard. Introspective psychology reigned there, but he was no longer interested in what he called “the inside story,” and quietly went his own way, doing behaviorist research with rats. In his autobiography he recalls with pleasure having been something of a bad boy: “They may have thought that someone in psychology was keeping an eye on me, but the fact was that I was doing exactly as I pleased.”
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Despite the teachings of his professors, he became ever more thoroughly behaviorist, and at his dissertation examination, when asked to name some objections to behaviorism, he could not think of one.

Making good use of his mechanical aptitude, he constructed a puzzle box that was a great improvement over the Thorndike model; widely used ever since, it is known as the Skinner box. In its basic form—it has many models—it is a cage, large enough to comfortably accommodate a white rat, with a horizontal bar on one wall just above a little food tray and a water spout. When the rat, prowling about the cage, happens to rest its forepaws on the bar, pressing it down, a food pellet automatically drops into the tray. Connected equipment outside the cage automatically records the behavior by drawing a line showing the cumulative number of bar pressings minute by minute. This was a much more efficient way of gathering data than Thorndike’s puzzle box procedure, since the experimenter did not have to observe the rat or deliver the food when it pressed the bar but merely look at the record.

The box also yielded more objective data on the acquisition or extinction
of behavior than anyone had gathered thus far. The rat, and it alone, determined how much time elapsed between one pressing of the bar and the next. Skinner could base his findings of learning principles on the “response rate”—the rate at which the animal’s behavior changed in response to reinforcement—uncontaminated by the experimenter’s actions.

Moreover, Skinner could program the box in ways that approximated many circumstances in the real world that either reinforce or fail to reinforce behavior. He could, for instance, study the learning of a response when it is regularly rewarded; the extinction of a learned response when the reward is abruptly discontinued; the effects on learning and on extinction when rewards are delivered intermittently at regular intervals (say, every fourth bar pressing); the effects when rewards are delivered intermittently at irregular intervals; the effects of mixed results of bar pressing (such as a reward coupled with an electric shock); and so on. In each case, the data yielded a curve showing the rate of acquisition or extinction of a behavior under those particular circumstances.

From these curves, Skinner formulated a number of principles that cast light on the behavior of rats—and human beings. An example is his discovery of an important variation of the partial reinforcement effect. After rats had been trained on a schedule in which food pellets were delivered only once in a while and at irregular intervals, the rats would persist in their bar pressing even if the food-dispensing apparatus was turned off altogether. Their learned behavior was more resistant to extinction than that of rats trained to intermittent but regular reinforcement.
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This has been likened by some to the behavior of a slot machine player in a casino: neither the rat nor the gambler has any way of predicting when the next reinforcement is to come, but, being accustomed to occasional rewards, will hang on in the hope of getting one on the next try.
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Skinner’s most important contribution, however, was his concept of “operant conditioning”; for this alone he merits a permanent place in the Hall of Fame of psychology.

In “classical” (Pavlov’s) conditioning, the animal’s unconditioned response (salivating) to food is made into a conditioned response to a formerly neutral stimulus (the sound of the metronome or bell); the crucial element in the behavior change is the new stimulus.

In “instrumental” (Thorndike’s) conditioning, the crucial element in behavior change is the response, not the stimulus. A neutral response— the accidental stepping on the treadle during random efforts to get to
the food—is rewarded and becomes a learned bit of behavior serving an end it formerly did not have.

Skinner’s operant conditioning is an important development in instrumental conditioning. Any random movement the animal makes, for whatever reason, can be thought of as “operating” on the environment in some way and therefore, in Skinner’s terms, is an “operant”; rewarding the movement produces operant conditioning. By rewarding a series of little random movements, one by one, the experimenter can “shape” the behavior of the animal until it acts in ways that were not part of its original or natural repertoire.

Here is how Skinner shaped the behavior of a pigeon to peck at a small colored plastic disk set flush in one wall of the Skinner box:

(Other experimenters, using Skinner’s technique, have constructed far more peculiar behaviors. One taught a rabbit to pick up a coin in its mouth and drop it into a piggy bank; another taught a pig named Priscilla to turn on a TV set, pick up dirty clothes and put them in a hamper, and run a vacuum cleaner over the floor.
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)

Skinner likened the operant training of his pigeons to a child’s learning to talk, sing, dance, play games, and in time acquire the entire repertoire of adult behavior. All, in his view, is due to the assembling of long chains of behavior out of tiny links of simple behaviors by operant conditioning. One might call it an Erector-set view of the human being
(
Homo erectorus?
)—a mindless robot assembled by operant conditioning from a multitude of meaningless bits.

Skinner was more or less ignored by the psychological establishment for a long while but slowly acquired a number of devotees—enough, finally, to result in the publication of four journals of Skinner behaviorist research and theory and the creation of a special section of Skinner-type studies within the American Psychological Association (Division 25, Experimental Analysis of Behavior, since renamed Behavior Analysis). Skinner boxes and the techniques of operant conditioning have long been widely used by experimental psychologists. In recent years Skinner’s name and work have been cited in hundreds of behavioral science publications each year (though far less often than Freud’s).
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Still, it was outside of mainstream psychology that Skinner had his major impact.

During a visit to his daughter’s fourth-grade class in 1953, it occurred to him that operant techniques similar to those by which he had taught pigeons to play the piano would make for more efficient teaching than traditional methods. Complicated subjects could be broken down into simple steps in a logical sequence; the students would be presented with questions, and immediately told whether their answers were correct. Two principles would be at work here: the knowledge that one has answered correctly is a powerful reinforcer (reward) of behavior; and immediate reinforcement works better than delayed reinforcement. The result is known as “programmed instruction.”