Hall of Fame
Skinner (1904 -1990)
B.F. Skinner, the American psychologist, promoted pure behaviourism.
Only observable phenomena are allowed as evidence, in this case
stimuli and their behavioural responses. No mental or cognitive
events were to be considered admissible, as they were unobservable.
His experimental work concentrated on animals and the famous Skinner
Box, where rats had to press levers to get food. Although he was
not averse to human experimentation, the claim that Skinner raised
his own daughter in a "Skinner box" and that she sued
her father, ultimately committing suicide, is an urban myth.
Operant conditioning
Learning, for Skinner, was the ability of an organism to learn
to operate in its environment (operant conditioning). If a behaviour
is reinforced through repeated stimuli it is more likely to be repeated.
An important facet of this theory is that positive reinforcement
is more powerful than negative reinforcement i.e. carrots are better
than sticks. A problem with relying just on observable behaviour
is that what one takes as evidence of reinforcement is the repeated
behaviour itself. The evidence is therefore self-fulfilling. Withdrawing
a reinforced behaviour also leads to the extinction of the behaviour.
Teaching machines and Programmed Instruction
Skinner was profoundly affected when he witnessed poor teaching
in his daughter’s maths class. The teacher, he thought, was
violating almost everything we know about learning. Rather than
adapting to the ability of the child, they were being forced through
sheets of problems with no immediate feedback on each problem. The
teacher was clearly not shaping any of the 20-30 children in the
class. They clearly required help in reinforcement.
That same afternoon he built his ‘teaching machine’,
allowing learners to practice already learnt skills. Within three
years he had developed programmed instruction, which broke material
down into small steps, and as performance improved, less and less
support was provided. As this was before the age of computers, most
of this was produced in books, where getting the answers was all
too easy. His article Teaching Machines published in Science (1958)
is still a relevant read today and in 1968 he published The Technology
of Teaching, a collection of writings on technology and education.
His analysis of what sequencing and feedback was required was way
ahead of his time and technology.
Behaviourism and social engineering
One unfortunate consequence of his strict behaviourism was the
development of the technology of conditioning; "teaching machines"
and other techniques to shape human behaviour on contraception and
so on. Walden Two (1961) was an attempt to describe and prescribe
this behaviourist utopia in the form of a novel. Interestingly,
this was to creep into parenting manuals and other social engineering.
There are still elements of this in social engineering policies
and techniques practiced by governments today. Attempts to put Walden
Two into practice did not succeed spectacularly but one commune
is still going in Mexico!
Conclusion
The weaknesses of behaviourism are now well known. Obsessively
ignoring all internal, cognitive mental events led to a relevant,
but narrow account of learning. As the post-coital behaviourist
couple joke goes, ‘That was great for you, how was it for
me’. Its over-dependence on external stimuli along with a
tendency to take animal experiments and extend them to humans led
to a suffocating, straightjacketed view of psychology. In The Behaviour
of Organisms, only two were mentioned; rats and pigeons. This reliance
on animal experimentation was far too narrow. To ignore the brain
and internal events was to ignore the vast amount of evidence now
available to experimental and evolutionary psychologists. We have
motivation, emotions, instincts, beliefs, memory and many other
facets of the brain which show that it is far from being a blank
slate, etched by the environment.
Skinner’s behaviourism is now dead in psychology, initially
by Chomsky, who, showed that behaviourism could not account for
language learning. However its modern form, associatism, a learning
theory used by most neural network theorists, lives on. The danger
is still to base government policy on the idea that the brain is
a totally malleable entity waiting for the appropriate stimuli and
reinforcement.
Bibliography
Skinner, B. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms
Skinner, B. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: MacMillan.
Skinner, B. (1961, repr. 1976). Walden Two
Skinner, B. (1968). The technology of teaching. New York: Appleton-Crofts.
Skinner, B. (1971). Beyond Freedom and Dignity
Skinner, B. (1974, repr. 1976). About Behaviorism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
Encyclopedia article
http://www.bfskinner.org/index.asp
Skinner Foundation
http://www.snopes.com/science/skinner.asp
Urban myth about Skinner’s box
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