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B.F. Skinner
Monday, 4 December 2006
B.F. Skinner
The Life of B.F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. With his father being a lawyer and his mother a house wife, his life was somewhat old-fashioned and hard-working. He enjoyed playing outside and building things as a child. Perhaps his first use of experimentation was from building a flotation system that separated ripe berries from the green ones. His brother died at age 16 of an aneurysm. He went to a religious school in upstate New York, although he was an atheist. He wanted to be a writer and when he graduated he went to his parent’s attic to concentrate on his writing. It was here that he decided to study psychology. He decided that he could not write about people if he did not understand them. He stumbled upon books by Pavlov and Watson and became very interested in them. After some traveling he decided to go back to school and attended Harvard. He got his master’s in Psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931. He stayed there and did research until 1936.

His Theory
Skinner’s Theory is based on operant conditioning. His fundamental premises include 1) organisms are active and perform behaviors of many kinds 2) when a behavior is performed, it has consequences that affect the future of the behavior, consequences that either increase or decrease the likelihood that the behavior will occur again 3) the consequences are determined by the organism’s physical and social environments. Skinner is sometimes called the S-R psychologist. He was concerned with the stimulus-response, but he was also concerned about the environment in which this S-R happens. Skinner was a methodological behaviorist. He was concerned with methodology when experimenting. There were rumors that he used his daughter as an experiment by putting her in a Skinner Box, which led to a life-long mental illness and eventually she committed suicide because of it. These rumors are not true. Skinner used shaping and was not an advocate for the use of punishment. He wanted to create behaviors using reinforcement instead of punishment.



References

B.F. Skinner Foundation, Biography, 2006, http://www.bfskinner.org/bio.asp

B.F. Skinner, Personality Theories, 2006, http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/skinner.html

Nye, R. D., (1992). The Legacy of B.F. Skinner, Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.

Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.F._Skinner

Posted by planet/brittney_ann at 11:21 PM CST
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