The skinner box consisted of a lever, a food tray and a rat which can feed itself by pressing the lever. Each time a rat was put into that box it would run and sniff around for the food eventually identifying the correct spot, pressing the lever and getting the food pellet. After the first successful attempt, the rat got used to the box and hit many successful attempts resulting in getting food as a reward until it satiated its hunger.
BF Skinner formulated the principle of reinforcement through this experiment. The studies indicated and confirmed his belief that human free will is not a phenomenal reality but an indicator of results produced by the actions performed.
Reinforcement processes indicated that a positive action beget a positive consequence and a negative action beget a negative consequence, so positive and negative consequences of actions reinforces a person to perform what brings about a positive outcome or reward and avoid the negative actions to stay clear of punishments. He redefined the meaning of free will by proposing the revolutionary concept of behaviorism.
Although he originally intended to make a career as a writer, Skinner received his Ph. He returned to Harvard in as a professor, and was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology from until he retired in Skinner was influenced by John B.
In a utopian novel called Walden Two and a bestseller called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he argued that human behavior was always controlled by its environment. According to Skinner, the future of humanity depended on abandoning the concepts of individual freedom and dignity and engineering the human environment so that behavior was controlled systematically and to desirable ends rather than haphazardly.
It was during this time at Harvard that he also invented the cumulative recorder, a device that recorded responses as a sloped line. By looking at the slope of the line, which indicated the rate of response, Skinner was able to see that response rates depended upon what happened after the animal pressed the bar. That is, higher response rates followed rewards while lower response rates followed a lack of rewards. The device also allowed Skinner to see that the schedule of reinforcement that was used also influenced the rate of response.
Using this device, he found that behavior did not depend on the preceding stimulus as Watson and Pavlov maintained. Instead, Skinner found that behaviors were dependent on what happens after the response. Skinner called this operant behavior. Skinner took a teaching position at the University of Minnesota following his marriage. While teaching at the University of Minnesota and during the height of World War II, Skinner became interested in helping with the war effort.
He received funding for a project that involved training pigeons to guide bombs since no missile guidance systems existed at the time. In "Project Pigeon," as it was called, pigeons were placed in the nose cone of a missile and were trained to peck at a target that would then direct the missile toward the intended target. The project never came to fruition, since the development of radar was also underway, although Skinner had considerable success working with the pigeons.
While the project was eventually canceled, it did lead to some interesting findings and Skinner was even able to teach the pigeons to play ping-pong. In , B. Skinner also invented the "baby tender" at the request of his wife. It is important to note that the baby tender is not the same as the "Skinner box," which was used in Skinner's experimental research.
He created the enclosed heated crib with a plexiglass window in response to his wife's request for a safer alternative to traditional cribs. Ladies Home Journal printed an article on the crib with the title "Baby in a Box," contributing in part to some misunderstanding over the crib's intended use.
A later incident also led to further misunderstandings over Skinner's baby crib. In her book Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychology Experiments of the Twentieth Century, author Lauren Slater mentioned the oft-cited rumor that the baby tender was actually used as an experimental device. The rumors were that Skinner's daughter had served as a subject and that she had committed suicide as a result. Slater's book pointed out that this was nothing more than a rumor, but a later review of the book mistakenly stated that her book supported the claims.
This led to an angry and passionate rebuttal of the rumors by Skinner's very much alive and well daughter Deborah. In , he joined the psychology department at Harvard University where he kept an office even after his retirement in In Skinner's operant conditioning process, an operant referred to any behavior that acts on the environment and leads to consequences.
He contrasted operant behaviors the actions under our control with respondent behaviors, which he described as anything that occurs reflexively or automatically such as jerking your finger back when you accidentally touch a hot pan. Skinner identified reinforcement as any event that strengthens the behavior it follows. The two types of reinforcement he identified were positive reinforcement favorable outcomes such as reward or praise and negative reinforcement the removal of unfavorable outcomes.
Punishment can also play a role in the operant conditioning process. According to Skinner, punishment is the application of an adverse outcome that decreases or weakens the behavior it follows. A punishment involves presenting a negative reinforcer prison, spanking, scolding —which some refer to as positive punishment —or removing a positive reinforcer taking away a favorite toy , which is also known as a negative punishment.
In his research on operant conditioning, Skinner also discovered and described schedules of reinforcement:. Skinner's utopia, like every other utopia or dystopia, is both a thought experiment and a rhetorical work. In he wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which suggests that the concept of individual freedom is an illusion. Skinner later sought to unite the reinforcement of individual behaviors, the natural selection of species, and the development of cultures under the heading of The Selection by Consequences , the first of a series of articles in the journal Science.
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Feel free to contact me now for your free initial consultation. Once you become an existing client, you will be given a pager number where you can reach me whenever you need. Table of Contents. Emotional Problems. Lack of Confidence. Eating Disorders. Binge Eating. Eating and Weight. Emotional Eating. Loved Ones. Drug and Alcohol. Behavioral Problems. Adjustment Disorder. Conduct Disorders. Explosive Disorder.
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Skill Enhancement. For Adoptees. For Adopting Persons. For Birth Parents. Famous Psychologists: B. Schedules of Reinforcement Continuous reinforcement is the original scenario: Every time that the rat does the behavior such as pedal-pushing , he gets a food pellet.
Shaping A question Skinner had to deal with was how we get to more complex sorts of behaviors. Aversive stimuli An aversive stimulus is the opposite of a reinforcing stimulus, something we might find unpleasant or painful. Walden II In , Skinner published his actual ideas on child-rearing in Walden Two, a fictional account of a behaviorist-created utopia in which carefree young parents stroll off to work or school while their little ones enjoy all the comforts of community-run, behaviorist-approved daycare.
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