Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a pioneering, also provocative, psychologist. His work led to the emergence of a new understanding of human behaviour while changing the contexts of how society viewed everything from penitentiaries to childcare. Skinner deliberated that free will was an illusion and that all our actions were a result of conditioning — one that could be achieved through the doctrine of reinforcement and punishment. This translates to ‘sculpting’ connotations that boost, or dampen, particular actions. Skinner termed this approach of deducing behaviour as ‘radical behaviourism.’
When Skinner [1904-1990] published his riveting autobiography, Particulars of My Life [1976], he not only went so far as to question whether classical Pavlovian conditioning should be taken seriously, or studied at all. That he broke new ground in behavioural and instrumental, or operant, conditioning was apparent. Add to this the fact that he emerged as the most noted behaviourist of his time — a steadfast champion and proponent of his own school of thought — and, you’ve a textbook script.
The fact is: Skinner’s sharp mental acumen, or ken for detail, was focused on the organism’s observable behaviour. With his gadget — the Skinner box — appropriately named after him, Skinner delved, explained and reasoned ‘target’ behaviour and its innate, intricate structure like no one else before, or after him. “Behaviour,” wrote Skinner [1904-1990] in his first book, The Behaviour of Organisms [1938], “is what an organism is doing — or, more accurately, what is observed by another organism to be doing. But, to say that a given sample of activity falls within the field of behaviour simply because it normally comes under observation would misrepresent the significance of this property.”
He elaborated, “Where inherited behaviour leaves off, the inherited modifiability of the process of conditioning takes over.” In this respect, or canon, Skinner was fond of pointing out that instrumental, or operant, conditioning is just not analogous to Darwinian natural selection, but also continuous with it. He proclaimed a simple ‘iteration’ of the fundamental Darwinian process: operant conditioning, which accounts for all mentality, and all learning, not just in pigeons, but also human beings. Sceptics, however, called his tenets manipulative and cold — “to fuelling his theories about stimulus-response behaviour.”
The Skinner box usually contains a soundproof enclosure, equipped with a button and levers: to ‘condition’ behaviour with rewards of food for certain functions, or impose punishment. In a traditional experiment, a rat deprived of food is lodged in the box’s one cubic foot space. As the rodent moves around, often seeking a route to escape, a basic instinct, it stumbles on the lever and depresses it. Result: a pellet of food is delivered. After a few trials, the rat learns to ‘play’ ball in a game which is, more or less, ‘worth the salt.’
Skinner’s ‘cutting-edge’ ideas are best illustrated in his seminal work, Science and Human Behavior [1953]. It provides a panoramic Skinnerian view of measuring behaviour, primarily because functions can easily be observed and also recorded. Behaviour, to Skinner, often meant ‘that’ component of the functioning involved or engaged in acting upon, or having commerce with the outside world: to dealing with the effect rather than the movement itself. As he explained, “By behaviour, I simply mean the movement, or of its origin — the organism’s parts — in a frame of reference provided by the organism, or by various external objects, or fields of force.” His revolutionary credo was remarkable, also controversial. It challenged and slowly changed the way psychologists thought about conditioning and learning.
Skinner often used rats, in his experiments, and trained pigeons to play ‘ping-pong,’ dance and walk in a figure of eight. Not only that. His ingenious pigeons were also ‘employed’ to guide Allied pilots: to bomb enemy posts during World War II, when high-tech scanners were not in vogue. Skinner was not amused. He obviously knew his pigeons better than the pigeons themselves. Well, as far as instrumental conditioning with human subjects was concerned, Skinner recommended classrooms, workplaces, and homes, as appropriate environments: for selective reinforcement, or desired behaviours. The art and grammar of it all, as a consequence of any expected behaviour, Skinner maintained, was involuntary, not ‘reflex-like’ as in Pavlovian analogy.
Critics argue that Skinner was a ‘greedy reductionist,’ trying to define all the design, and also ‘invent’ power, in a single stroke. What’s erroneous with Skinner’s ideas, they contend, is not that he tried to base ethics on scientific facts about human nature, but that his endeavour was so simplistic. Human beings, for more reasons than one, are really far too complicated than pigeons. A human being, after all, is composed of more than a complex ‘cause and effect’ equation than one’s basic operant response and/or reaction in a diverse milieu. Right? Skinner never agreed. His riposte: “The idea of behaviourism is to eliminate coercion, to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforcing the kind of behaviour that benefits everyone.”
This also, perforce, explains Skinner’s philosophical leanings, best illustrated in his benchmark work, Walden Two [1948], where he describes a sublime utopia: of communes of people who have eradicated vice and replaced it with rewarding good work and creativity — a world without punishment. While Skinner’s laboratory experiments were widely recognised to be exciting and innovative in the understanding of human behaviour and logistics, the somewhat perplexed response of the public to his theories was apparent. As The Times, London, commented: “A behaviourist cannot expect more than a mixed reception for presenting a view of people that is neither flattering nor comforting, even if it is true.”
Skinner considered punishment almost useless in training animals, teaching children, or managing public offenders, or criminals. Punishment to him worked as a ‘negative reinforcer’ which served merely to produce escape, or avoidant behaviour — something that was more undesirable than the behaviour it was first ‘invented’ to punish. This was his axiom and also one foremost reason why the chemistry of his writings seemed to draw a much more sympathetic and perceptive audience. More importantly, whatever the argument in his favour, or otherwise, Skinner created a science of behaviour — the exacting study of his own perceptions for posterity.
For a man who argued that his daughter spent no more time, in a ‘box,’ a larger edition at that, than other children did in their crèche, Skinner was only human; too human. He was prone to faults. Although modern psychology has ‘returned’ to a more humanistic platform now, it would be important to note that behaviourism, as championed by Skinner, was never defeated. So far, no enterprising anti-behaviourist has been able to come up with a type of behaviour for whose explanation consciousness is essential.
Agreed, that, Skinner ‘failed’ in his attempts to bring all psychology into his camp, yet the fact is he triumphed in calling attention to a major weakness: “20th century science is powerless to verify the presence of consciousness in human beings.” What’s more, behaviourists, in effect, have issued a challenge to modern experimental science to conjure up an objective way of measuring the presence of subjective experience, which Skinner thought was fume. Until now, technology has been futile to meeting this challenge — from the inside out.
Skinner entered psychology, in his twenties, in the 1920s, when his chosen discipline was expanding. Since then, and until his death 30 years ago, Skinner was on the cutting edge of behaviourism: a group of theories that sets out to prove that human and animal behaviour is based not so much on subjective impetus, but on reward and punishment.
Skinner took plaudits and brickbats in his stride. He often said, referring to the misinterpretation of his work: “I find that I need to be understood only 3-4 times a year.” A recipient of a host of awards and honours, Skinner, who taught at leading US and other universities, was also a prolific writer. Though his eyesight was limited towards the end of his life, he continued to write and publish. His last book, Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior, was published just a year before his death: at age 86.
It is agreed now that we no longer assume that all people, including children, receive and interpret information the same way as Skinner and fellow behaviourists once held. This is because it is ‘valid’ to treat the child’s inner world as having special properties — unlike those of an adult. Yes, the behaviourist metaphor is no longer adequate — a child is much more than a ‘lump of clay,’ whose behaviour can be moulded into a socially acceptable ‘shape’ by feedback from various environmental forces, including the child’s parents. More than that, current knowledge acknowledges the fact that kids are active interpreters of their own experience.
It has been widely surmised that philosophers Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza originally found the ‘leads’ of behaviourism — a domain Skinner pursued with rare diligence and fidelity. While Bacon advocated a strict study of the cause and effect of human action, as much as Spinoza attempted to reduce the difference between the will and human conduct, it goes to Skinner, and his seminal work, the credit and honour for having assayed such dimensions with sublime dexterity — for the good of psychology, and its new advances as also, albeit indirectly, the import of the mind-body relationship, or ‘connect.’
Skinner always wanted to be a poet and novelist. He could not fulfil either ‘dream,’ but the best part is he achieved and carved a niche of his own through his landmark work and writings. This was destiny manifest in Skinner’s own novel plank of behaviourism. No rapid, or imposed, current of experimental, or experiential, science can really sweep him, including his precepts and percepts, off their feet, or terra firma.
— First published in Financial Chronicle
