Burrhus F. Skinner

The Shaping of Behaviour

Frederick Toates

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780230218666
• eBook ISBN: 9781350312357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As the world faces up to the challenges of climate change and the threat to security, Skinner's contributions on these issues continue to resonate today. In this stimulating introduction for students and general readers, Toates places Skinner's ideas within the context of mainstream psychological thought, presenting a balanced synthesis of the psychologist's work and his approach. The author reveals the links between Skinner's perspective and other branches of psychology, highlighting his solutions to problems at individual, society and global levels.

1 Who was B.F. Skinner

Why such fame?

When the Vice-President of the United States uses the expression “very dangerous” about a man’s utterances, what image does this trigger in your mind? Most likely, it is that of an international terrorist, the President of a hostile power or a Mafia Godfather, whose menacing features stare out from the pages of the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ rogues’ gallery.

When someone is blamed almost single-handedly for America losing the Vietnam War, what image does this evoke for you? It is probably safe to guess that the image would be of a Russian or Chinese spy at the heart of the Pentagon, a failed President or a highly-incompetent general.

Surely, amongst the last candidates to come to mind in either role would be a bespectacled highbrow professor, who spent much of his time in the genteel atmosphere of Harvard University, observing pigeons as they pecked keys and rats as they pressed levers. Yet, Vice-President Spiro Agnew¹ gave the “most dangerous” description to the Harvard professor of psychology, Burrhus Frederic Skinner*.

So, what kind of sinister double life was the famous professor leading in order to earn such a rare and unenviable distinction? After all, his devotion to observing laboratory animals might be regarded as somewhat eccentric but that in itself is hardly sufficient to cause the FBI to open a file on him (as indeed they did). Similarly, why did US Congressman Cornelius Gallagher propose that the US government should stop the research support that it was giving to Skinner?

What earned his negative reputation was the extrapolation that Skinner made from experiments on animals in laboratory cages to explaining the human behaviour that he observed around him in the ‘land of the free’. The determinants of the behaviour of laboratory rats and pigeons have, it was suggested, some fundamentally common features with the determinants of the behaviour of so-called free citizens. In the words of Congressman Gallagher, steps need to be put in place²:

… to deal specifically with the type of threats to our Congress and our Constituents which are contained in the thoughts of B.F. Skinner.

Skinner argued that the behaviour of a person, whether tramp, saint, sinner or whoever, is the product of the history of what has been done to him or her during a life-time. What cannot be accounted for by this environmental factor (‘nurture’), past and present, is left to the genes (‘nature’) as an explanation. So, the individual is squeezed inextricably between these two sets of determining factors. Differences in genes and environment would be seen as the determinants of differences between individuals.

The role of a person’s life-time experience is comparable to how the key-pecking of the pigeon can be explained ‘historically’ by what has been done to the pigeon. In the pigeon’s case, it is usually in terms of how the experimenter arranged for the delivery of food pellets to be triggered by the hungry bird’s pecks on a key.

Such an unflattering analogy might seem to run counter to the most cherished ideals of an individualistic and democratic culture, in which people are thought to decide freely their own destiny and whereby they should be held responsible for their own actions. So, when these latter and grander terms are applied to American society, behaviour is said to be spontaneously and purposively generated as a result of prior conscious reflection and sometimes even in opposition to the push and pull of life-time circumstances. This is a culture in which the rugged individual, who asserts personal responsibility, is something of a hero. Unlike that of Skinner’s pigeon, it is argued, human behaviour has an element of inscrutability about it: its determinants might be known only to the individual showing the behaviour. Thereby, human behaviour merits its fair share of praise or blame, and corresponding reward or punishment, not only in this life but, according to some, for all eternity. The law of the land is based upon the assumption of personal responsibility and the right to apply punishment for violation, except where there is evidence that the freedom of choice is impaired.

Skinner’s offence was to give an account that ‘takes away’ from humankind this quality of freedom and autonomy, with its associated personal responsibility (To keep you, I hope, captivated, the exact logic of why he was blamed for America losing the Vietnam War will have to wait until later!). The notions of freedom and autonomy, he argued, were the useless and superstitious remnants of a pre-scientific age, to be discarded along with the belief in a flat earth, demonic-possession and six-day creation. To use his favourite term, ‘autonomous man’*^_ was to be relegated merely to a place in the history books of psychology and culture. But history has taught us that so-called useless and superstitious remnants can die hard, as Skinner was quick to discover for himself.

In the first major dethroning of the scientific era, Copernicus and Galileo had found that old ideas, in their case that the earth has a special astronomical place at the geometric centre of cosmological creation, are not to be painlessly discarded. Next, Darwin appeared to have dislodged humankind from its unique place at centre-stage in an act of biological creation, a move that still encounters passionate resistance. Freud is sometimes credited with the third major dethroning of humankind, which would make Skinner’s the fourth. A vociferous part of humankind was to hit back at any such heresy.

Platt³ writes:

Darwin, like Skinner, was accused of unjustified extrapolation from birds to dogs to man, and of treating man as a mere animal. And in both cases, in spite of the scientific clarification and the technical successes, there were loud protests from the defenders of humanism and morality.

Skinner told us that our near-universal intuition and feeling that we have free will to consciously decide our actions is merely an illusion. This is somewhat like Copernicus telling people that what was obvious before their eyes, i.e. that the sun rotates around the earth, is in truth an illusion⁴.

It was not only right-wing Conservative politicians, such as Spiro Agnew, and religious people who considered Skinner to be outrageous in making his claims. He also earned the wrath of liberals, humanists and left-wing radicals, most famously the linguist Noam Chomsky. In addition, a large number of psychologists were incensed by what they considered grossly over-simplified claims concerning what made people act as they do.

Surely, rang the counter-argument, it must count that humans have a sophisticated language, free will and conscious insight into their behaviour. Their actions bear evidence of a self-generated purpose; something not yet achieved (a goal in the mind) is playing a role in controlling their current behaviour. Behaviour is said to be purposive, guided by goals that might be idiosyncratic and evident only to the individual in question. These goals can be articulated by the individual, if he or she freely chooses to do so. Despite the best (or worst!) intentions of the psychologist, people being studied have minds of their own and can spring surprises. This means that very little could be usefully extrapolated from the tractable behaviour of the laboratory rat to that of the priest or street mugger.

Skinner countered that the language of ‘inner states’, such as thoughts and conscious goals as a means of explanation, is not one that is useful to a science of behaviour. We are still left with the task of explaining how these goals and other mental states arise in the first place. The contents of the conscious mind as reported by introspection were rejected as a basis for explanation in psychology. Rather, to understand thinking and behaviour, we need to focus on the causes of both of these within the environment.

A development of psychology, termed ‘cognitive psychology’, put on a more formal scientific footing such internal processes as goal-direction, memory, attention and decision-making. However, this did nothing to placate Skinner, who reiterated that this was looking in the wrong place for the determinants of behaviour.

Foundations of behaviourism

The behaviourist school of psychology argued that behaviour itself should form the subject-matter of psychology. In a branch of this that became known as ‘radical behaviourism’, Skinner and his followers⁵ took this as its frame of reference but argued that the study of conscious states is permitted in a science of psychology. Indeed, they suggested that they might have some very useful things to say about how these states arise. It is simply that we are not permitted to explain behaviour in terms of such states of mind. To try to do so is called ‘mentalism’ by Skinnerians and this is definitely a pejorative expression. Any explanation based on mentalism is said to be fictional since it immediately raises the issue of what caused the mental state.

Suppose, for example, that one asks a child why he hit another and the child answers “Just because I felt like it”⁶. The mental state of ‘just feeling like it’ is itself in need of an explanation in terms of a cause, which to a Skinnerian would be in terms of the aggressive child’s life history. Similarly, for a Skinnerian, to suggest that the child was offensive ‘because he has low self-esteem’ explains nothing. Where is this mysterious thing, which is called ‘self-esteem’, located? What evidence do we have for its existence, apart from the behaviour that we are trying to explain by means of it? The argument in terms of such mental causes is a circular one, even though, in popular discourse, low self-esteem is seen as the culprit for explaining a variety of personal failings.

As a philosophical foundation for his whole approach, Skinner noted that we are all the product of a process of evolution, in which, survival, in effect, poses a number of similar ‘problems’ for any species. Skinner’s favourite species for research were rats, pigeons and humans and he emphasized certain general features. Each must find food, water and shelter, and each is attracted to engage in sexual behaviour.

Why use rats and pigeons? They are simpler organisms to study than humans are. For practical and ethical reasons, it is obviously easier to maintain them under controlled laboratory conditions, in which interference from outside is minimized. In this sense, Skinner was little different from other scientists, such as biologists, physicists or chemists, who also start by studying the most simple systems⁷. He argued that insights arising from non-humans can give important clues as to how human behaviour operates and sometimes suggest research that can be applied to humans.

The notions of reinforcement and punishment

Positive reinforcement

Skinner suggested that nature provides a range of what he termed positive reinforcers, such things as food, shelter, sex and water. These reinforcers shape the behaviour of the animal, i.e. they change the future probability of showing the behaviour that was occurring just before the reinforcer appeared. The term ‘reinforcer’ describes the fact that behaviour is strengthened in this process. The link with evolutionary thinking is that the contact with positive reinforcers tends to help the animal to survive and reproduce.

The most fundamental pillar of Skinnerian psychology is really so basic that it could be described on the back of a postcard. If a positive reinforcer follows a particular behaviour, then that behaviour will increase in frequency (or, as it is sometimes expressed, ‘rate’). For example, suppose an experimenter deprives a rat of water for some hours. The rat is then placed in a maze, where, after running along an arm, it comes to a T-junction and encounters the choice of turning into a left or right arm. If the rat turns to the left, it finds a small quantity of water. If the rat turns right, it finds nothing. In psychological jargon, there exists what is termed a contingency between the behaviour of turning left and obtaining water. A ‘contingency’ is the arrangement of events as organized by the experimenter, in this case the link between behaviour and finding water. At first, the rat’s choice is apparently random but, after a number of experiences in the maze, it almost invariably turns to the left. So, the favoured jargon of behaviourism is as follows. Water is said to be a ‘positive reinforcer’ for the behaviour of a thirsty animal, in this case, turning left; water is ‘positively reinforcing’ and the behaviour of turning left has been ‘positively reinforced’.

For another demonstration of the same principle, suppose a hungry pigeon is placed in a Skinner box – a piece of apparatus consisting of a key, which, if pecked, causes a pellet of food to appear. The experimenter has arranged a ‘contingency’ between pecking and food. At first, the pigeon might show little inclination to peck the key. So, the experimenter would try the ‘generous criterion’ of giving pellets simply when the pigeon’s beak is in the vicinity of the key. Subsequently, the experimenter becomes less generous by giving pellets only when the bird shows pecking anywhere near the key. By careful observation of its behaviour and by the giving of pellets, successively closer approximations to key-pecking can be reinforced, such that the bird comes to reliably peck the key and earn food pellets.

Such changing of behaviour and establishing a new behaviour is known as ‘operant conditioning’, the animal is said to emit ‘operants’, that is to say, effects which operate on the environment. These operants can then be reinforced. The initial phase of the experiment, which guides the behaviour by small increments in the direction of the desired response, is known as ‘shaping’. The term ‘successive approximations’ applies here: the criterion for gaining the pellet is made slightly more difficult by small steps, each requirement being a closer approximation to the final criterion of behaviour: key-pecking. This is by analogy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Who was B.F. Skinner?
• 2. Biography, Background and Impact
• 3. Looking at the Evidence
• 4. Linking Skinner to Other Perspectives on Behaviour
• 5. The Relationship with Biology
• 6. Determinism, Freedom and Autonomy
• 7. Skinnerian Advice for Living Life
• 8. Social Policy
• 9. Development and Education
• 10. Helping to Ease Human Suffering
• 11. Ethics, Religion and the Skinnerian Good Life
• 12. The Environment and a Sustainable Future
• 13. Conclusions
• References and Notes
• Index