Andrade, Michelle
Go, Ma. Lira Jasper O.
Tang-o, Prince Deux January 31, 2019
THE BIOGRAPHY OF B.F. SKINNER
B. F. Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, a small
railroad town in the hills of Pennsylvania just below Binghamton, New
York. His father was a rising young lawyer, his mother a housewife. Much
of his boyhood was spent building things – for example a cart with steering
that worked backwards and a perpetual motion machine that did not
work. Other ventures were more successful. He and a friend built a cabin
in the woods. For a door to door business selling elderberries, he designed
a flotation system to separate ripe from green berries. When working in a
shoe store during his high school years, he made a contraption to
distribute the “green dust” that helped the broom pick up dirt.
After attending Hamilton college, Skinner decided to become a
writer. Moving back home he wrote little. His entire production from the period he called his “dark year”
consisted of a dozen short newspaper articles and a few models of sailing ships. Escaping to New York City for a
few months working as a bookstore clerk, he happened upon books by Pavlov and Watson. He found them
impressive and exciting and wanted to learn more.
At the age of 24 Skinner enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University. William Crozier
was the chair of a new department of Physiology. Crozier fervently adhered to a program of studying the
behavior of “the animal as a whole” without appealing, as the psychologists did, to processes going on inside.
That exactly matched Skinner’s goal of relating behavior to experimental conditions. With his enthusiasm and
talent for building new equipment, Skinner constructed apparatus after apparatus as his rats’ behavior
suggested changes. After a dozen pieces of apparatus and some lucky accidents (described in his A Case History
in Scientific Method), Skinner invented the cumulative recorder, a mechanical device that recorded every
response as an upward movement of a horizontally moving line. This recorder revealed the impact of the
contingencies over responding. Skinner discovered that the rate with which the rat pressed the bar depended
not on any preceding stimulus (as Watson and Pavlov had insisted), but on what followed the bar presses. This
was new indeed. Unlike the reflexes that Pavlov had studied, this kind of behavior operated on the environment
and was controlled by its effects. Skinner named it operant behavior. The process of arranging the contingencies
of reinforcement responsible for producing this new kind of behavior he called operant conditioning. Because of
a fellowship, Skinner was able to spend his next five years investigating not only the effect of following
consequences and the schedules on which they were delivered, but also how prior stimuli gained control over
behaviour-consequence relationships with which they were paired. These studies eventually appeared in his first
book, The Behaviour of Organisms (1938).
A concern with the implications of behavioral science for society at large turned Skinner to philosophical
and moral issues. In 1969 he published Contingencies of Reinforcement and two years later Beyond Freedom and
Dignity which prompted a series of television appearances. Still, the lack of understanding and
misrepresentation of his work prompted his writing About Behaviorism (1974). Towards the end of his life he
was still active professionally. In addition to professional articles, he wrote three autobiographical
volumes, Particulars of my Life, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, and A Matter of Consequences. In 1989 he was
diagnosed with leukemia, but kept as active as his increasing weakness allowed. At the American Psychological
Association, ten days before he died, he gave a talk before a crowded auditorium. He finished the article from
which the talk was taken on August 18, 1990, the day he died.
From https://www.bfskinner.org/archives/biographical-information/
