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A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity)
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In a world of complete economic equality, you get and keep the affections you deserve. You can’t buy love with gifts or favors, you can’t hold love by raising an inadequate child, and you can’t be secure in love by serving as a good scrub woman or a good provider.
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B.F. Skinner
“
Severe punishment unquestionably has an immediate effect in reducing a tendency to act in a given way. This result is no doubt responsible for its widespread use. We 'instinctively' attack anyone whose behavior displeases us - perhaps not in physical assault, but with criticism, disapproval, blame, or ridicule. Whether or not there is an inherited tendency to do this, the immediate effect of the practice is reinforcing enough to explain its currency. In the long run, however, punishment does not actually eliminate behavior from a repertoire, and its temporary achievement is obtained at tremendous cost in reducing the over-all efficiency and happiness of the group. (p. 190)
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B.F. Skinner (Science and Human Behavior)
“
As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.
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Michael Shermer (Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time)
“
The most effective alternative process [to punishment] is probably extinction. This takes time but is much more rapid than allowing the response to be forgotten. The technique seems to be relatively free of objectionable by-products. We recommend it, for example when we suggest that a parent 'pay no attention' to objectionable behavior on the part of his child. If the child's behavior is strong only because it has been reinforced by 'getting a rise out of' the parent, it will disappear when this consequence is no longer forthcoming. (p. 192)
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B.F. Skinner (Science and Human Behavior)
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Science is human behavior, and so is the opposition to science. What
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B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
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The consequences of behavior determine the probability that the behavior will occur again
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B.F. Skinner
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If people can't control their emotions they need to stop trying to control other people's behavior
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Robin Skinner
“
We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement-- there's no restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave-- the motives, desires, the wishes.
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B.F. Skinner (Walden Two (Hackett Classics))
“
Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward.
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Michael Shermer (The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths)
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Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.
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Frans de Waal (Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?)
“
I would have been glad to agree to let them all proceed henceforth in complete ignorance of psychology, if they would forget my opinion of chocolate sodas or the story of the amusing episode on a Spanish streetcar.
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B.F. Skinner
“
Sometimes it seems that the beau ideal of many conservatives, as well as of many liberals, is to put everyone into a cage and coerce him into doing what the conservatives or liberals believe to be the moral thing. They would of course be differently styled cages, but they would be cages just the same. The conservative would ban illicit sex, drugs, gambling, and impiety, and coerce everyone to act according to his version of moral and religious behavior. The liberal would ban films of violence, unesthetic advertising, football, and racial discrimination, and, at the extreme, place everyone in a “Skinner box” to be run by a supposedly benevolent liberal dictator.
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Murray N. Rothbard (For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (LvMI))
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Compare two people, one of whom has been crippled by an accident, the other by an early environmental history which makes him lazy and, when criticized, mean. Both cause great inconvenience to others, but one dies a martyr, the other a scoundrel.
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B.F. Skinner (About Behaviorism)
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Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs. And as to technology, we have made immense strides in controlling the physical and biological worlds, but our practices in government, education, and much of economics, though adapted to very different conditions, have not greatly improved. We can scarcely explain this by saying that the Greeks knew all there was to know about human behavior. Certainly they knew more than they knew about the physical world, but it was still not much. Moreover, their way of thinking about human behavior must have had some fatal flaw. Whereas Greek physics and biology, no matter how crude, led eventually to modern science, Greek theories of human behavior led nowhere. If they are with us today, it is not because they possessed some kind of eternal verity, but because they did not contain the seeds of anything better.
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B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
“
Science not only describes, it predicts. It deals not only with the past but with the future. Nor is prediction the last word: to the extent that relevant conditions can be altered, or otherwise controlled, the future can be controlled. If we are to use the methods of science in the field of human affairs, we must assume that behavior is lawful and determined. We must expect to discover that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered, we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions.
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B.F. Skinner (Science And Human Behavior)
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[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data".
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Kenneth MacCorquodale
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One person manages another in the sense that he manages himself. He does not do so by changing feelings or states of mind. The Greek gods were said to change behavior by giving men mental states such as pride, mental confusion, or courage, but no one has been successful in doing so since. One person changes the behavior of another by changing the world in which he lives. In doing so, he no doubt changes what the other person feels or introspectively observes.
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B.F. Skinner
“
Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled…nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.
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B.F. Skinner (Walden Two (Hackett Classics))
“
Slot machines cater, like the games on computers and phones, to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt, social stagnation, and a dysfunctional political system. They shape our behavior with constant bursts of stimulation. We become rats in a Skinner box. We frantically pull levers until we are addicted and, finally entranced, by our adrenaline-driven compulsion to achieve fleeting and intermittent rewards. Behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner found that when pigeons and rats did not know when or how much they would be rewarded, they pressed levers or pedals compulsively. Skinner used slot machines as a metaphor for his experiment.27
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Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
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This is implied in the assertion that a man shows certain behavior because he was “born that way.” To object to this is not to argue that behavior is never determined by hereditary factors. Behavior requires a behaving organism which is the product of a genetic process. Gross differences in the behavior of different species show that the genetic constitution, whether observed in the body structure of the individual or inferred from a genetic history, is important. But the doctrine of “being born that way” has little to do with demonstrated facts. It is usually an appeal to ignorance. “Heredity,” as the layman uses the term, is a fictional explanation of the behavior attributed to it.
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B.F. Skinner (Science And Human Behavior)
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When a criminal justice system works properly, it’s not because rational actors know that Big Brother is watching them 24/7 and will swoop down and impose a cost that will cancel any ill-gotten gain. No democracy has the resources or the will to turn society into that kind of Skinner box. Only a sample of criminal behavior can ever be detected and punished, and the sampling should be fair enough that citizens perceive the entire regime to be legitimate. A key legitimator is the perception that the system is set up in such a way that a person, and more importantly the person’s adversaries, face a constant chance of being punished if they break the law, so that they all may internalize inhibitions against predation, preemptive attack, and vigilante retribution.
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Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
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One may take the line that metaphorical devices are inevitable in the early stages of any science and that although we may look with amusement today upon the “essences,” “forces,” “phlogistons,” and “ethers,” of the science of yesterday, these nevertheless were essential to the historical process. It would be difficult to prove or disprove this. However, if we have learned anything about the nature of scientific thinking, if mathematical and logical researches have improved our capacity to represent and analyze empirical data, it is possible that we can avoid some of the mistakes of adolescence. Whether Freud could have done so is past demonstrating, but whether we need similar constructs in the future prosecution of a science of behavior is a question worth considering.
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B.F. Skinner (Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories)
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In his classic textbook Science and Human Behavior, Skinner explained that while aversives may seem to promptly extinguish undesirable behavior, the behavior often returns with a vengeance after the punishment ceases, because the subject has not been taught more adaptive ways to behave. He also pointed out that punishment creates fear, guilt, and shame, resulting in less learning overall. (In other words, a child compelled to practice the piano with threats of spanking does not tend to become a virtuoso but instead learns to hate music.) Skinner also cautioned that the use of aversives has negative effects on the researcher, potentially turning the experimental situation into a sadistic power play. “In the long run,” he observed, “punishment, unlike reinforcement, works to the disadvantage of both the punished organism and the punishing agency.” But
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Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently)
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Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain.
If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.
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Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine)
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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior.
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B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
“
Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history of human science is not encouraging. Galton's eugenics, Freud's unconscious, Durkheim's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinner’s behaviorism, Piaget's early learning, and Wilson’s sociobiology all appear in retrospect to be riddled with errors and false perspectives. No doubt the Red Queen's approach is just another chapter in this marred tale. No doubt its politicization and the vested interests ranged against it will do as much damage as was done to previous attempts to understand human nature. The Western cultural revolution that calls itself political correctness will no doubt stifle inquiries it does not like, such as those into the mental differences between men and women. I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious. "Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the Press," said David Hume.
But then I remember how much progress we have made since Hume and how much nearer to the goal of a complete understanding of human nature we are than ever before. We will never quite reach that goal, and it would perhaps be better if we never did. But as long as we can keep asking why, we have a noble purpose.
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Matt Ridley (The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature)
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The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner designed a special crib for his daughter, and there’s a persistent myth that she grew up psychologically damaged and eventually committed suicide. It’s completely false; she grew up healthy and happy. On the other hand, consider the psychologist John B. Watson, known as the founder of behaviorism. He advised parents, “When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument,” and he shaped views on child-rearing for the first half of the twentieth century. He believed that his approach was in the best interests of the child, but all of his own children suffered from depression as adults, with more than one attempting suicide and one succeeding.
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Ted Chiang (Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny)
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The first educational.Psychologist EL Thorndike, developed an understanding of behavior in the 1920s that could be very useful for parents. He called it the "law of reinforcement". Later, the concept became the basis for a branch of psychology known as behaviorism, which I resoundingly reject. Behaviorism was described by BF Skinner and JB Watson and includes the unbelievable notion that the mind does not exist, Period.One of my college textbooks referred to behaviorism as "psychology out of its mind." Well said! It perceives the human brain as a simple switchboard connecting stimuli coming in with responses going out.
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James Dobson (The New Dare to Discipline ('Yong Yu Guan Jiao', in traditional Chinese, NOT in English))
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The first educational psychologist, EL Thorndike, developed an understanding of behavior in the 1920s that could be very useful for parents. He called it the "law of reinforcement". Later, the concept became the basis for a branch of psychology known as behaviorism, which I resoundingly reject. Behaviorism was described by BF Skinner and JB Watson and includes the unbelievable notion that the mind does not exist, Period.One of my college textbooks referred to behaviorism as "psychology out of its mind." Well said! It perceives the human brain as a simple switchboard connecting stimuli coming in with responses going out.
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James C. Dobson (The New Dare to Discipline)
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Sigmund Freud said humans were slaves to their subconscious conflicts. B. F. Skinner believed outside influences dominated behavior. Since then, scientists found genetics to be a major determinant in how people react. Some of them discovered brain activity increased before the conscious mind made a decision, suggesting the brain decided what to do an instant before its owner was aware that a decision was made. In other words, maybe humans didn’t have free will.
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Craig DiLouie (The Children of Red Peak)
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I have endeavored, up to this point, to give an objective picture of some of the developments in the behavioral sciences, and an objective picture of the kind of society which might emerge out of these developments. I do however have strong personal reactions to the kind of world I have been describing, a world which Skinner explicitly (and many other scientists implicitly) expect and hope in the future. To me this kind of world would destroy the human person . . .
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Carl Rogers
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In the hallowed halls of businesses (and business schools) around the world, B. F. Skinner is the hidden king. Skinner was one of the major intellectual forces behind the “behaviorist” movement in psychology—the idea that biological systems always respond a certain way to certain stimuli. Control the stimuli and you can control the behavior. “Condition” the organism with rewards and punishments, and the organism will learn how to behave. Over the decades, behaviorism has fallen out of vogue in psychology—research has made it clear that there’s far more to behavior than the carrot and the stick. But that understanding hasn’t extended to business practice—in corporations and business-school classrooms around the world, the search continues for the magic incentive that will make people do what businesses want.
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Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume)
“
B. F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.
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Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People: Updated For the Next Generation of Leaders (Dale Carnegie Books))
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By questioning the control exercised by autonomous man and demonstrating the control exercised by the environment, a science of behavior also seems to question dignity or worth. A person is responsible for his behavior, not only in the sense that he may be justly blamed or punished when he behaves badly, but also in the sense that he is to be given credit and admired for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame to the environment, and traditional practices can then no longer be justified. These are sweeping changes, and those who are committed to traditional theories and practices naturally resist them.
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B.F. Skinner (Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Hackett Classics))
“
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
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B.F. Skinner
“
Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn't, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of reinforcement - there's no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave - the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.
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B.F. Skinner (Walden Two (Hackett Classics))
“
Let me see if I can sum up very briefly the picture of the impact of the behavioral sciences upon the individual and upon society, as this impact is seen by Dr. Skinner, and implied in the attitudes and work of many, perhaps most, behavioral scientists. Behavioral science is clearly moving forward; the increasing power for control which it gives will be held by some one or some group; such an individual or group will surely choose the purposes or goals to be achieved; and most of us will then be increasingly controlled by means so subtle we will not even be aware of them as controls. Thus whether a council of wise psychologists (if this is not a contradiction in terms) or a Stalin or a Big Brother has the power, and whether the goal is happiness, or productivity, or resolution of the Oedipus complex, or submission, or love of Big Brother, we will inevitably find ourselves moving toward the chosen goal, and probably thinking that we ourselves desire it. Thus if this line of reasoning is correct, it appears that some form of completely controlled society - a Walden Two or a 1984 - is coming. The fact that it would surely arrive piecemeal rather than all at once, does not greatly change the fundamental issues. Man and his behavior would become a planned product of society.
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Carl Rogers
“
I have endeavored, up to this point, to give an objective picture of some of the developments in the behavioral sciences, and an objective picture of the kind of society which might emerge out of these developments. I do however have strong personal reactions to the kind of world I have been describing, a world which Skinner explicitly (and many other scientists implicitly) expect and hope in the future. To me this kind of world would destroy the human person . . .
I feel that to the limit of my ability I have played my part in advancing the behavioral sciences, but if the result of my efforts and those of others is that man becomes a robot, created and controlled by a science of his own making, then I am very happy indeed.
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Carl Rogers
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Incompatible with one another (and often at odds with themselves), the three
were widely seen as plotting the course of modernity toward a future without reli-
gion and indeed without normative ethics. Today these threats, if not vanished, are
diminished, almost to mockeries of their former magnitude and hubris. The Soviet
embodiment of the Marxist idea has collapsed, as untenable politically and
economically as apartheid proved to be. Logical positivism is now a historical cu-
riosity. Philosophers who want to dig up the roots of our current philosophical
plantings often find it necessary to explain just what positivism was and tell the
story of the rival ideas that motivated otherwise intelligent thinkers to suppose that
verificationism circumscribed the possibilities of meaning. And, of course, the
doctrinaire behaviorism of Watson and Skinner that once proposed to do psy-
chology without any idea of minds or thoughts, intentions or even dispositions,
and dismissed as outmoded the ideals of human freedom and dignity, is itself a thing of the past, quaint as the brass microscopes that might decorate an antique
shop window, no longer proposed for serious scientific use.
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Lenn Evan Goodman (حي بن يقظان)
“
n the 20th century, the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner performed a famous set of experiments in which he tested different methods of introducing new behaviours in rats. These experiments brought to light how “the powers that be” can condition humans to love their servitude. In one set of experiments, Skinner attempted to cultivate new behaviours via positive reinforcement; he provided the rat with food anytime it performed the desirable behavior. In another set of experiments, he attempted to weaken or eliminate certain behaviours via punishment; he triggered a painful stimulus when the rat performed the behavior Skinner wished to eliminate.
Skinner discovered that punishment temporarily put an end to undesirable behaviours, but it did not remove the animal’s motivation to engage in such behaviors in the future. “Punished behavior”, writes Skinner, “is likely to reappear after the punitive consequences are withdrawn.” (B.F. Skinner, About Behaviorism) Behaviors that were conditioned via positive reinforcement, on the other hand, were more enduring and led to long-term changes in the animal’s behavioural patterns.
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Academy of Ideas
“
The addictive nature of smartphones is further enhanced by a form of behavioral conditioning called intermittent reinforcement and the power of this conditioning was revealed by the research of the 20th century psychologist B.F Skinner. Skinner discovered that if a behavior is rewarded on a variable and unpredictable schedule, the reward is felt as more pleasurable and the conditioned behavior is more resistant to extinction in comparison with a behavior that is rewarded all the time. Mobile app developers use this behavioural conditioning to promote the use of their applications. Rather than exposing their users to stimulating novel content each time they open the app, users are rewarded only some of the time. This type of behavioral conditioning heightens the feelings of pleasure associated with using these apps and renders users prone to addiction.
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Academy of Ideas
“
F. Skinner, the world-famous psychologist, proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.
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Dale Carnegie (How To Win Friends and Influence People)
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Skinner box, a device that automatically trains rats or pigeons to learn behaviors.
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Gregory Berns (How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain)
“
Adding variability increased the frequency of the pigeons completing the intended action. Skinner’s pigeons tell us a great deal about what helps drive our own behaviors. More recent experiments reveal that variability increases activity in the nucleus accumbens and spikes levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, driving our hungry search for rewards.[lxxiv] Researchers observed increased dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens in experiments involving monetary rewards as well as in a study of heterosexual men viewing images of attractive women’s faces.[lxxv] Variable rewards can be found in all sorts of products and experiences that hold our attention. They fuel our drive to check email, browse the web, or bargain-shop. I propose that variable rewards come in three types: Tribe, hunt and self (figure 20). Habit-forming products utilize one or more of these variable reward types.
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Nir Eyal (Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products)
“
As the founder of modern behaviorism, Skinner did not attempt to understand the processes occurring within the individual; he had the reserve and prudence to consider the mind a “black box.” Once, in one of our conversations about the nature of the universe, about space and time, Skinner said, “I don’t know how you can think like that. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to think about the nature of space and time.“ His humility revealed his epistemological wisdom. However, I also saw in the softness of his glance the helplessness that the topic occasioned.
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Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)
“
Theories—whether neural, mental, or conceptual—talk about intervening steps in these relationships. But instead of prompting us to search for and explore relevant variables, they frequently have quite the opposite effect. When we attribute behavior to a neural or mental event, real or conceptual, we are likely to forget that we still have the task of accounting for the neural or mental event. ...Research designed with respect to theory is also likely to be wasteful. That a theory generates research does not prove its value unless the research is valuable. Much useless experimentation results from theories, and much energy and skill is absorbed by them. Most theories are eventually overthrown, and the greater part of the associated research is discarded.
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B.F. Skinner
“
Skinner’s most famous contribution to behavioral psychology was the invention of the Skinner Box, a controlled environment used to study operant conditioning in animals.
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
“
Skinner was able to explore different patterns of reinforcement, including continuous reinforcement (rewarding a behavior every time it occurs) and partial reinforcement (rewarding only some of the time).
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
“
At the core of behavioral psychology lies a simple yet powerful framework: Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence, or the ABCs of behavior.
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
“
While Pavlov focused on classical conditioning, Skinner expanded the field by introducing the concept of operant conditioning, which emphasizes how behavior is influenced by consequences.
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
“
At the heart of Skinner’s theory is operant conditioning, which differs from Pavlov’s classical conditioning in that it focuses on the consequences of voluntary behavior.
”
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
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Just as we can learn behaviors through classical conditioning, we can also “unlearn” them—a process known as extinction.
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the most effective forms of therapy, and its roots lie in behavioral psychology.
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
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If you want to see a behavior repeated, reward it—this is the central premise of positive reinforcement.
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Dae Lee (365 Days of Psychology: 365 Days of Psychology: A Year of Daily Lessons to Master Your Mind—From Freud to Skinner, CBT to Creativity, Mental Health to Mindfulness, and More (The Everyday 365 Books))
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the situation in which behavior occurs, the behavior itself, and its consequences.
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B.F. Skinner (About Behaviorism)
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HISTORICAL TIMELINE OF THE EARLY THEORIES
1886 – Sigmund Freud began therapeutic practice and research in Vienna.
1900 – Sigmund Freud published “Interpretation of Dreams” – beginning of psychoanalytic thought
1911 – Alfred Adler left Freud’s Psychoanalytic Group to form his school of Individual Psychology
1913 – Carl Jung also departed from Freudian views and developed his own school of Analytical Psychology
1936 – Karen Horney published Feminine Psychology as she critiqued Freudian psychoanalytic theory
1951 – Carl Rogers published Client-Centered Therapy
1951 – Gestalt Therapy is published by Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, & Ralph Hefferline.
1953 – B.F. Skinner outlined Behavioral Therapy
1954 – Abraham Maslow helped found Humanistic Psychology
1955 – Albert Ellis began teaching methods of Rational Emotive Therapy – beginning of cognitive psychology
1959 – Victor Frankl published an overview of Existential Analysis
1965 – William Glasser published Reality Therapy
1967 – Aaron Beck published a Cognitive Model of depression
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Robyn Simmons, Stacey Lilley, and Anita Kuhnley (Introduction to Counseling: Integration of Faith, Professional Identity, and Clinical Practice)