B.F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner
Born	March 20, 1904 Susquehanna, U.S.
Died	August 18, 1990 Cambridge, U.S.
Known for	Operant conditioning

B.F. Skinner or Burrhus Frederick Skinner, was a reactionary Statesian psychologist born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, U.S., on March 20th, 1904. He was a leading figure in behaviourist psychology and one of the founders of behavioural modification techniques that are widely used today in social media and video games. Skinner is best known for his theory of operant conditioning, which focuses on how consequences affect behaviour. Skinner received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1931 and began teaching as a professor at various universities, such as Indiana University and Harvard.

Behaviourism functions similarly to other psychological philosophies, as it attributes social and class conflicts to individual behaviour that can be conditioned away; a common pattern in psychology is the reformist mechanism for obscuring capitalism's contradictions. For example, Skinner doesn't account for dreams, creativity, mass ideology, or unconscious conflicts, which cannot be dealt with or explained by simple reinforcement models.

Psychology

Preface

Behaviourism serves as a technology for controlling and disciplining both the workforce and consumers, offering manipulative techniques for shaping desired behaviour without addressing socio-economic causes. Behaviourism reduces consciousness and fails to capture the entirety of the human psyche; a one-sided obsession with reflexive behaviours leaves one unable to recognize all the other psychological characteristics of a human. Consciousness has its own laws that cannot be waved away with simple conditioning.

Skinner’s Work

Skinner's most notable work is his concept of operant conditioning. He viewed that behaviours are strengthened or weakened depending on their consequences, with four techniques:

• Positive Reinforcement: Adding a desirable stimulus to increase behaviour, e.g., rewarding a dog with food when it acts accordingly.
• Negative Reinforcement: Removing an undesirable stimulus to increase behaviour. This is often confused with punishment, but it's more in line with rewarding somebody by removing something that they find unpleasant.
• Positive Punishment: Adding an undesirable stimulus to decrease behaviour, e.g., putting a stinky sock in somebody's face.
• Negative Punishment: Removing a desirable stimulus to decrease behaviour, e.g., taking away your child's phone.

Skinner also mentioned that it is not whether one uses these techniques, but rather when and how often, that determines how fast behaviour is corrected and learned. Skinner found several schedules with varying effectiveness:

• Continuous Reinforcement: Rewarding a behaviour every time, which is good for a little while, but the behaviour stops as soon as the rewards stop.
• Fixed-Ratio Reinforcement: Rewarding behaviour after a fixed number of responses or a fixed amount of time.
• Variable-Ratio Reinforcement: Rewarding a behaviour after an unpredictable number of responses. Skinner views this as the most effective schedule, as it produces continuous behaviour that is hard to stop. This is used in casinos, lotteries, social media, and video games to keep you playing the game.

Skinner proposed the concept of shaping, which entails that one cannot wait for the subject to begin the activity on their own, but rather reward each successive step towards the behaviour, e.g., rewarding a dog for walking to the door, another reward once they have left the building, and finally once the dog is peeing outside rather than inside the home.

Radical Behaviourism is a philosophy that Skinner introduced, arguing that psychology must focus exclusively on the measurable, observable, and environmental variables that control it, as opposed to previous psychologists who tried to analyze minds through introspection or mental states that are unobservable.

In 1957, Skinner published the book Verbal Behaviour, attempting to apply his operant conditioning to language, specifically children's learning of language. He argued that children learn language through reinforcement from their parents, as when the baby says "ma-ma" and gets a positive reaction from its mom. Historically, this was criticized by Noam Chomsky, who argued that language is innate. The debate between these two led to the "Cognitive Revolution" in psychology.

Skinner invented the cumulative recorder, which was a mechanical device that used a pen on paper to leave a mark every time an animal made a response in order to identify the exact rate of behaviour.