Berres Frederick was born in Pennsylvania, USA, the son of lawyer William Skinner and his wife Grace. The boy had a happy childhood and early years he had a passion for all sorts of inventions. At an early age, he becomes a convinced atheist. He dreams of becoming a writer, and in order to achieve his cherished goal, he enters Hamilton College in New York. However, because of his views, the boy will remain a stranger to the intellectual position. educational institution. In 1926, Skinner received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature.
After that, in 1930, he entered Harvard University, where he received a master of arts degree.
After graduating from university, Skinner takes up writing a novel, but he soon becomes disillusioned with his literary talent. A chance encounter with John B. Watson's Behaviorism inspires Skinner to focus his efforts on the study of psychology.
In 1931, Skinner received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and until 1936 he would be a research fellow at the university. It is here that he begins work on the creation of the operant conditioning chamber, a device also known as the Skinner chamber, designed to study the processes of instrumental conditioning and classical conditioned reflexes animals.
In 1936, after leaving Harvard, he became a teacher at the University of Minnesota, where in 1937 he would receive the position of senior lecturer, and in 1939 he would become an assistant professor. In this position, Skinner will work until 1945.
In 1945, he will take the post of professor at Indiana University, where he will also be elected head of the department of psychology. After working for three years, Skinner leaves the university.
Returning to Harvard, in 1948 he joined the staff of university professors, in which he would remain until the end of his days.
Skinner founded his own school of psychology, known as "radical behaviorism". His works in this area are based on the study of conditioned reflexes. Skinner firmly believes that a living organism does not have a will of its own, but only copies behavior that leads to a favorable outcome for it.
He constructs a learning machine - a device that simplifies the educational process for a wide audience of his students. This apparatus teaches the inherent training course, testing the acquired knowledge and, as a motivation, rewarding for the correct answers.
In 1948, Skinner wrote the utopian novel Walden Two, a highly controversial literary work, in which the author refutes theories of the existence of free will, spirit and soul. He argues that human behavior is determined by genetic factors and the influence of variable environment rather than free choice.
In 1957, Skinner published "Verbal Behavior", in which he analyzes the use of language, linguistic phenomena and speech - a purely theoretical work, not supported by practical research.
In 1971, his most famous book, Beyond Freedom and Honor, was published, in which Skinner outlines his own approach to science, which he calls "cultural engineering." This publication instantly becomes a New York Times bestseller.
Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, which facilitates the study of the behavioral pattern of animals by prompting them to perform specific actions in response to certain stimuli. These cameras have been used in a number of studies in the study of animal behavior and psychology. Skinner's psychological doctrine, radical behaviorism, is used in many, completely different areas. modern society: in management, clinical practice, animal training and educational processes. His theories are used in prescribing therapy for autistic children.
In 1971, Skinner was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation.
In 1990, for his invaluable contribution to the field of science, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association.
In 1936 Skinner marries Yvonne Blue. The family has two daughters, Julia and Deborah. Julia would later become a famous writer and teacher.
The B. F. Skinner Foundation, founded in 1988 with his personal support, was created to promote the philosophy of science proposed by scientists. The president of this foundation is his own daughter Julia.
In 1989, Skinner was diagnosed with leukemia, from which he died in 1990.
The most vocal opponent of Skinner's theories was philosopher and cognitivist Noam Chomsky.
Skinner most often preferred to experiment on pigeons.
1. The behavior of organisms (1938).
2. Walden - 2 (1948).
3. Science and human behavior (1953).
4. Verbal behavior (1957).
5. Regimes of Reinforcement (1957).
6. Summation of observation (1961).
7. Teaching technology (1968).
8 Random Reinforcement (1969)
9. Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).
10. On Behaviorism (1974).
11. Details of my life (1976).
12. Reflections: behaviorism and society (1978).
13. Portrait of a Behaviorist (1979).
14. The Significance of Consequences (1983).
15. The joys of adulthood (1983).
16. Further Reflections (1987).
The behaviorist program was led by John Watson (1878 - 1958), trying to find forms of approach to mental life, with a pronounced natural-scientific bias. Behaviorists could not consider such concepts as “awareness”, “experience”, “suffering” as scientific, since they are subjective in nature, they are products of self-observation. Science, according to behaviorists, cannot operate with concepts that are not fixed by objective means. The most radical behaviorist, BF Skinner, called such concepts "explanatory fictions" and deprived them of the right to exist in science. Behavior was the subject of study for behaviorists. “We are replacing the stream of consciousness with the stream of activity,” said Watson. Activity - internal and external - was described by the concept of a reaction, which included those changes in the body that could be recorded by objective methods - movement, secretory activity.
J. Watson proposed as an explanatory scheme the formula S => R, according to which the impact (stimulus) generates a reaction, and the nature of the reaction determines the stimulus. Learning to manage behavior scientific program D. Watson. If the response is determined by the stimulus, then it is enough to choose the right stimuli to get the desired behavior. According to Watson, such laws of learning (the formation of a response to certain stimuli) are universal and apply to people and animals. The descriptions of learning were based on the patterns of formation of a conditioned reflex according to I.P. Pavlov, to which behaviorists have always referred.
B. Skinner suggested a different principle of behavior. Behavior may be determined not by the stimulus that precedes the response, but by its probable consequences. An animal or person will replicate behavior that had pleasurable consequences and avoid if the consequences were unpleasant. In other words, it is not the subject who chooses the behavior, but the likely consequences of the behavior govern the subject. Accordingly, one can manage behavior by positively reinforcing certain behaviors and thereby making them more likely. This is the basis of Skinner's idea of programmed learning, which provides for "step-by-step" mastery of activities with reinforcement for each step.
» Skinner's Operant Theory
© V.A. Romenets, I.P. Manoha
Burres Frederic Skinner is considered the second leading neobehaviorist after C. Hull, but he is much more popular than him. Until his death, he remained one of the most famous psychologists in the world, and his ideas still influence the nature of psychological research, pedagogy and the practice of psychology today. Historians of science ask the question: Did Skinner make a significant contribution to human self-knowledge? And basically they answer like this: "He was too far from these kinds of questions."
Man's understanding of himself, or at least of what philosophers and psychologists have been looking for for centuries, was by no means Skinner's goal. Throughout his long life, he adhered to an extreme behaviorist position, according to which “subjective entities”, such as the mind, thinking, memory, argumentation, do not exist at all, but are only “verbal constructs”, grammatical traps into which humanity has fallen with the development of speech. Skinner was looking for the determinants of behavior: how it is determined by external causes. He did not doubt the correctness of his position, because he believed that "behaviorism needs an explanation."
The conditioning theory that Skinner sought to create was to sum up his rather unusual research: everything we do and what we are is determined by the history of our rewards and punishments. The details of his theory came from principles such as partial reinforcement of the effect, the study of the environment that causes a certain behavior or stops it.
Like J. Watson, Skinner was socially active, in particular as a publicist. In one of his early television appearances, he cited a dilemma suggested by M. Montaigne: “What would you do if you had to choose between having children or writing books?” - and replied that for himself personally he would give birth to children, but his contribution to the future would be significant thanks to his work.
Skinner liked to laugh at the terms specialists used to understand human behavior: “Behavior is inherent in human nature, and therefore there must be an extensive “psychology of individual differences” in which people are compared and described in terms of traits, abilities, inclinations. But beyond tradition, everyone who deals with human action continues to interpret human behavior in a pre-scientific way."
Skinner also rejected attempts to understand inside character of a person: “We did not need to say that personalities, states of mind, feelings, character traits of a person really exist, so that they can be reconciled with scientific analysis behavior... Thinking and everything else is behavior. The mistake lies in trying to attribute behavior to the soul.”
According to Skinner, it is necessary to know the external causes of behavior and its observable results. Only on the basis of such assumptions can a clear picture of the activity of the organism as a behavioral system be given.
According to this position, he acted as a convinced determinist: “We are what we appear in our history. We want to think that we choose, that we act, but I cannot accept that the individual is either free or responsible.” Self-sufficient and autonomous human existence Skinner considers an illusion. For him, a good person is such because he is completely conditioned to behave in a certain way, and a good society must be based on "behavioral technology", which means the scientific control of behavior using positive reinforcement methods.
Skinner's contemporaries considered him a clever popularizer of science: he was eloquent, confidently selfish, able to grab attention. To demonstrate the benefits of the conditioning technique, he taught a pigeon to play a tune on a toy piano and a pair of pigeons to play table tennis as they rolled a ball around with their beaks. Millions of viewers watched it on television as a science documentary.
Two pigeons play ping pong during an operant learning experiment. Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1950.
Skinner transferred his naturalistic visions to the society he invented. In the utopian novel Walden Two (1948), he describes a small community in which the behavior of children from birth was strictly conditioned by rewards (positive reinforcement) to set them on a path of cooperation and sociability, all behavior scientifically controlled for the greater good. Despite the artificiality of the dialogues and the somewhat hackneyed plot, this book has become a favorite among students. It quickly sold over two million copies.
Skinner's popularity with the public was far greater than among his professional colleagues. The American Psychologist wrote: “Skinner is the leading figure in the behavioral myth. He is the scientist-hero, Prometheus, the fire-bearer of discovery, the master technologist, the master rebel who liberates our thoughts from the old ways."
Skinner was born in a small Pennsylvania town to a lawyer father. As a boy, he was fond of inventions, later, already as a psychologist, he created original and effective equipment for experiments with animals. In high school and college, Skinner dreamed of being a writer, and after college he tried writing. Although he closely observed various forms of human behavior around him, he once clearly realized that he could not say anything about what he saw and experienced, and in deep sadness abandoned this kind of effort.
But Skinner soon found another, more practical way of understanding human behavior. Getting acquainted with the works of Watson and Pavlov, he realized that his future lay in the scientific disclosure of human behavior, in particular in the study of conditioning reactions. I was very upset by my failures in literature, - he said in 1977 - I was convinced that the writer really did not understand anything. And this led to the fact that I returned to psychology.
Although Harvard was then dominated by introspective psychology, Skinner was not interested in the "inner history" of man and went his own way, conducting behavioral research with rats. In his autobiography, he frankly says that, despite his professorial training, he became more and more a behaviorist, and on the defense of his dissertation, he sharply rejected the criticism of behaviorism.
Relying on his inventive abilities, he designed a "problem cell", which was a significant achievement after the well-known Thorndike model. It was quite spacious for white rats, and there was a bar with food and drink on the wall. When a rat, walking around the cage, accidentally rested its front paws on the bar, pressing it, the food in the form of a ball fell onto the tray.
This made it possible to obtain more objective data on behavior than it was before Skinner's experiments. It was the rat that “determined” how much time elapsed between pressing the bar. Therefore, for his discovery of the principle of learning, Skinner could thank the so-called "rat response" - a class of achievements when the animal's behavior changes in response to reinforcement without the intervention of the experimenter.
Skinner designed the research program with the cell in such a way that it approximated its conditions to real situations where behavior is reinforced or not reinforced. In particular, he investigates the learning of responses if they are regularly reinforced or if the reinforcements are abruptly interrupted, as well as the effect on learning of time intervals with their regularity and irregularity.
On this basis, Skinner formulated a series of principles that shed light not only on the behavior of rats, but also on human existence. It's about, in particular, about his discovery of important variations in the effect of partial, partial reinforcement. Skinner finds an analogy in the behavior of players with a slot machine in a casino: neither the rat nor the players can predict when the next reinforcement will appear, but they have the hope that it will appear on each new attempt.
Skinner's important contribution to the behavioral sciences is his concept of operant learning. This alone deserves, in the opinion of American historians of psychology, a prominent place among the famous psychologists of the world.
In classical Pavlovian conditioning, the animal's unconditioned response (salivation) to food becomes a conditioned response to a previous neutral stimulus (metronome or bell sounds: the new stimulus is the decisive element in behavioral change.
In Thorndike's "instrumental" conditioning, the decisive element of behavioral change is the response, not the stimulus. The neutral response - a random step (pressing) on the pedal during a random effort to get food - is a reinforcing learning behavioral step that leads to a change that the animal has not previously been taught.
Skinner's operant conditioning is an important development of instrumental conditioning. The random movement that an animal performs can in any case be understood as operant for those around it, and therefore, according to Skinner, is precisely operant. Reinforcement movement leads to operant learning. By reinforcing a series of small random movements, the experimenter can "create" the animal's behavior while it acts in ways that were not part of its original natural repertoire.
Burres F. Skinner
This approach enabled Skinner to "create" the pigeon's behavior by making it peck at a large colored plastic disc attached to the wall of the "Skinner" cage. He writes about it this way: “We first gave the bird food when it slowly turned in the direction of the disk. This led to the frequency of such behavior. We supported reinforcements until a slight movement was directed towards the spot (disk). This again changed the general distribution of behavior without developing a new unity. We continued with position reinforcement to successfully approach the spot, further reinforcement only when the head moved slowly forward, and finally only when the beak actually made contact with the spot.
Thus we can build operant behavior, which would never have appeared in the organism's repertoire otherwise. When reinforcing a series of successful approximations, we get the answer for a short time. There is a functionally connected unity of behavior; it is constructed by an ongoing process of differential reinforcement away from non-differential behavior.”
Skinner likened the pigeon's operant training to a child's learning to talk, sing, dance, play, and eventually the entire repertoire of human behavior, built up from small units of simple behavioral acts. It could be called "an Erector-set" (a view from being human), a mindless robot put together by operant conditioning from many meaningless pieces.
Skinner was, in one way or another, not recognized by the leading psychological institutions for a long time, but gradually he gained supporters, which subsequently resulted in the publication of four journals of Skinner's behavioral work, as well as the creation of a special section of Skinner's studies.
Skinner's technique of operant conditioning has been widely used in experimental psychology. In recent years, his writings have been cited in hundreds of scientific publications every year (something about a seventh of the frequency of Freud's mentions). In addition, Skinner had great influence outside the mainstream of psychology.
Darby, 13-month-old daughter of Professor B.F. Skinner, has lived since birth in a dust-proof, closed and glazed playpen, in which temperature and humidity were automatically regulated. Skinner gradually reduced the time Darby spent in her box, so that eventually she would only sleep in it.
In 1956, during a visit to his daughter's school, Skinner had the idea that the operant technique used to teach a pigeon to play the piano could be more effective for learning than traditional methods. Complex subjects can be broken down into simple steps in a logical sequence; students can be asked questions, and the teacher should immediately answer which of their answers are correct. Two principles work here: 1) knowledge, which is told correctly, must become reinforced behavior; 2) Immediate positive reinforcement works better than destructive negative reinforcement. The result is known as a "programmable instruction".
Since the teacher cannot simultaneously apply reinforcement in a class with many students, new textbooks must be written so that questions and answers follow one another. In addition, Skinner proposed learning machines for operant self-learning. mechanical model was abandoned over time, but today the use of instructional instruction based on a computer with direct reinforcement is experiencing a rebirth.
Within a few years, the programmed learning movement gained momentum. The principles of operant conditioning have been adapted for teaching in schools and colleges in the United States and other countries. But educators realized that "atomistic" methods of programmed instruction are only part of what human existence needs: integral, hierarchized thought structures are also needed. More recent research has shown that delayed reinforcement often results in best result than instant reinforcement. Reasoning about the nature of the response can lead to a greater effect in learning than quickly getting the answer. At the same time, Skinner's doctrine of direct reinforcement was qualified as useful and is contained in many curricula and school textbooks.
Burres Skinner also had some success in uncovering the causes of mental and emotional disorders. A system of small reinforcers for small changes in the direction of health provides an opportunity to change the behavior of the patient. In the late 1940s, Skinner and two of his students carried out the first experimental test of what became known as behavior modification. They set up an in-patient facility at a psychiatric hospital near Boston, in which psychotic patients were given sweets or cigarettes by appropriate methods to operate the machine appropriately. The therapists provided stimuli to patients for appropriate behavior, such as voluntary attentional aids, support with chores, the privilege of choosing a company for dinner, talking to a doctor, or being able to watch television.
Reinforcement of the desired behavior often worked in such people. One depressed woman did not want to eat and was afraid to starve to death. But she received guests, watched TV shows, listened to the radio, read books and magazines, had flowers in her room. The therapists moved her to a room devoid of this comfort and shone the light directly on her. If she ate something, certain comfort items were temporarily returned to the room. Gradually, the woman regained her weight. After 18 months, she was already leading a normal life.
The "behavioral modification" movement has spread to many psychiatric hospitals and schools. This modification was used to solve important problems such as smoking, obesity, timidity, tics, speech difficulties. It was a specialized technique for behavioral therapy, but based more on Pavlovian conditioning than Skinnerian modification.
Burrhus F. Skinner
Skinner's famous book, Walden Two, did not make American society, or at least part of it, happy, but it certainly influenced the social perceptions of millions of his readers. Some effort has been made to realize the Walden Two utopia of Twin Oaks Community in Louisiana, Virginia, and a commune founded by eight people in 1966. After several years of survival, this commune has grown to 81 members. They tried, on the basis of relevant knowledge, to induce ideal behavior and create models of its various forms using Skinner reinforcement methods.
Skinner once remarked: "My influence on other people was much less than on rats and pigeons or on people as subjects of the experiment." This is apparently not to be taken literally. What he thought seriously was: "I never doubted the importance of my work." And he added in his characteristic perverse style: “When this work began to attract attention, I was more wary of this experiment than I was pleased with it. Some reproach me that I was afraid or depressed from the so-called pride and thirst for fame. I reject any ambition that takes away my time from my work or over-emphasizes specific aspects of it.
The historian of psychology M. Hunt, expounding Skinner's ideas, does not go further than stating individual facts and describing the characterological traits of the scientist himself. But even this presentation cannot but suggest the thought: is it possible to draw a parallel between Skinner's intentions to build an ideal communist community based on the idea of operant learning, and the intentions of Marxists to change the world, relying on "scientific communism" as a technology of social transformation?
Romenets V.A., Manokha I.P. History of psychology of the XX century. - Kyiv, Lybid, 2003.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist and writer. Skinner admitted that at the beginning of his journey he was strongly influenced by the ideas of the English scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose works he became acquainted with in his youth. "Bacon's three principles have guided my professional life." Skinner put it this way:
1. "I studied nature, not books."
2. "In order to control nature, it must be obeyed."
3. " better world possible, but it will not arise suddenly, by chance. It must be carefully planned and created in accordance with this plan, mainly with the help of science” (1984, pp. 406-412).
“Behaviorism is a tool that makes it possible to apply an experimental approach to the study of human behavior ... Many aspects of the theory of behaviorism probably require further research, but there is no need to doubt the correctness of this theory. I am absolutely sure that in the end it will triumph” (Skinner, 1967, pp. 409-410).
Skinner said of himself: "I asked more questions of the organism itself than of those who studied the organism" (1967, p. 409). The result of this approach was that Skinner emphasized rigorous laboratory experimentation and the collection of measurable behavioral data. If we take into account the wealth of the human person, then such an approach may seem too limited; and yet he is the very foundation on which all of Skinner's theories rest firmly.
Skinner adopted and developed the scientific philosophy known as radical behaviorism. Some modern behavioral learning theorists use terms such as need, motivation, and intention to explain certain aspects of human and animal behavior. Skinner refused such terms, as they were related to personal, mental experience and symbolized, in his opinion, a return to non-scientific psychology.
According to Skinner, observable and measurable aspects of the environment, the behavior of an organism, and the consequences of this behavior are the basic material for a thorough scientific analysis.
Skinner believed that science is concerned with finding the causes of phenomena, that the determination of causes makes prediction and control possible, that carefully conducted experimental research will make it possible to establish these causes.
Skinner introduced definitions of two, in his opinion, the most important species behaviors:
Responsive behavior that is evoked by a known stimulus
operant behavior that is not caused by a stimulus, but simply produced by the organism.
Unconditioned responses are an example of respondent behavior because they result from the use of a stimulus. Examples of respondent behavior are all reflexes, such as a sharp movement of the hand when pricked with something sharp, constriction of the pupil in bright light, salivation when food appears.
In Skinner's ideology, behavior change is simply about finding something that will reinforce the organism whose behavior needs to be changed, wait for the desired behavior to emerge, and then reinforce the organism's response.
After that, the frequency of occurrence of the desired reaction will increase. The next time the desired behavior appears, it is reinforced again, and the rate at which the response appears increases even more. Any behavior that an organism is capable of exhibiting can be influenced in this way.
According to Skinner, what we call "personality" is nothing but consistent patterns of behavior that are the sum total of our reinforcement history. For example, we learn to speak our native language because we have been reinforced in our immediate environment since early childhood by making sounds similar to those of our native language. Different cultures reinforce various models behavior. This fact needs to be well understood before any adequate applied science behavior.
In Skinner's attempts to understand the causes behind behavior and thus predict and control behavior, the similarity between operant conditioning and natural selection is important.
If reinforcement can be controlled, then behavior can be controlled.
It is not a question of whether behavior will be controlled, but rather who or what will control it. For example, parents can guide their child's personality development by reinforcing certain behaviors, or they can enable society to nurture their child by allowing television, peers, school, books, and nannies to reinforce. However, setting the direction of their child's life is not easy, and every parent who wishes to do so should at least follow these steps:
1. Decide what personal qualities you would like your child to have.
Let's say, for example, you want your child to grow up to be a creative person.
2. Express these goals in terms of behavior. To do this, ask yourself; “What does a child do when he creates?”
3. Reward behavior that is consistent with these goals. With this example in front of you, you can reward moments of creativity the moment they occur.
4. Be consistent, organize the main aspects of the child's environment so that they also reward behaviors that you consider important.
A similar approach can be used by a manager in relation to his subordinate. That is why Skinner's ideas subsequently led to the development of the so-called reinforcement theory.
The process of operant conditioning takes quite a long time.
There is another approach to operant conditioning that doesn't take that long. This procedure is very similar to the children's game "hot - cold", when one child hides something, and other children try to find the hidden one. As they approach the hidden object, the child who hid the object says, “Warmer, very warm, terribly hot, just hot.” When they move away from the object, the child says: "It's getting cold, very cold, you can become stiff."
Modeling has two components: differential reinforcement, which means that some responses are reinforced while others are not, and successive approximation, which shows that only responses that meet the experimenter's intention are reinforced.
Skinner was very interested in the practical application of his theory of learning to the educational process. According to Skinner, learning is most effective when:
1) the information that needs to be learned is presented gradually;
2) learners receive immediate feedback on the correctness of their learning (i.e. they are shown directly from the learning experience, whether they learned the information correctly or incorrectly);
3) learning takes place at a pace acceptable to students.
It is interesting to note that the most common teaching method is lecturing, and the lecturing method violates all three of the above principles.
Skinner suggested alternative method teaching, called programmed learning, which really includes all three of the above principles.
Many behavioral problems arise because our behavior is more influenced by immediate reinforcers.
For example, for some, the taste of food in the moment is more reinforcing than the distant promise of longevity through a meal or diet regimen. Likewise, the immediate effects of nicotine are more reinforcing than the promise of a long smoking-free life.
Skinner believed that it was not necessary to formulate complex theories of learning a certain behavior, that behavioral events should be described in terms of what has a direct impact on behavior, and it was logically inconsistent to try to explain behavior in terms of mental phenomena. For this reason, Skinner's method of research has been called the "empty body approach".
Skinner also believed that complex learning theories are a waste of time and uneconomical. At some point, such theories may prove useful in psychology, but only after a huge amount of basic / initial data has been collected. Our main goal should be to discover the basic relationships that exist between classes of stimuli and classes of responses.
Skinner's approach to research was to carry out a functional analysis of the effect of a behavior-stimulating event on the individual's behavior itself.
Weakening Factors of Reinforcement Conditions Skinner states that there are five factors that attenuate the reinforcing effects of reinforcement conditions.
According to Skinner, many of the problems resulting from these "cultural habits" could be solved by reinforcing the desired behavior through the use of principles derived from experimental behavioral analysis.
Skinner's long and effective research programs have had a significant impact on both applied and theoretical psychology. Compared to the systems of many other researchers, Skinner's system was simple and could be easily applied to problems ranging from animal education to human behavior modification. On the other hand, his work led to the emergence of the Law of Correspondence and indirectly influenced modern research on behavioral decision making.
In 1972, the members of the American Psychological Association (already numbering one hundred thousand at the time) were asked to name the most prominent psychologists of the 20th century. In their almost unanimous opinion, this honorary list was headed by B.F. Skinner, ahead of even Freud (he was named second). Probably, the great-power narcissism of the Americans also played a role here. However, if in such an assessment an exaggeration was allowed, then a small one. Skinner is a truly outstanding psychologist, and if not the first, then one of the first. His influence on world psychology, on the whole complex of human sciences (not least on pedagogy) is enormous. One can treat his radical ideas in different ways (and he was constantly reproached for radicalism), but in the analysis of the world psychological thought of the outgoing century, they should by no means be discounted.
Berres (such a Russian spelling is accepted for rare name Burrhus Frederick Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania on March 20, 1904. As he himself noted in his autobiography, which was published in the 5th volume of the famous History of Psychology in Autobiographies (1967), he was brought up in a warm and friendly family atmosphere. However, there was strict discipline in the family. The general positive attitude was achieved due to the fact that the parents did not abuse punishments, but, on the contrary, maintained discipline and order, each time encouraging and rewarding those deeds that deserved it. Probably, this style of relationship subsequently influenced the formation of Skinner's psychological and pedagogical views: he always assigned a decisive role to the so-called positive reinforcement.
In childhood and adolescence, the interests of the future psychologist were extremely diverse and completely unsystematic. Like many boys, he was fond of experimenting with mechanical devices, tried to make a homemade pneumatic gun, even designed a sophisticated multi-block design for ... neatly hanging his own pajamas.
In these interests, his biographers see (although this seems to be a stretch) a foreshadowing of the extreme mechanism of his future theories. At home, he arranged a whole terrarium, where he kept several toads, lizards, turtles and even snakes.
He managed to play in the school orchestra, in his youth he was considered a good saxophonist. But the young Skinner paid the greatest attention to literature. Already at the age of fourteen, based on a rigorous analysis of Shakespeare's plays, he put forward his own hypothesis about their authorship, which he attributed to Bacon. Similar hypotheses have been put forward before and after, but it is characteristic that an American schoolboy came to this conclusion with his own mind, which in itself characterizes this mind as very uncommon. How many eighth graders do you know who are capable of such conclusions, and who have even read Bacon? And Skinner special attention delved into the Baconian philosophy of science, admiring the faith of the English thinker in the possibility of a scientific solution to practical life problems.
Skinner was known among his peers for his amazing work ethic. Skinner received his higher education at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts school in New York State. Here he specialized in in English and literature, intending to devote himself to literary creativity in the future. He retained not the most pleasant memories of his student years. Many things in the curriculum annoyed him, especially the obligatory daily services (religiousness was absolutely alien to him throughout his life).
He failed to get close to his classmates, because he considered them (probably not unreasonably) to be limited people, with low spiritual demands. While they indulged in simple youthful amusements, he read Joyce and Proust with rapture. However, Skinner sometimes took an active part in student pranks, and after several risky pranks organized on his initiative, the young man was almost expelled from college. He still managed to graduate from college, in 1926 he received a bachelor's degree.
It should be noted that at Hamilton College, psychology was taught as an elective. Skinner did not attend these classes, his interest in psychology was formed later. And in those years, he seriously planned his literary career. Acquaintance with the famous poet Robert Frost further strengthened him in this intention. Frost believed that the young man showed great promise as a writer, and warmly admonished him. This prediction was not destined to come true. After graduating from college, Skinner spent quite a bit of time in creative pursuits, until he finally came to the disappointing conclusion that he "had absolutely nothing to say."
At this moment there was a sharp reorientation from the field of art to the field of science, which, as he realized, is the "art of the twentieth century." In 1928, Skinner entered Harvard University in the psychology department. He was aware that he had lost a lot of time and, in terms of psychological erudition, was far behind his university comrades. Therefore, he set for himself the strictest, truly Spartan regimen of training sessions, completely denying himself leisure: he set aside 15 minutes a day for extracurricular activities. This dedication paid off. In 1931, Skinner received his doctorate and published his first serious scientific study, immediately pushing him to the forefront of behavioral psychology.
Skinner studied at Harvard from 1931 to 1936. scientific work. He concentrated his efforts on the study of animal behavior. In 1936 he took up a teaching position at the University of Minnesota and remained there until 1945. In the fall of 1945, he became chair of psychology at Indiana State University, a post he held until 1947, after which he returned to Harvard as a lecturer. He worked there until he retired in 1974.
Skinner's scientific bibliography is very extensive: for half a century he wrote 19 major monographs and many articles. But the earliest publication that brought him fame is usually mentioned even in the shortest lists of his writings. This is a small article "The concept of a reflex in descriptions of behavior." Here, for the first time, the conditioned reflex was interpreted not as a real act of life activity inherent in it in itself, but as a derivative of the experimenter's operations.
In one of his subsequent works, Skinner wrote that in his entire life he had only one idea, and this idea is expressed by the term "management" ("control"), meaning the management of behavior. The experimenter can cope with this task only if he controls all the variables under the influence of which the behavior of the organism is formed and changed. He loses power over his object when he admits its dependence on hypothetical internal factors that elude direct observation. Therefore, only directly fixed relationships between experimentally controlled stimuli and subsequent reactions are of interest to science.
According to Skinner, science is forced to resort to hypotheses and deductive theories where its objects are phenomena that are inaccessible to direct perception. Psychology is in a better position. The interaction of factors generating behavioral responses can be directly seen.
However, this requires special experimental setups and schemes. They are like optical instruments that can detect events hidden from the naked eye. Skinner considered such a device to be the experimental box he invented (later called, despite the protests of the inventor himself, the Skinner box), in which a rat or a pigeon, by pressing a lever or button, receives reinforcement. The lever is connected to a recorder that registers movement.
Pressing the lever is considered as a sample and an independent unit of the "operant reaction" - very convenient for fixation, since it can always be unambiguously determined whether it has occurred or not. Additional devices allow you to connect reinforcements with various signals (sound, light, etc.).
The scheme of experience can be complicated. For example, instead of one lever in front of the rat, there are two, thereby putting it in a situation of choice. From this rather simple set of elements, a wide variety of behavior management plans are compiled. So, the rat presses the lever, but gets food only when the light bulb lights up. As a result, in the future, under the light of a light bulb, the reaction rate increases markedly. Or food is given out only when pressed with a certain force. In the future, movements of the required force appear more and more often. You can connect movements in a chain (say, a reaction to a green color leads to the appearance of a new stimulus - a red color, the motor response to which is reinforced). The experimenter can also vary widely the timing and order of positive and negative reinforcement by constructing various "reinforcement plans".
In his experiments, Skinner clearly preferred experimenting on animals, mainly pigeons and rats, believing that the difference between humans and animals is actually not at all fundamental.Skinner had a negative attitude towards statistical generalizations, believing that only a careful fixation of the reactions of an individual organism would solve the main problem of psychology - to predict and control the behavior of specific individuals.
Statistical data concerning the group (sample) are insufficient for conclusions that have predictive power in relation to each of its members. The frequency of responses and their strength are captured by curves, which, according to Skinner, exhaust all that positive science can say about behavior. As an example of this type of research, Skinner's work, carried out by him jointly with C. Foerster, “Reinforcement Plans” (1957), was proposed, in which data were collected in 921 diagrams on 250 million reactions continuously produced by experimental pigeons for 70,000 hours.
Like most behaviorists, Skinner believed that recourse to physiology was useless for studying the mechanisms of behavior. Meanwhile, his own concept of "operant conditioning" was formed under the influence of Pavlov's teachings. Recognizing this, Skinner distinguished between two types of conditioned reflexes. He suggested classifying the conditioned reflexes studied by the Pavlovian school as type S. This designation indicated that in the classical Pavlovian scheme, the reaction occurs only in response to the impact of some stimulus (S), that is, a stimulus. 
Behavior in the "Skinner box" was classified as type R and called operant. Here the animal first produces a reaction (R) and then the reaction is reinforced. During the experiments, significant differences were established between the dynamics of the type R reaction and the development of the salivary reflex according to the Pavlovian method.
According to Skinner, the limitation of the traditional behavioral formula S - R is that it does not take into account the influence of the results of the reaction on subsequent behavior. The reaction is considered only as a derivative of the stimulus, only as a consequence, but not as a determinant that transforms the organism. An adequate formula for the interaction of an organism with the environment, Skinner wrote, must always take into account three factors: 1) the event about which the reaction occurs, 2) the reaction itself, 3) reinforcing consequences. These relationships are incomparably more complex than the relationship between stimulus and response.
Thus, the fundamental importance of the transition from a linear idea of behavior to the assertion of the role of feedback in the construction of reactions was outlined. This role was played by reinforcement, which selects and modifies reactions.
Developed by Skinner and his followers, the technique of "operant conditioning" received in the United States wide application in various areas of practice. The intention to apply the principles of operant behaviorism to the solution of practical problems of various kinds has given this direction wide popularity far beyond the boundaries of psychology. Operant technique began to be used in the education of mentally retarded children, the treatment of neurotics and the mentally ill. In all cases, behavior modification is achieved through incremental reinforcement. For example, the patient is rewarded for every action that leads step by step to the goal provided by the treatment regimen.
During the years of World War II, the observation of trained pigeons pecking food led Skinner to the invention of special guided projectiles. However, this invention has not been put into practice. (This idea by Skinner was parodied by Danish filmmakers many years ago: in the comedy Hit First, Freddy!, specially trained pigeons were replaced in the belly of a rocket with ordinary carrier pigeons, which are accustomed ... to return home.)
In pedagogy, Skinner's ideas have found extremely wide application. He himself explained this phenomenon by chance, as well as all his achievements (true to his theory, he assessed everything that happens in life as a consequence of the prevailing circumstances).
On November 11, 1953, after attending an arithmetic class at his daughter's school, Skinner, as he recalls in his autobiography, became distraught: “Suddenly the situation seemed completely absurd to me. Feeling no guilt, the teacher violated almost all the laws discovered by scientists regarding the learning process.
Impressed by this picture, Skinner began to think about reinforcement factors that could be used to improve the teaching of school subjects, and designed a series of teaching machines. So there was a direction called programmed learning. Its rapid development met the needs of the era of the scientific and technological revolution.
True, the idea of optimizing learning and using special machines for this purpose is not inextricably linked with any particular psychological concept. As for Skinner's theory, it was able (unlike other psychological systems) to become the basis for prospecting work on programmed learning, due to the fact that it introduced the principle of dividing the process of solving a learning problem into separate operations, each of which is controlled by a reinforcement that serves as a feedback signal.
The vulnerability of Skinner's "learning technology" was that it introduced into pedagogical theory and practice the idea inherent in all behaviorism about the identity of the mechanisms of behavior modification in all living beings. The controversy of this position was especially sharply exposed in Skinner's interpretation of those higher forms of mental activity that since ancient times have been considered purely human property, namely speech acts.
In Verbal Behavior (1957), Skinner develops the concept that language acquisition occurs according to the general laws of the formation of operant conditioned reflexes. When one organism produces speech sounds, the other organism reinforces them (positively or negatively), thereby controlling the process of acquiring stable meanings for these sounds. The latter, according to Skinner, can belong to one of two sections - indicate either the subject in which the speaking individual feels the need, or the subject with which this individual comes into contact.
This concept was sharply criticized by the well-known American linguist Noem Chomsky, who showed that attempts to explain the production of speech by the type of operant reactions of a rat pressing a lever are not only incompatible with the linguistic interpretation of language as a special system, but also render meaningless the concepts of stimulus that are key to behaviorism. reactions, reinforcement. And although most specialists in the field of language theory in this controversy gravitate more towards the position of Chomsky, Skinner himself considered Verbal Behavior to the end of his days the most successful and convincing work.
No less, and perhaps even more acute controversy was caused by another work of Skinner - the social utopia "Walden 2".
In this book, combining his literary inclinations and psychological findings, Skinner depicted in a fictional form the prospects for creating a new just social order using the technique of operant conditioning.
Despite the humanistic intent, the analogy with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was seen in Walden 2 so clearly that the most exalted publicists wrote Skinner almost into fascists. However, life itself put everything in its place. The communes, created according to the model proposed by Skinner, did not last long: it turned out to be not very comfortable to live in them. However, as in the communes of flower children, who professed diametrically opposed principles. Perhaps this is the fate of all social utopias.
Skinner, in fact, gave a lot of criticism. However, the names of his critics (with the exception of Chomsky and, perhaps, Rogers) are unlikely to be preserved in the history of psychology, and Skinner remains one of the most frequently cited authors to this day. The Gold Medal awarded to him in 1971 by the American Psychological Association barely contained the eulogy: “B.F. Skinner, a pioneer in psychological research, a leader in theory, a master of technology who has revolutionized the study of behavior."
B.F. Skinner died of leukemia on August 18, 1990.
None of his works has yet been translated into Russian.
