A. the Life of Skinner

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

OUTLINE

I. B. F. Skinner

A. The Life of Skinner

1. Skinner was brought up under strict parenting in Pennsylvania. He spent hours constructing mechanical devices such as wagons, seesaws, carousels, slingshots, model airplanes, and a steam cannon that shot carrots and potato plugs over neighboring houses. He as interested in animal behavior and trained pigeons to play ping-pong.

2. Skinner majored in English and became a novelist in which he was not successful. He decided to study human behavior by the methods of science rather than the methods of fiction. Skinner studied psychology at Harvard, taught there until 1936 and also taught at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University.

3. Skinner returned to writing and projected his emotional and intellectual discontent onto the protagonist of a novel, Walden Two, letting the character vent his personal and professional frustrations. This book has sold over 2 million copies and it describes a society in which all aspects of life are controlled by positive reinforcement. Skinner worked well into his 80’s.

B. Reinforcement: The Basis of Behavior

1. Skinner’s fundamental idea is that behavior can be controlled by its consequences, that is, by what follows the behavior. Respondent behavior involves a response made to or elicited by a specific stimulus. Skinner studied the work of Ivan Pavlov and his emphasis on the importance of reinforcement and extinction.

2. To Skinner, respondent behavior was less important than operant behavior. Skinner believed that the nature and frequency of operant behavior will be determined or modified by the reinforcement that follows the behavior.

C. Operant Conditioning and the Skinner Box

1. Operant-conditioning is a procedure by which a change in the consequences of a response will affect the rate at which the response occurs, according to Skinner. Skinner believed that most human and animal behavior is learned through operant conditioning. To Skinner, personality is a pattern or collection of operant behaviors.

D. Schedules of Reinforcement

1. Skinner decided to consider how behavior would change if he varied the rate at which it was reinforced, which is called reinforcement schedules. A fixed- interval schedule of reinforcement means that the reinforcer is presented following the first response that occurs after a fixed time interval has elapsed. This is much like a person’s weekly or bi-monthly salary. The fixed-ratio schedule of reinforcement is where reinforcers are given only after the organism has made a specified number of responses. This type of reinforcer becomes an incentive to work harder, such as for a person who makes a commission, (or fixed amount of money); for each car he might sell. With the variable-interval schedule of reinforcement, a person might be reinforced by preparing for a pop quiz at various intervals or time frames throughout a semester. A person would have to be alert and ready to respond well to the introduction of this type of reinforcer. The final schedule of reinforcement is the variable-ratio, which is based on an average number of responses between reinforcers, but there is great variability around the average. We would perceive that various types of gambling would operate under this schedule of reinforcement.

E. Successive Approximation: The Shaping of Behavior

1. Conditioning a child or an animal, according to Skinner, to do desired complex responses, in which they would not normally do, is with the use of the method of successive approximations or shaping. The organism, as it goes through this process of shaping, is reinforced as its behavior comes in successive, or consecutive, stages to approximate the final behavior desired. This is called successive approximation. Skinner believed that this is how children learn the complex behavior of speaking. The parents continue to teach and encourage the child by pronouncing words correctly and having the child repeat the corrected word.

F. Superstitious Behavior

1. Skinner believed we sometimes are reinforced by accident after we have displayed a behavior. A baseball player who felt he had to wear his cap a certain way in order to hit the ball or having a certain routine that seems to be “lucky” would be called by Skinner as, superstitious behavior. A single reinforcer of this kind may be powerful enough for a person or an animal to repeat the accidentally reinforced behavior more frequently for a while. According to Skinner, in humans, such behaviors may persist throughout life and require only occasional reinforcement to sustain them.

G. The Self-Control of Behavior

1. To Skinner, self-control meant the ability to exert control over the variables that determines our behavior. In stimulus-avoidance, we control ourselves by removing our self from something that may be negative for us to do, such as an alcoholic removing liquor from their home to avoid the temptation of drinking. Through the technique of self-administered satiation, we exert control to cure ourselves of bad habits by overdoing the behavior. We may smoke until we get sick of smoking which may help eliminate the negative behavior. The aversive- stimulation technique of self-control involves unpleasant or repugnant consequences. In self-reinforcement, we reward ourselves for displaying good or desirable behaviors. To Skinner, then, the crucial point is that external variables shape and control behavior.

H. Applications of Operant Conditioning

1. Behavior modification has been successful with children and adults, with the mentally healthy and the mentally disturbed, and with individuals as well as group behavior. An application from behavior modification is the use of a token economy. This is where tokens can be exchanged for valued objects or privileges as a reward for a desirable behavior. However, token economies have been found to be effective only within the setting in which they are implemented. In general, the modified behaviors do not carry over to life outside the setting in which they are used. When these tokens are no longer given, reinforced behaviors usually revert to their original state.

2. Operant-conditioning techniques have been applied to problems in business and industry. Reinforcers for business may include pay, job security, recognition from supervisors, and perks and status within a company. The focus is on changing overt behavior, defining the nature of the appropriate reinforcers, and determining their optimal rate of presentation to modify behavior. Skinner said that punishment, as a reinforcer; was ineffective in changing behavior from undesirable to desirable or from abnormal to normal. Skinner felt that positive reinforcement administered for desirable behaviors is much more effective than punishment. Negative reinforcement is an aversive or noxious stimulus, the removal of which is rewarding, such as a loud noise or an electric shock continues until the subject emits a desirable behavior. However, negative reinforcement does not always work whereas positive reinforcement is more consistently effective.

I. Assessment and Research in Skinner’s Theory

1. Skinner’s approach to assessing behavior is called functional analysis and it involves three aspects of behavior: (A) the frequency of behavior, (B) the situation in which the behavior occurs, and (C) the reinforcement associated with the behavior. Three approaches to assessing behavior are direct observation, self- reports, and physiological measurements. Observation has been used in a number of studies, while self-reports are carried out through interviews and questionnaires. Questionnaires for assessing behavior are similar in format to self-report inventories that assess personality. The difference lies in the way they are interpreted, as described by the sign-versus-sample approach. The sign approach is used to assess personality, while the sample approach is used to assess behavior. Physiological measurements may include heart rate, muscle tension, and brain waves. For Skinner, whatever the technique, the ultimate goal is to modify behavior, not change personality.

2. Skinner preferred the intensive study of a single subject. He believed that the data on the average performance of groups is of little value in dealing with a particular case. Skinner believed that valuable and replicable results could be obtained without as statistical analysis, as long as sufficient data were collected from a single subject under well controlled experimental conditions. Skinner favored the ideographic method rather than the nomothetic approach.

3. Skinner’s single-subject experiments follow the reversal experimental design. This design has four stages: (A) the first stage establishes a baseline for the subject’s behavior (the dependent variable) which is observed to determine the normal rate of response before any modification, next is the (B) conditioning, or experimental stage where the independent variables are introduced. The third stage is (C) which is called reversal, which determines whether some factor other than the independent variable is responsible for the learned behavior. When the procedure is applied to behavior modification, a reconditioning stage is added. Skinner and his followers conducted thousands of operant-conditioning experiments with highly supportive results.