The theory of B. F. Skinner and behaviorism

Burrhus Frederic Skinner is not just one of the most important historical figures in psychology; it is, in many respects, responsible for its asserting itself as a science.

His contributions to this field are not only methodological, but also philosophical, and his radical behaviorism, despite not being far from Hegemonic today, he allowed, among other things, that in the second half of the 20th century a tool as useful as the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, very inspired by this researcher. Let's see what were the main keys to the theory of B. F. Skinner.

A turn towards operant conditioning

When B. F. Skinner began his studies, behaviorism was based basically on the simple conditioning inherited from the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and popularized by John B. Watson.

Explained far above, this first approach to behavioral psychology proposed modifying behavior by making stimuli pleasant or unpleasant that were presented at the same time as other stimuli to which the individual was wanted to develop an aversion or liking. I say "individuals" and not "persons" because the simple conditioning was so rudimentary that functioned even with life forms with a nervous system as simple as that of reptiles or mollusks.

For example, in Pavlov's famous dog experiments, this physiologist made animals start to salivate when they heard a certain sound, as it had been associated with food in previous trials. The key to simple conditioning was to associate stimuli with each other.

Skinner admitted that simple conditioning could be helpful in certain cases, but he ruled out the possibility that the behavior could be explained only through this mechanism, among other things because the conditions for it to occur rarely exist outside of a laboratory. However yeah He believed that our behavior (and that of many other forms of life) can be understood as a process of adaptation to pleasant and unpleasant experiences, useful and not useful.

The change that the theory of B. F. Skinner went the other way: instead of focusing on the way in which stimuli are associated with each other, he He looked at the way in which the actions that are carried out and the consequences of these actions are associated. What happens to us because of something we have done is, in itself, a stimulus that we take note of. Thus, Skinner takes into account the perception-action-perception loop.

Operant conditioning

For Skinner, learning from the consequences of the way in which one interacts with the world was the main mechanism of behavior modification. Both humans and animals are always performing all kinds of actions, for insignificant that they are, and these always have a consequence for us, which we receive in the form of stimuli. This association between what we do and what we notice are the consequences of our actions are the foundation of operant conditioning, also known as instrumental conditioning, what according to Skinner it was the basic form of learning in a good part of the forms of life.

But that the mechanisms of operant conditioning were basically the same in many types of organisms did not It means that the contents on which they are produced were to be the same regardless of whether we are a mouse or a being human. Members of our species have the ability to create abstract concepts and generate autobiographical memory, but for Skinner the appearance of these refined ways of thinking were the tip of the pyramid of a process that began by learning from our successes and our mistakes in time real.

Furthermore, the methodology commonly used by behavioral psychologists was based on the animal models (experimentation with rats, pigeons, etc.), which in a way is a limitation.

The black box and Skinner

Behaviorists have always been well known for their conceptualization of mental processes as phenomena that occur within of a "black box", a metaphor that serves to indicate the impossibility of observing from the outside what happens in the minds of women. people. However, the black box of Skinner's theory was not the same as that of the early behaviorists. While psychologists like John B. Watson denied the existence of a mental world, Skinner did believe that the study of mental processes could be useful in psychology.

Of course, for B. F. Skinner, in practice it was not necessary to do that, and it was enough to start from the analysis of the relationships between measurable and directly observable actions and the consequences of these actions. The reason for his position on this issue was that he did not consider our mind to be more than a part of the journey from performing the action to recording of the stimuli that are (or appear to be) a consequence of these actions, although with the added difficulty that it is practically impossible to study objective.

In fact, the very concept of "the mind" was misleading for Skinner: it leads us to think that there is something within us that does thoughts and action plans appear out of nowhere, as if our psychic life were disconnected from our environment. That is why in the theory of B. F. Skinner the object of study of psychology is behavior, and not the mind or the mind and behavior at the same time.

According to this behaviorist, everything that is usually called "mental process" was actually a form of behavior more, something that is put in place to make the fit between our actions and the expected consequences optimum.

The legacy of B. F. Skinner

The theoretical legacy of the father of radical behaviorism supposed a total rejection of the speculative research methods characteristic of psychoanalysis and a research proposal outside of introspection and focused only on objective variables that are easy to measure.

Furthermore, he indicated the risk of transforming highly abstract theoretical constructs (such as "mind" or "demotivation") into causal elements that explain our behaviors. So to speak, for Skinner to say that someone has committed a crime because of his feeling of loneliness is like saying that a locomotive is moving because of movement.

Being so heavily supported by operant conditioning, Skinner's work claimed the experimentation with animals as a useful source of knowledge, something that has been widely criticized both by cognitive psychologists and by various philosophers, according to whom there is a qualitative leap between the mental life of nonhuman animals and the members of our species. However, animal models are still widely used in psychology to make approaches to the types of behaviors present in our species.