B. F. Skinner: life and work of a radical behaviorist

What we understand by Psychology it can become very broad. It is an area of ​​study and intervention in which a large number of theoretical proposals and practices about issues not so similar to each other, and that historically has given birth to a great amount of theories Y proposals about human behavior.

Biography of B. F. Skinner

However, not all these currents of Psychology have been ascribed to the scientific method with the same force: some seem to be essentially related to the philosophy, while others only conceive the study of psychological processes as something approachable from the science.

This second tradition of Psychology owes much of its existence to a researcher named Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Manager revolutionize human action research through its radical behaviorism.

The start of his career

B. F. Skinner was born in March 1904 in a small town in Pennsylvania, United States. Encouraged by the creative possibilities of prose, during his youth he set out to create a career as a writer

, but he gave up on his purposes when he realized that he had no facility for it. He decided, however, that the Psychology studies They could give him a broader perspective on what human beings are like and how they act, which is why he began studying this discipline at Harvard.

This renewed enthusiasm did not last long. Upon reaching university he encountered an underdeveloped psychology highly focused on private mental processes, some disjointed ideas about the human mind and very abstract theories about states of consciousness that were more related to philosophy than to the scientific study of behaviour.

Towards a Scientific Psychology: The Influence of John Watson

Because it was observable human behavior that B. F. Skinner aspired to understand. Influenced by the behavioral psychologist John B. Watson, believed in the importance of developing experimental psychology and leaving behind the psychoanalysis and theories about the mind based on simple common sense. However, the use of the scientific method was not common in Harvard psychology studies.

If he did not give up on his academic and professional career, it was thanks to Fred S. Keller, who in the late 1920s was one of the young promises of behaviorism at Harvard. Fred Keller convinced Skinner that it was possible to make psychology a science, and shortly after both received doctorates in that discipline. That little meeting, in addition to consolidating a friendship between the two Freds that would last decades, made it possible for Frederic Skinner to become one of the most important figures in Psychology Scientific

Psychology according to B. F. Skinner

Skinner developed his studies within the methods and philosophy of behaviorism, a tradition of the Young psychology at that time that rejected introspective methods as a way of studying and modifying the mind. This same concept, that of "the mind"seemed to Skinner too confusing and abstract to be considered, and is that is why he placed his object of study in pure observable behavior.

Keeping this approach based purely on the empirical evidence is what made neither the methods nor the object of study of psychology studied by this researcher were the same as those from which they started psychoanalysts, focused on introspection and whose approach to the study of the psyche does not resist the Popperian principle of falsifiability.

In the established rivalry between mentalistic psychology and behaviorism, B. F. Skinner strongly opted for the second option in order to make psychology a science of behavior.

The birth of Radical Behaviorism

Skinner did not want psychology to fully embrace the scientific method simply so that his field of study would be better considered by having the backing of science. This researcher He sincerely believed that internal mental processes are not responsible for originating human behavior, but external and measurable factors.

B. F. Skinner believed, ultimately, that the proposals and hypotheses of psychology should be tested exclusively through objective evidence, and not through abstract speculation. This theoretical principle was shared by behavioral psychologists in general, but B. F. Skinner differed from most of them in one fundamental respect.

While certain researchers who at the beginning of the 20th century were ascribed to the current of behaviorism took behavior as an indicator of methodological objectivity to create explanatory models of human psychology that included some non-physical variables, Skinner believed that behavior itself was the beginning and the end of what should be studied in psychology. In this way, rejected the inclusion of non-physical variables in the investigations of what psychology should be for him.

The term "radical behaviorism", which Skinner himself coined, served to name this type of philosophy of behavioral science. In opposition to methodological behaviorism, the radical behaviorism carries the principles of behaviorism that researchers such as John B. Watson or Edward thorndike. That is why, according to this philosophical position, the concepts that refer to private mental processes (in as opposed to observable behavior) are useless in the field of psychology, although their existence.

Skinner and operant conditioning

B. F. Skinner is, of course, one of the greatest referents of behaviorism, but he was not a pioneer of this psychological approach. Before him, Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson had described the fundamentals of the classical conditioning in animals and humans respectively. This is important, since initially behaviorism was based on learning by stimulus associations as a method to modify the behavior, and classical conditioning made it possible to establish relationships between stimuli and responses in a way that could predict and control the conduct.

For Skinner, however, classical conditioning was not very representative of the learning potential of the human being, since it could practically only exist in highly controlled and artificial environments in which conditioned stimuli could be introduced.

The importance of operant behavior

Contrary to what other behaviorists thought, Burrhus He believed that operant behavior, and not responding behavior, was the most common, universal, and versatile kind of behavior., which means that when it comes to modulating behavior, the consequences matter more than the stimuli that precede it.

It is the results of the actions that are fundamental, says Skinner, since it is from these that the true usefulness or not of the actions is revealed. A behavior on the environment is considered operant because it has a series of verifiable consequences, and it is these responses from the environment (including other living beings in this category) that alter the frequency with which that behavior or a similar one is reproduced.

Thus, B. F. Skinner basically uses the form of associative learning known as operant conditioning, based on the increase or decrease of certain behaviors depending on whether their consequences are positive or negative, such as giving incentives to children when they perform their tasks.

Skinner's boxes

Skinner experimented with animal behavior based on the principles of operant conditioning. For this he used environments in which he tried to have total control of all the variables in order to be able to observe clearly what was affecting the behavior of the animal.

One such artificial environment was the so-called "Skinner box", a kind of cage for rats that had a lever and a food dispenser. Every time the rat, by chance or deliberately, activated the lever, a piece of food fell next to it, which was a way to encourage the rodent to repeat that act. In addition, the frequency with which the rat moved the lever was recorded automatically, which facilitated statistical analysis of the data obtained.

Skinner's box was serving as a means to introduce various variables (including electric shocks) and see how they affected the frequency with which certain behaviors occurred. These experiments served to describe certain behavior patterns based on operant conditioning and to test the possibility of predicting and controlling certain actions of animals. Today, many spaces used to experiment with animals are called Skinner boxes.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the great debater

One of the consequences of professing radical behaviorism is having to deny the existence of free will. In the book Beyond freedom and dignity, Skinner clearly expressed in writing this logical consequence of the philosophical principles in which he based: if it is the environment and the consequences of the acts that shape behavior, the human being cannot be free. At least, if by freedom we understand indeterminacy, that is, the ability to act independently of what happens around us. Freedom is, therefore, nothing more than an illusion far removed from reality, in which each act is caused by triggers outside the will of a deciding agent.

Of course, Skinner believed that the human being has the ability to modify his environment to make it determine it in the desired way. This pursuit is just the other side of the coin of determination: the environment is always affecting our behaviors, but at the same time everything we do also transforms the environment. Therefore, we can make this loop of causes and effects take on dynamics that benefit us, giving us more possibilities of action and, at the same time, greater well-being.

His denial of free will brought him harsh criticism

This philosophical stance, which today is relatively normal in the scientific community, he felt very bad in an American society in which the principles and values ​​of liberalism were (and are) strongly rooted.

But this was not the only point of friction between B. F. Skinner and public opinion. This researcher devoted much of his time to inventing all kinds of gadgets based on the use of the operant conditioning and liked to appear in the mainstream media to show the results of him or proposals. In one of his knockouts, for example, Skinner even trained two pigeons to play table tennis, and even proposed a system to guide bombs using pigeons to peck at the moving target that appeared on a screen.

Public opinion called Skinner an eccentric scientist

This kind of thing made B. F. Skinner won a picture of eccentric character, which was not surprising considering the extreme and far from common sense approaches of the time that germinated in his conception of what radical behaviorism is. Nor did it help that he invented a kind of crib with adjustable temperature and humidity, which was accompanied by the myth that Skinner was experimenting with his own daughter, a few months old.

For the rest, his opinions on politics and society expressed in his book Walden Two Nor did they marry the dominant ideology, although it is true that Skinner was not wasting any opportunity to appear in the media to explain and clarify his proposals and ideas.

The legacy of B. F. Skinner

Skinner died of leukemia in August 1990, and he was working until the same week of his death.

The legacy he left behind served to consolidate Psychology as a scientific discipline, and also revealed information on certain association-based learning processes.

Beyond the media side of Skinner, it is unquestionable that he became a scientist who took himself very seriously. He was serious about his work and spent a lot of time and thoroughness generating knowledge backed by testing empirical. The importance of his legacy has survived the behaviorism of his time and has come to strongly influence Cognitive Psychology and the appearance of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies.

Therefore it is not strange that today, 25 years after his death, B. F. Skinner is one of the most claimed figures from Scientific Psychology.