Your recent column on Marshall McLuhan was terrific, and it led me to wonder about another darling of the 60s, in the field of psychology: Whatever became of B.F. Skinner? I recall all the fun we had torturing rats in “Skinner boxes” and thinking that we were all just messes of “operant conditioning.” Like your previous questioner about McLuhan, I haven’t followed the field since, so how is Skinner regarded today? –Greg Durand, Phoenix, Oregon
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Although he was certainly an icon of the 60s, Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990) did some of his most provocative work long before then. Walden Two, the utopian novel that endeared him to a generation of undergraduates, was first published in 1948, which readers will recognize as the year George Orwell wrote the dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-four. (He came up with the title by reversing the last two digits of the year of composition.) In contrast to Orwell’s book, Walden Two offered an optimistic vision of the future, which no doubt explained its appeal to 18-year-old middle-class peace marchers. Unfortunately, like a lot of authors popular at the time (Robert Heinlein comes to mind, and don’t even get me started on Hermann Hesse), Skinner was more monologuist than novelist, and the book’s value as literature is slight. It did, however, inspire a commune, Twin Oaks, which survives in rural Virginia to this day.
Skinner made a more enduring contribution as an experimenter and psychological theorist. A professor at Harvard from 1948 until his death, he built on the work of Ivan Pavlov, the reflex-conditioning pioneer, and John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism. Behaviorists rejected theories about the unconscious, defense mechanisms, and other mental constructs as untestable and ascientific. Instead they emphasized results you could reproduce in the lab. Drawing on a famous series of animal experiments involving a “Skinner box” (a cage containing a lever or button that produced a food pellet when pressed), Skinner showed that an organism’s behavior can be understood as a function of its interaction with its environment. The critter learns that behavior A produces reward X and behavior B will enable it to avoid punishment Y. If you want to change behavior, you merely modify the reinforcements. That seems numbingly obvious now, of course, but Skinner discovered a great many subtleties. For example, he found that training is most effective not when behavior A always produces reward X but when it does so only intermittently–the critter won’t give up so quickly when its efforts aren’t immediately rewarded. Through combinations of positive and negative reinforcement, one can shape complex behaviors–at one point Skinner taught pigeons to bowl.
