B. F. Skinner's legacy to human infant behavior and development.

B. F. Skinner's legacy to human behavioral research for the study of environment-infant interactions, and indeed for the conception of development itself, is described and exemplified. The legacy is largely the practicality, the efficiency, and the comparative advantage--relative to diverse other behavioral and nonbehavioral approaches--of using the operant-learning paradigm to organize and explain many of the sequential changes in behavior patterns conventionally thought to constitute infant development.     

Review of B. F. Skinner's The Behavior of Organisms

As I reread my review nearly 50 years later, I think of the circumstances. I had heard a paper by Fred at the Ithaca meeting of the APA in 1932, and recall the praise by Edna Heidbreder, who was sitting next to me, whose remark was that “He has a clean mind.” The year before his book appeared, I had already cited eight of his published papers in a review of the conditioned response in relation to conventional learning experiments that appeared in the Psychological Bulletin (1937, 34, 61–102). It may be because of that the editor sent me Fred's book to review.

When I received the copy of his new book to review, I read it carefully, and soon reported on it orally before Lewis Terman's weekly seminar to get comments and questions before revising my review. I was pleased by Terman's excitement over the originality of Fred's approach.

     

B. F. Skinner's Utopian Vision: Behind and Beyond Walden Two

This paper addresses B. F. Skinner's utopian vision for enhancing social justice and human well-being in his 1948 novel, Walden Two. In the first part, we situate the book in its historical, intellectual, and social context of the utopian genre, address critiques of the book's premises and practices, and discuss the fate of intentional communities patterned on the book. The central point here is that Skinner's utopian vision was not any of Walden Two's practices, except one: the use of empirical methods to search for and discover practices that worked. In the second part, we describe practices in Skinner's book that advance social justice and human well-being under the themes of health, wealth, and wisdom, and then show how the subsequent literature in applied behavior analysis supports Skinner's prescience. Applied behavior analysis is a measure of the success of Skinner's utopian vision: to experiment.     

B. F. Skinner's technology of behavior in American life: from consumer culture to counterculture

From the 1940s through the 1970s, articles in popular magazines and newspapers presented B. F. Skinner in a wide array of guises, from educational revolutionary and utopian to totalitarian and fascist. Understanding these diverse, and often contradictory, portrayals requires a consideration of the social and political discourses in which they were embedded. In this paper, I suggest that reports of Skinner's work were influenced by a number of cultural categories, from the better living campaign of the 1950s, to the counterculture crusade of the late 1960s. Through this examination, a multifaceted rendering of Skinner's public image that takes into account the nature of his work, the context in which it was produced, and the culture in which it was received is revealed. I propose that the received view of Skinner as maligned behaviorist actually obscures the complexity of his relationship with psychology's public throughout this period.     

A day of great illumination: B. F. Skinner's discovery of shaping

Despite the seminal studies of response differentiation by the method of successive approximation detailed in chapter 8 of The Behavior of Organisms (1938), B. F. Skinner never actually shaped an operant response by hand until a memorable incident of startling serendipity on the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis in 1943. That occasion appears to have been a genuine eureka experience for Skinner, causing him to appreciate as never before the significance of reinforcement mediated by biological connections with the animate social environment, as opposed to purely mechanical connections with the inanimate physical environment. This insight stimulated him to coin a new term (shaping), and also led directly to a shift in his perspective on verbal behavior from an emphasis on antecedents and molecular topographical details to an emphasis on consequences and more molar, functional properties in which the social dyad inherent to the shaping process became the definitive property of verbal behavior. Moreover, the insight seems to have emboldened Skinner to explore the greater implications of his behaviorism for human behavior writ large, an enterprise that characterized the bulk of his post-World War II scholarship.     

A Quantitative Analysis and Natural History of B. F. Skinner's Coauthoring Practices

This paper describes and analyzes B. F. Skinner's coauthoring practices. After identifying his 35 coauthored publications and 27 coauthors, we analyze his coauthored works by their form (e.g., journal articles) and kind (e.g., empirical); identify the journals in which he published and their type (e.g., data-type); describe his overall and local rates of publishing with his coauthors (e.g., noting breaks in the latter); and compare his coauthoring practices with his single-authoring practices (e.g., form, kind, journal type) and with those in the scientometric literature (e.g., majority of coauthored publications are empirical). We address these findings in the context of describing the natural history of Skinner's coauthoring practices. Finally, we describe some limitations in our methods and offer suggestions for future research.     

Quantitative order in B. F. Skinner's early research program, 1928-1931

The purpose of this article is to provide a coherent story of Skinner's graduate-school (1928-1931) research projects, adding to Skinner's own accounts a different emphasis and a number of interesting details. The story is guided by the proposal that a search for quantitative order was the "unifying force" amid the variety of apparatus changes and shifts of research topic in Skinner's early development as a researcher. Archival laboratory-research records from several apparatuses which Skinner constructed between 1928 and 1931 (1) indicate that his research program was more complicated than he has implied; (2) show that he worked on three interdependent lines of investigation simultaneously; (3) suggest that change or abandonment of an apparatus or a project was markedly affected by his success (and failure) in his primary objective, which was to find quantitative orderliness in measured behavior. Frequent apparatus change in the period of 1928 to 1930 ceased when he obtained quantitative orderliness in the panel-press and lever-box preparations. In the examination of archival records, questions about the enterprise of biographical understanding are considered.