B. F. Skinner

BF Skinner ( Susquehanna, 20 as of March 1904 – Cambridge, 18 as of August as 1990 ) was a psychologist, social philosopher, inventor, author, and American . Drove a pioneering work in experimental psychology and advocated behaviorism, which considers behavior as a function of environmental reinforcement stories. He wrote controversial papers in which he proposed the widespread use of psychological behavior modification techniques, mainly operant conditioning, to improve society and increase human happiness, as a form of social engineering.

Biography 

BF Skinner was born in rural Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, United States, son of Grace and William Skinner, a lawyer. He became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to calm his fear of hell, which his grandmother had described. His brother Edward, two and a half years younger, died at sixteen of a brain hemorrhage. He was part of Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. After graduating, Skinner spent a year in Greenwich Village trying to train as a fiction writer, but he soon became disillusioned with his literary skills. He thought he had little experience and that he lacked a strong personal perspective to write with. During this period, which he later called “the dark year,” he read An Outline of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, in which Russell discussed the behavioral philosophy of psychologists, especially John B. Watson.

After his frustrated attempt as a writer, BF Skinner began to be interested in people’s behaviors and actions, which led him to study psychology at Harvard University (which at that time was not an institution at the forefront of psychology), graduating and taking a doctorate in 1931. He became part of that institution as a researcher in 1936, and later, he developed his teaching activity at the University of Minnesota and then at Indiana, and then returned to Harvard as a professor in 1948, where he would practice rest of his life

In 1948, he wrote the book Walden Two.

Skinner was the subject of many awards throughout his life. In 1968, he received the National Medal of Science by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Three years later, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation, and in 1972, he was awarded the Humanist of the Year award from the American Humanist Association. Just eight days before his death, he received the first mention for a life contributing to psychology by the American Psychological Association.

Psychology according to BF Skinner

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

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

In the established rivalry between mentalistic psychology and behaviorism, BF Skinner strongly opted for the second option in pursuit of making psychology science of behavior.

The pigeon’s superstition 

Pigeon’s superstition is an already classic BF Skinner experiment that was carried out in 1948. Eight hungry pigeons participated in this experiment, which was introduced in the so-called Skinner box. In it, the pigeons had food at regular intervals regardless of the response they issued. However, in this experiment evident conditioning was observed in all the pigeons.

An important aspect of this experiment was the conditioned responses that the pigeons adopted. For example, one of the pigeons learned to turn counterclockwise around the box, another pigeon stuck its head to one of the upper corners in a very characteristic way and a third subject developed the response of shaking the head.

Each pigeon developed its own idiosyncratic response. So much so that it gave the impression that the pigeons behaved in such a particular way because they believed that their behavior would cause the appearance of food. Nothing is further from reality. It is for this reason that this behavior was called superstitious.

BF Skinner’s explanation of this phenomenon appealed to the reinforcement received: he understood that whatever the response the subject had just made just before the administration of the food (the reinforcement) would be reinforced by the reward. Otherwise, of the multiple responses that the pigeons emitted before the presentation of the meal, the result, coincidentally, adjacent to the reward, would be reinforced. Hence, each pigeon will perform its particular response (idiosyncratic). It is important to note that this procedure is not, strictly speaking, an operant conditioning procedure. It is a classic conditioning procedure. The scientific literature offers experiments whose results invite you to question the conclusion that Skinner obtained. On the one hand it has been found that, in a procedure such as that used by Skinner, relatively specific patterns of behavior are generated that are a function of the proximity to the enhancer and the animal species used in the experiment.In particular, some researchers have observed that all pigeons develop identical answers, ie not idiosyncratic. However, it is also possible to find other results that support Skinner‘s explanation by finding that each pigeon develops its own distinctive behavior.

Be that as it may, superstition is a more or less common behavior in human behavior. The ritual of changing one’s luck to the cards is usual. A few random accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences are sufficient to establish sustained behavior despite the fact that there is no causal reinforcement. These behaviors have no real effect on the fate of a subject, just as in the case where the pigeon was fed regardless of its behavior.