Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a behaviourist, psychologist, inventor, social philosopher and author based in the United States. He was born on March 20th 1904, and died on August 18th 1990. He was born in Susquehanna County to William and Grace Skinner. Edward, his young brother, died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 16. Skinner went to Hamilton College in New York City to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree of Arts in literature. At college, he found himself at a social disadvantage due to his intellectual attitude. In 1926, he finished his bachelor’s degree and attended Harvard University, where he researched and taught at the same time. While at Harvard University, he was convinced by Fred Keller to develop an experimental science from studying people’s behaviour. This made him invent the Skinner Box prototype and joined Keller to develop other tools for experiments. Immediately after graduating from Harvard, Skinner unsuccessfully attempted to write a novel, but he became discouraged with his literary skills as much as Robert Frost encouraged him to write ( Akpan, 2020 ). After the discouragement, he concluded that he had no experience and a personal perspective to write. His encounters with Watson’s behaviourism made him study psychology and later developed his behaviourism version.
In 1931, he graduated from Harvard University with a PhD but remained there until 1936, when he moved to the University of Minnesota to continue teaching. After nine years of teaching in Minnesota, Skinner moved to Indiana University and was appointed from 1946 to 1947 as the chair in the psychology department. He later returned to Harvard as professor and taught there until his retirement. Skinner was among the people that signed the Humanist Manifesto that occurred in 1973. Skinner married Yvonne Blue in 1936 and were blessed with two daughters Julie and Deborah. In the 1970s, Skinner’s public exposure had escalated considerably and remained active until death. Skinner died on August 18th 1990, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after suffering from leukemia. Ten days before he died, the American Psychological Association gave him the sustainable achievement award.
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Skinner immensely contributed to the field of psychology. He came up with behaviourism theory that provides a systematic description of how environmental variable controls the body. Basing on his theory, Skinner differentiated two kinds of behaviour that are controlled in various ways. One of the behaviours he distinguished is respondent behaviour. According to Skinner (2019), stimuli elicit respondent behaviours, and these behaviours can be changed through respondent conditioning, notably classical conditioning. Operant behaviours are the second kind of behaviour he distinguished. Any stimulus does not induce operant behaviours, and they are reinforced through operant conditioning, in which a response occurrence produces a reinforcer. While discussing behaviourism, Skinner majorly focused on reinforcement. Reinforcement is a critical behaviourism concept. It is the main process that modifies and control behaviours that occur as negative and positive. According to the organism's behaviour, Skinner defined negative reinforcement as the reinforcement of behaviour by some event occurrence and negative reinforcement as reinforcing behaviour by avoiding the aversive event. Both kinds of reinforcement reinforce behaviour or heighten the probability of a reoccurring behaviour.
Behaviourism made significant contributions in the field of psychology. Behaviourism brought knowledge into learning, developing language and further developed moral and gender. It also defined behaviours clearly and measure changes. The contributions of this theory are seen in some practical applications. Behaviour modification and therapy represents effective approaches used in abnormal behaviour treatment. As much as behaviourism made significant contributions to psychology, it is marred with various criticisms. One of the criticisms of this theory is that it only provides a limited account of human behaviour and leaves important factors such as expectations, emotions and higher-level motivation. These behaviourist explanations can prevent further studies from another perspective that could uncover significant factors. Additionally, Skinner used animals in many of his experiments which are physiologically and cognitively different from humans who experience different social norms and moral values. Humanistic psychology also criticizes behaviourism and assumes that they have personal agency to make their decisions in life and should not follow science.
References
Akpan, B. (2020). Classical and Operant Conditioning—Ivan Pavlov; Burrhus Skinner. In Science Education in Theory and Practice (pp. 71-84). Springer, Cham.
Skinner, B. F. (2019). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis . BF Skinner Foundation.
