Biography:

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna.  His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife.  His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard-working.

Burrhus received his BA in English from Hamilton College in upstate New York. He wanted to be a writer and did try, but it just wasn’t working for him.

Ultimately, he resigned himself to writing newspaper articles on labor problems, and lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York City as a “bohemian.”  There, he happened upon books by Ivan Pavlov and John Watson.

A  At the age of twenty-four he enrolled in the psychology department at Harvard University. Skinner was interested in the behavior of animals, and he constructed apparatus after apparatus to observe and record rats' behavior and its changes. He got his masters in psychology in 1930 and his doctorate in 1931, and stayed there to do research until 1936. It is during this time that he conceived of the theory of Operant Conditioning.

Also in that year, at the age of 32, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota.  He also met and soon married Yvonne Blue.  They had two daughters, the second of which became famous as the first infant to be raised in one of Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. 

In 1945, Skinner and his family moved to Bloomington Indiana where he became Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of Indiana. In 1946 the first meeting of the Society of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was held in Indiana. Twelve years later, it had a journal.

In 1948, he was invited to come to Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his life.  In 1989 he was diagnosed with leukemia. At the American Psychological Association, ten days before he died, he gave a talk before a crowded auditorium. He finished the article from which the talk was taken on August 18, 1990, the day he died.

Operant Conditioning:

B.F. Skinner's Operant Conditioning theory is built off of Edward Thorndike's unpolished consequence model. In developing his theory, Skinner worked a lot with animal behavior. Operant Conditioning is also a consequence model, which means that what comes after a behavior controls it. Skinner basically reinvented Thorndike's vocabulary. Rather than calling the consequences rewards and punishers, he called them positive reinforcers and negative reinforcers respectively. This is an R → S+/- model. These letters are psychological language that can be translated into: the behavior (R) is performed, and it yields a positive reinforcer (S+) or negative reinforcer (S-).

When a behavior is followed by a POSITIVE (+) reinforcer, the behavior will maintain or increase in frequency and probability. When a behavior is followed by a NEGATIVE (-) reinforcer, the negative reinforcer will decrease the likelihood of the behavior occuring again.

He also coined the terms PRIMARY and SECONDARY reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is naturally occuring; these include food, water, air, and sex. A secondary reinforcer is learned to be a reinforcer by pairing it with a primary. For example, if trying to get a dog to sit. If the dog sits, initially you would follow the behavior, sitting, with a primary reinforcer (e.g., a dog treat/ food). You cannot give the dog food forever however, for he or she would become sick or fat. So you need to pair a secondary reinforcer with the primary so the dog knows this secondary is positive. Now when the dog sits you will give it a treat and pet it and praise it (secondary). Eventually the dog will consider the petting and praising by itself a reinforcer to continue the good behavior- sitting.

From his research with the use of reinforcers following a behavior, Skinner constructed a table. The contents of the table were rather straight forward. When you follow a behavior with something positive the behavior will increase, this he called positive reinforcement. When you follow a behavior with something negative the behavior will decrease, this he called punishment. When you follow a behavior by taking away something negative the behavior will increase, this he called negative reinforcement. And finally, when you follow a behavior with the removal of something positive, this is again considered punishment.

Through his learnings about how to increase and decrease the probability of a behavior occuring, Skinner experimented with how to shape a new behavior. He knew first and foremost that learning is not a one-shot deal and that he would need to come up with incremental steps.

If you want to teach a new behavior, according to Skinner you need to first decide what your goal is (eg, what the behavior is that you want). The second step is to determine the baseline: the existing level of the behavior prior to intervention. You can assume this is zero, but it might not be. Then comes the intervention which is shaping by successive approximations. Basically, you do small steps/ increments of the behavior reinforcing at each step until the whole behavior/goal is attained. You must reinforce continuously at each approximation because new behaviors are very fragile and easy to lose.

Once the goal is attained you must implement what Skinner calls a schedule of reinforcement, which depending on which one you choose can make the behavior as permanent and as frequent as you want. He constructed this because he acknowledged that it would be too hard to continuously reinforce every time forever. There are four schedules of reinforcement:

I. Fixed Ratio: reinforcer delivered after a fixed number of responses each time; this makes a high rate of behavior in a short period of time that is easily extinguishable.

II. Variable Ratio: reinforcer delivered after a a varied number of responses, all averaged around a certain number; this makes for a more average rate of behavior over time that is permanent.

III. Fixed Interval: reinforcer delivered after a fixed amount of time. Reinforced following first behavior performed after time has lapsed. The organism will increase its behavior right before the time period has lapsed; however he or she will not be productive at the beginning of the interval, and this is also easily extinguishable.

IV. Variable Interval: reinforcer delivered after varied amount of time, all averaged around a certain time interval. This produces the same rate of behavior and permanency as the Variable Ratio schedule.

Skinner's final significant contribution was his theories on how to get rid of an incompatible behavior; namely through his processes of extinction, satiation, and/or shaping.

Why Operant Conditioning?:

When trying to understand, control and change behavior I believe that the principles of Operant Conditioning are by far the most useful. There are several ways to apply the behavioral approach of psychology, and through the use of this model everybody should be able to learn anything and everything. Unfortunately however, behavioral psychologists are quickly reducing in number, and psychologists and psychiatrists who favor the medical model are taking over the realm of therapy and counseling.

The medical model assumes that everything can be cured with medicine. These days you go to therapy and within the first few minutes of a session they are suggesting possible drugs that may help you. Stressed out? Anxious? Depressed? Here's an easy cure. Take prozac or xanax! Ignore the undeniable truths that lie behind these. Do we not care that for these to be effective they must be used forever? Do we want to be drugged up everyday for the rest of our lives? Should we trivialize the side-effects?

I will not deny that the quick-fix associated with taking a drug to slow down the physiological increase of heart-rate or temperature that accompanies anxiety is appealing. I too understand the desire to boost our metabolisms, energy, and spirits. Nevertheless, these drugs although they work quickly, do not solve the problems. They stop the physiological components that come with fear, but they don't get at the root of what caused the fear. Thus inevitably if we ever get off the medicine the fear will come right back because the sources of it still exist. And we must eventually get off the medicine, unless of course we all want to be walking zombies.

Behavioral psychologists on the other hand are trying to find where the fear, anxiety, depression, et cetera stems from. If they can break the association of the object or stimulus and the emotion that follows then drugs are not necessary, and next time you enter that situation you won't feel those unpleasant emotions.

An example: You walk into a classroom and a pack of wild dogs attacks you. Naturally fear of classrooms, and that specific classroom in particular, is a result. What do you do? Dropping out of school and avoiding classrooms all together isn't the best idea (hopefully you can acknowledge that much). Additionally, fear tends to generalize outwards towards other areas, so you really don't want to ignore it. The medical model would dope you up with tranquilizers. Sure you wouldn't feel the physiological components of fear, but your brain probably wouldn't be functioning at its normal level to learn in the classroom either.

Operant conditioning would instead try to get at the core of the problem. They might do this in several ways. You could do systematic desensitization with visual imagery, where you'd imagine yourself in the situation while at the same time doing deep muscle relaxation techniques so you're feeling calm in the situation. They may also do shaping by successive approximations, where you'd take small steps towards the ultimate goal of entering the classroom, of course being reinforced positively at each step.

The medical model would also say that most behavior is genetic or hereditary. So if you frequently engage in reckless behavior, to a proponent of the medical model you inherited this recklessness. Operant models would say to the contrary, that most behavior is learned. This is either through direct interaction with the environment, or through its modeling by others. See Albert Bandura.

Through education and research I have come to believe that anything can be taught through operant conditioning. You can get someone to do just about anything with the incentive of positive reinforcement. Additionally, you can get someone to stop just about anything with punishment. Why psychologists have chosen to nearly abandon this field is beyond me.