B. F. Skinner

The behavior of organisms : an experimental analysis

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The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response

(1935). The Generic Nature of the Concepts of Stimulus and Response. The Journal of General Psychology: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 40-65.

Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo Type

(1935). Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo Type. The Journal of General Psychology: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 66-77.

An operant analysis of problem solving

Behavior that solves a problem is distinguished by the fact that it changes another part of the solvers behavior and is strengthened when it does so. Problem solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli. Verbal responses produce especially useful stimuli, because they affect other people. As a culture formulates maxims, laws, grammar, and science, its members behave more effectively without direct or prolonged contact with the contingencies thus formulated. The culture solves problems for its members, and does so by transmitting the verbal discriminative stimuli called rules. Induction, deduction, and the construction of models are ways of producing rules. Behavior that solves a problem may result from direct shaping by contingencies or from rules constructed either by the problem solver or by others. Because different controlling variables are involved, contingency-shaped behavior is never exactly like rule-governed behavior. The distinction must take account of (1) a system which establishes certain contingencies of reinforcement, such as some part of the natural environment, a piece of equipment, or a verbal community; (2) the behavior shaped and maintained by these contingencies; (3) rules, derived from the contingencies, which specify discriminative stimuli, responses, and consequences, and (4) the behavior occasioned by the rules.

Symbolic Communication Between Two Pigeons, (Columba livia domestica)

Through the use of learned symbols, a pigeon accurately communicated information about hidden colors to another pigeon. Each verbal exchange was initiated with a spontaneous request for information. The two pigeons engaged in a sustained and natural conversation without human intervention.

The operational analysis of psychological terms

The major contributions of operationism have been negative, largely because operationists failed to distinguish logical theories of reference from empirical accounts of language. Behaviorism never finished an adequate formulation of verbal reports and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective terms. But verbal responses to private stimuli can arise as social products through the contingencies of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities.In analyzing traditional psychological terms, we need to know their stimulus conditions (“finding the referent”), and why each response is controlled by that condition. Consistent reinforcement of verbal responses in the presence of stimuli presupposes stimuli acting upon both the speaker and the reinforcing community, but subjective terms, which apparently are responses to private stimuli, lack this characteristic. Private stimuli are physical, but we cannot account for these verbal responses by pointing to controlling stimuli, and we have not shown how verbal communities can establish and maintain the necessary consistency of reinforcement contingencies.Verbal responses to private stimuli may be maintained through appropriate reinforcement based on public accompaniments, or through reinforcements accorded responses made to public stimuli, with private cases then occurring by generalization. These contingencies help us understand why private terms have never formed a stable and uniform vocabulary: It is impossible to establish rigorous vocabularies of private stimuli for public use, because differential reinforcement cannot be made contingent upon the property of privacy. The language of private events is anchored in the public practices of the verbal community, which make individuals aware only by differentially reinforcing their verbal responses with respect to their own bodies. The treatment of verbal behavior in terms of such functional relations between verbal responses and stimuli provides a radical behaviorist alternative to the operationism of methodological behaviorists.

The operant side of behavior therapy

For more than twenty-four hundred years, people were seen to behave in given ways because of what they were feeling or thinking, and feelings and thoughts were therefore the things to study. However, it has always been difficult to do very much with feelings and thoughts because of their inaccessibility to outside observers. Further, important distinctions are obscured when behavior is attributed to a state of mind. As more and more of the variables of which behavior is a function are identified and their role analysed, less remains to be explained in mentalistic ways. The operant side of behavior therapy is illustrated by considering a few characteristic problems. Discussion includes the analysis of contingencies outside and inside the clinic, and the relationship between behavioral health and medical health.

The Behavior of the Listener

In the traditional view of a speech episode, held by philosophers for thousands of years, the speaker perceives some part of the world in the literal sense of capturing or taking it in (or rather, because there is no room for the world itself, taking in a copy or representation) and then puts the copy into words, the meanings of which correspond in some way with what the speaker perceived. The listener takes the meanings out of the words and composes another copy or representation. The listener thus receives or conceives what the speaker has perceived. Something has been communicated in the sense of made common to both speaker and listener. A message has been sent, the content of which is sometimes called information. Information theory, however, was invented to deal only with the structural features of a message (how many bits or bytes could be sent through a telephone line or stored in a computer?). The content of a message is more appropriately called knowledge, from a root that gave the Greek word gnomein, the Latin gnoscere, the late-Latin co-gnitio, and at last our own cognition.

Methods and theories in the experimental analysis of behavior

We owe most scientific knowledge to methods of inquiry that are never formally analyzed. The analysis of behavior does not call for hypothetico-deductive methods. Statistics, taught in lieu of scientific method, is incompatible with major features of much laboratory research. Squeezing significance out of ambiguous data discourages the more promising step of scrapping the experiment and starting again. As a consequence, psychologists have taken flight from the laboratory. They have fled to Real People and the human interest of “real life,” to Mathematical Models and the elegance of symbolic treatments, to the Inner Man and the explanatory preoccupation with inferred internal mechanisms, and to Laymanship and its appeal to “common sense.” An experimental analysis provides an alternative to these divertissements. The “theories” to which objection is raised here are not the basic assumptions essential to any scientific activity or statements that are not yet facts, but rather explanations which appeal to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of observation, described in different terms, and measured, if at all, in different dimensions. Three types of learning theories satisfy this definition: physiological theories attempting to reduce behavior to events in the nervous system; mentalistic theories appealing to inferred inner events; and theories of the Conceptual Nervous System offered as explanatory models of behavior. It would be foolhardy to deny the achievements of such theories in the history of science. The question of whether they are necessary, however, has other implications. Experimental material in three areas illustrates the function of theory more concretely. Alternatives to behavior ratios, excitatory potentials, and so on demonstrate the utility of rate or probability of response as the basic datum in learning. Functional relations between behavior and environmental variables provide an account of why learning occurs. Activities such as preferring, choosing, discriminating, and matching can be dealt with solely in terms of behavior, without referring to processes in another dimensional system. The experiments are not offered as demonstrating that theories are not necessary but to suggest an alternative. Theory is possible in another sense. Beyond the collection of uniform relationships lies the need for a formal representation of the data reduced to a minimal number of terms. A theoretical construction may yield greater generality than any assemblage of facts; such a construction will not refer to another dimensional system.

Behaviorism at fifty

Each of us is uniquely subject to certain kinds of stimulation from a small part of the universe within our skins. Mentalistic psychologies insist that other kinds of events, lacking the physical dimensions of stimuli, are accessible to the owner of the skin within which they occur. One solution often regarded as behavioristic, granting the distinction between public and private events and ruling the latter out of consideration, has not been successful. A science of behavior must face the problem of privacy by dealing with events within the skin in their relation to behavior, without assuming they have a special nature or must be known in a special way.The search for copies of the world within the body (e.g. the sensations and images of conscious content) has also had discouraging results. The organism does not create duplicates: Its seeing, hearing, smelling, and so on are forms of action rather than of reproduction. Seeing does not imply something seen. We know that when we dream of wolves, no wolves are actually there; it is harder to understand that not even representations of wolves are there.Mentalistic formulations create mental way stations. Where experimental analyses examine the effects of variables on behavior, mentalistic psychologies deal first with their effects on inferred entities such as feelings or expectations and then with the effects of these entities on behavior. Mental states thus seem to bridge gaps between dependent and independent variables, and mentalistic interpretations are particularly attractive when these are separated by long time periods. The practice confuses the order of events and leads to unfinished causal accounts.