B.F. Skinner and
Beyond Freedom and Dignity
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on March 20
1904 in Susquehanna, a small town in Pennsylvania, where his
father was a lawyer. He originally hoped to pursue a career as a
writer and to that end followed a degree course in English at a
college in New York State.
In the event, however, this intended career failed to take off
and he returned to college life at Harvard University where he
graduated in Psychology being awarded a master's degree in 1930
and a PhD in 1931 and becoming involved in further research until
1936 at which time he took up a teaching post at the University
of Minnesota. Later academic appointments were taken up at
Indiana University and then in 1948, by invitation, at Harvard
University.
At the time of his death in 1990 Skinner had become a most
notable figure with a reputation, in the field of Psychology,
only equalled or surpassed by a very few others.
behavioral psychology - behaviorism
B.F. Skinner became the leading United States proponent of
behavioral psychology. Under "operant conditioning" theorisings
associated with behaviorism it was held that organisms would
operate in their environment, and whilst so operating would
receive resultant stimuli. Such consequential stimuli would tend
to variously encourage or discourage the organism from operating
in a similar way in the future.
Although Skinner's researches were usually conducted with
laboratory rats he did not see a particular barrier to
extrapolating on the results of these researches and in deeming
the results as being applicable to human beings. His approach to
behaviorism saw human behavior as also being largely explicable
in terms of physiological responses to external stimuli.
Among his important works are Behavior of Organisms
(1938), Walden Two (1961), and Beyond Freedom and
Dignity (1971). In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner
controversially advocated mass conditioning as a means of social
control.
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