Accomplishments and major theory
B.F. Skinners major accomplishments reside in his writing and theories. He was a well decorated psychologist. He received awards and honors that totaled more than 35. His most prestigious award was the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Lifetime Achievement award that he received in 1990. It was the crowning moment for one of the most popular and well known psychologists, Sigmund Freud notwithstanding. His prominence was so great that he was awarded honorary degrees. In all there were 21 honorary degrees from major universities around the country (Boeree, 2006).
Through his autobiography and other writings about B.F. Skinner we can see that his man attained great notoriety and levels of success. While still at Harvard, B.F. Skinner came upon the idea to measure behavior objectively and scientifically. He began to use his earlier skills at tinkering with gadgets to invent a type of box in which he could put animals and observe them. He began by studying rats. He was able to observe them interacting with their environment. He watched as they responded to rewards dispensed by a lever in the box. He later used the box to observe pigeons and the way in which they interacted with the box (Biography.com, n.d.). At this early point in his career B.F. Skinner had already hit upon the idea that it was necessary for some form of reinforcement to occur so that behavior change would also occur.
This idea of B.F. Skinner was termed operant conditioning. Although he had been influenced by Watson’s behaviorism, B.F. Skinner believed that we had a mind which is the type of work that he began to apply his studies later in life. He preferred to study external behavior rather than internal events. He focused on the idea that the earlier type of behaviorism was too simple to explain complex behavior. The idea that came from this was that the best manner by which to understand human behavior was through looking at how an action is caused through the consequences that result. This is how he came about operant conditioning. Operant conditioning was roughly that actions that are taken have an effect on the surrounding environment. In 1938 only 7 years after he received his Doctorate B.F. Skinner came up with the term operant conditioning. This means that behavior is changed through the use of reinforcements that are applied after the behavior has been performed. He had originally set out to understand how certain behaviors were more or less likely to occur. This is the idea of reinforcement. A behavior that is reinforced will continue or strengthen. A behavior that is not reinforced will have a tendency to extinguish or become weaker (McLeod, 2015).
B.F. Skinner was able to identify three types of reinforcement through this work. There were neutral operants which were those consequences from the environment that did not increase of decrease the behavior, reinforcers that would increase the likelihood of the behavior and punishers that would in most cases, decrease the behavior (McLeod, 2015). B.F. Skinner published the discoveries of his work in a 1938 book titled The Behavior of Organisms. There would be comparisons of his work to earlier behaviorists who had identified involuntary responses to stimuli but the difference in his work was that B.F. Skinner had identified learned responses to environmental changes (Biography.com, n.d.; Boeree, 2006).
His system of behavioral change involved the use of operants and he coined it operant conditioning. The basic theory holds that a person operates in a world that is filled with reinforcing stimuli. While going about our daily lives when we encounter these stimuli or consequences from those behaviors, the behavior is either strengthened (increased) or weakened (decreased) (Boeree, 2006).
In his work B.F. Skinner discusses how he came upon the idea of reinforcement schedules. His discovery of schedules of reinforcement was an accident that occurred when he decided to not give some food pellets to the rats that he was studying. These schedules of reinforcement had implications for the ability of the person dispensing the rewards to control and change behavior.
He came upon the idea of continuous reinforcement, when each time a behavior is enacted there is a reward received which ensures that the behavior is continuous. Next is a fixed ratio schedule in which the reward is received the reward is received after a specific number of attempts of the behavior. This ensures that the behavior will continue and that it is repeated the number of times that it must occur for the reward to be presented. Another type of schedule is the fixed interval schedule that occurs with time. The reward is dispensed at specific times and no matter how many times the behavior occurs it will only happen at the set time period. This ensures that behavior will continue but that the behavior is then paced and does not occur as frequently as if the reward was received at each behavior action. It tends to create an environment in which the behavior will occur more slowly once the reward is received and more quickly at the time that the reward is about to be received. The last schedule is the variable schedule. This presents a reward at different occurrences of the behavior. At first perhaps the behavior is rewarded after three times, then perhaps after ten times. The reward is still given but the amount of times that behavior must occur to receive the reward changes so that the behavior will be repeated over and over in order to receive the reward which can occur at any time after any number of actions. This is a powerful method by which behavior can be controlled because the behavior will be repeated often because there is no way to know at which point the behavior will receive a reward, much like gambling on slot machines when one does not know when they will receive more coins for their pull of the lever (Boeree, 2006).
With reinforcement, B.F. Skinner believed that he could shape behavior. It was known as shaping. He would give the animals in his study a reward when the behavior that he desired to be produced was approximated even if vaguely. The animal would then have to make another similar behavior that more closely copied the desired behavior so that in time the reinforcement would then shape the animal to move close and closet the behavior. In this idea it was the ability to teach the animal to move toward the end result that would define its learning of the desired outcome (Boeree, 2006).
There were many criticisms of his theories. It would seem that behaviorists began to treat all behaviors in humans as if there were not thought involved. He responded by explaining his work in better terms. In (E.G. Boring & Lindzey, 1967) B.F. Skinner explains that thoughts are akin to behaviors. The idea is that in accounts of cognitive theory the idea of thoughts were mislabeled. The thoughts as standing alone did not account for the interaction with the consequences. The labeling of thoughts then had to be inferred from behaviors that had occurred. As the person begins to interact with the environment, the environment takes on the role of thoughts purpose and plans. In so much of his work he did not want to use the term language because of its arbitrary meaning. It is perhaps because of influence from earlier works that he concluded that the various “language” could take on any number of meanings. It was his defense of why he did not want to study the simplistic behaviors of say something like the movement of a frogs leg that he was able to begin what appears to be a search for the use of verbal behavior and its understanding that moves into the type of behavior therapies that are used today. He mentioned that it is only through verbal behavior that non mechanical responses, or higher level behaviors can be learned (De Lourdes & Passos, 2012).
In (Mulligan, 2016) this point is illustrated in that B.F. Skinner began to show how strong reinforcement could be. He used schedule of reinforcement, and brought ideas such as generalization and discrimination into the framework of behaviorism. Most importantly he expanded the principles of his operant conditioning so that verbal behavior must be considered. . I believe this is the important fact because it is the point of most of the controversy within the behavioral schools of thought.