


After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1926, he attended Harvard University, where he would later research and teach. He wrote for the school paper, but, as an atheist, he was critical of the traditional mores of his college. He was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He found himself at a social disadvantage at the college because of his intellectual attitude. Skinner attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. They would pour water down the trough into a bucket, and the ripe berries would sink into the bucket and the unripe ones would be pushed over the edge to be thrown away. The device was a bent piece of metal to form a trough. They found that when they picked the ripe berries, the unripe ones came off the branches too, so they built a device that was able to separate them. During one summer, Doc and Skinner started an elderberry business to gather berries and sell them door to door. They had set up a telegraph line between their houses to send messages to each other, although they had to call each other on the telephone due to the confusing messages sent back and forth. Doc and Skinner became friends due to their parents' religiousness and both had an interest in contraptions and gadgets. Skinner's closest friend as a young boy was Raphael Miller, whom he called Doc because his father was a doctor. His brother Edward, two and a half years younger, died at age 16 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Skinner became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to assuage his fear of the hell that his grandmother described. Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to Grace and William Skinner, the latter of whom was a lawyer. 7 "'Superstition' in the Pigeon" experiment.2.2 Foundations of Skinner's behaviorism.Accordingly, a June 2002 survey listed Skinner as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, are considered to be the pioneers of modern behaviorism. He imagined the application of his ideas to the design of a human community in his 1948 utopian novel, Walden Two, while his analysis of human behavior culminated in his 1958 work, Verbal Behavior. Skinner was a prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles. Using these tools, he and Charles Ferster produced Skinner's most influential experimental work, outlined in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement. To study operant conditioning, he invented the operant conditioning chamber (aka the Skinner box), and to measure rate he invented the cumulative recorder. He also used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering the rate of response to be the most effective measure of response strength. Skinner developed behavior analysis, especially the philosophy of radical behaviorism, and founded the experimental analysis of behavior, a school of experimental research psychology.
#TIMELANE SKINNER FREE#
Ĭonsidering free will to be an illusion, Skinner saw human action as dependent on consequences of previous actions, a theory he would articulate as the principle of reinforcement: If the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance the action will not be repeated if the consequences are good, the probability of the action being repeated becomes stronger. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. Shoshana Zuboffīurrhus Frederic Skinner (Ma– August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher.
