Word: burrhus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Burrhus Frederic Skinner is not, as his work or his opponents might imply, a cold-hearted man whose body bears the wings and feathers of the pigeons he has used in research. Rather, he is the writer who, during his senior year at Hamilton College, sent off his short stories to Robert Frost, who thought that Skinner's prose was the best he had read the whole year. He is the poet who composes love sonnets and witty verse. He is the actor who devotes time to his play-reading group. He is the educator who invented the teaching machine...
...speaker is T.E. Frazier, a character in Walden Two and the fictional founder of the Utopian community described in that novel. He is also an alter ego of the author, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, who is both a psychology professor and an institution at Harvard. Skinner is the most influential of living American psychologists, and the most controversial contemporary figure in the science of human behavior, adored as a messiah and abhorred as a menace. As leader of the "behavioristic" psychologists, who liken man to a machine, Skinner is vigorously opposed both by humanists and by Freudian psychoanalysts. Next week that...
Skinner came rather slowly to his conviction that such changes can be made; his early interests, in fact, were far from psychology. Born in Susquehanna, Pa., in 1904, he was the elder son of Grace Burrhus, an amateur musician who sang at weddings and funerals, and William Skinner, a lawyer who was "a sucker for book salesmen." In his "Sketch for an Autobiography," Skinner describes his early life as "warm and stable." He lived in the same house until he went to college. He was never physically punished by his father and only once by his mother?when she washed...