Word: skinnerism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Skinner would probably attribute his need to revolt to environmental circumstances, but at least those circumstances gave him the freedom to revolt. If he hadn't had the chance to rebel, even in the most immature sense, who knows? The Skinner box, operant conditioning, behavior modification programs or the Aircrib (a large, glass-walled enclosure in which he raised one of his daughters for two and a half years and in which his two grand-children were raised) might just not exist. Maybe he would never have been attracted to the notions of John Watson, the father of behaviorism...
After receiving his Ph. D. in psychology from Harvard, Skinner spent five years doing postdoctoral research in a "subterranean laboratory" at the same time Frankling Roosevelt and his braintrust were advocating the New Deal. In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne Blue, an English major at the University of Chicago, who now says. "Fred told me he was a genius when we were first seeing each other. But I told him that he couldn't be a genius if he wanted to marry...
...Yvonne Skinner, a robust and affable woman from her rhinestone-studded glasses to her brand-new blue sneakers, is the main reason, Skinner says, that he never started a Walden Two of his own. "I don't like the idea of Walden Two," she says, "I like my privacy, I like collecting stuff, I like to travel, And I like my home...
Unhappy with his teaching experience at the University of Minnesota during the summer of 1945, Skinner wrote Walden Two, "a venture in self-therapy, in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior represented by [the two main characters] Burris and Frazier. Now, of course, I'm a convinced Frazerian... Some of it was written with great emotion. The scene in Frazier's room, in which Frazier defends Walden Two while admitting that he himself is not a likeable person or fit for communal life.... I typed out in white heat...
...Skinner's most important discovery while writing Walden Two is expressed through Frazier: "I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!' Eventually I realized that the subjects were always right. They always behaved as they should have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made a bad prediction...What a strange discovery for a would-be dictator that the only effective methods of control are positively reinforcing...