Word: skinnerism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just as he would like us to believe, to understand Skinner is to understand his past history and reinforcement contingencies. Born in the railroad town of Susquehanna, pa., Fred Skinner was "taught to fear God, the police and what people will think." Skinner writes, "My mother was quick to take alarm if I showed any deviation from what was 'right'... I can easily recall the consternation in my family when in second grade I brought home a report card on which under 'Deportment,' the phrase 'Annoys others' had been checked. Many things which were not 'right' still haunt...
Whether a direct result of his childhood experience or not, Skinner has undeniably developed his own sense of what is 'right' through his psychological epistemology. "I really don't think I'm particularly brilliant," he said last week on his 71st birthday. "I think I've been stubborn. I think I've held to a given point of view every doggedly--and that's paid off. I think it's right. I wouldn't be holding it if I didn't think...
...casual analysis linking his past history and present behavior might seem unjustified. But Skinner himself writes, "perhaps I have answered my mother's question 'what will people think?' by proving that they do not think at all." In much the same way, Skinner says that behaviorism has helped him to "resolve [his] early fear of theological ghosts," which his grandmother instilled in him by equating the concept of hell with the glowing bed of coals in his parlor stove. One might, the young liberty bound-selling boy scout lay awake all night "in an agony of fear" after seeing...
Like his father, Skinner places a tremendous amount of emphasis on his own brand of praise--positive reinforcement. He may not have inherited his father's conceitedness, but he appears exceedingly arrogant to many of his critics. And whether or not this arrogance conceals his own secret sense of failure is something that only he can know...
Rollo May once unknowingly pointed out a fundamental aspect of Skinner's personality by criticizing his work: "I have never found any place in Skinner's system for the rebel. Yet the capacity to rebel is of the essence in a constructive society." Skinner was something of a rebel during his college career and still is--perhaps a reason for his never starting a community along the lines of the one in his novel, Walden Two. After developing an aversion to Hamilton College("I was not good at sports and suffered acutely as...better players bounced basketballs off my cranium...