Word: skinnerism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...matter that might interest President Nixon is Skinner's belief that new ways must be found to persuade people that work is worthwhile. "Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions." Moreover, "we can't control inflation if everything we might do is a threat to somebody's freedom. Yet in the long...
...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...
From his childhood years. Skinner was mechanically inclined. He built roller-skate scooters, steerable wagons, rafts, water pistols from lengths of bamboo, and "from a discarded water boiler a steam cannon with which I could shoot plugs of potato and carrot over the houses of our neighbors." He also devised a flotation system to separate green from ripe elderberries, which he used to sell from door to door. Although his attempts to build a glider and a perpetual motion machine ended in failure, his innovative tinkering was to pay off handsomely in the laboratory in later years...
...high school, Skinner earned money by lettering advertising show cards, played
That encouragement convinced Fred Skinner that he should become a writer. The decision, he says, was "disastrous." Recalling those "dark years," living first at home with his family and then in New York's Greenwich Village, he admits that he frittered away his time, read aimlessly, wrote very little?"and thought about seeing a psychiatrist." In his own words, he "failed as a writer" because he "had nothing important...