Word: skinners
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...four decades the heady belief has grown that people can be molded by simply deciding what they should be and then manipulating their behavior, as though the world were a laboratory and man a rat or a pigeon. No one has done more to advance the notion than B.F. Skinner, Harvard psychology professor and author of the bestselling Beyond Freedom and Dignity (TIME cover, Sept. 20, 1971). Those who claim to leave man "free," Skinner believes, are merely abandoning him to uncontrolled forces in his environment. To Skinner, observable behavior is the only reality and belief in an "inner...
...moguls. At 5 ft. 2½ in. and 160 Ibs., usually billowing in a sea of muumuus and caftans, she is sometimes seen as a cross between Mama Cass and Mack the Knife. She has the soft, breathy voice of a little-bitty girl, the vocabulary of a mule skinner and the subtle approach of a Sherman tank. She often compares herself to Eve Harrington, the calculating and ruthless climber in All About Eve. In fact, a character based on Mengers will soon appear in a new film called The Last of Sheila. Director Herb Ross describes the character...
This underlying system of attitudes is more manifestly at work in the Twin Oaks community than in Walden Two, because the former lacks much of the scientistic veneer which cloaks these attitudes in Skinner's work. Behaviorism is, in this context, a vehicle by which Skinner advances the prejudices of an age in the imposing guise of "objective understanding...
...times one commits a specific behavioral flaw on a chart each day in order to reduce its incidence. But only a few people are interested in this practice, she says, "because most people don't care enough about it to be reinforced by it." A major criticism of Skinner's theory of human behavior is that it represents, in the words of Arthur Koestler, "question-begging on a heroic scale," and here is a perfect example. If people have to be interested in something before they can be reinforced by it, then reinforcement obviously presumes the very thing...
...relaxation; otherwise, there would be no competitive pressures toward altruistic work, and no motive for escaping community opprobrium or banishment. But can a society survive on such a pleasure principle? If one looks closely, it is apparent that the Twin Oaks community has not even tested the principle yet. Skinner's claim in the foreward to the book that Twin Oaks "is the world in miniature" is simply untrue. It is an artificial community: its population is very small and, as the author admits, homogenous due to its selective admissions policy; it buys the technological means to its pleasure from...