Skinnerian Branch of Behaviourism

Pavlov and Watson’s behavioural work lead to B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments about ten years later. Burrhus Frederic Skinner is considered one of the most important psychologists of the twentieth century and also the most misunderstood. During his life, Skinner established and promoted a science of behaviour which he named " Experimental Analysis of Behaviour “. Skinner's research was concerned with the experimental analysis of behaviour, and specifically, the effect of reinforcement on sequential behavioural acts. While Pavlov used " hard-wired" reflexes as the raw material for conditioning, Skinner used any overt action of the organism, including human beings, that is, from the smile of a baby to working harder for a grade of a student.

When a student, Skinner was influenced by Pavlov’s ideas and considered his method a corner stone of his career in psychology (see details in: Catania, 1998; Catania and Laties, 1999). As Skinner wrote in his autobiography (1967), Pavlov had given him a glimpse of experimental method: “Control the environment and you will see order in behaviour”. When Pavlov gave the Principal Address at the International Congress of Physiology which was held in Harvard Medical School in 1929, Skinner, then a graduate student, attended the Congress as a volunteer (one of his tasks was to operate a slide projector). He acknowledged this event in his presidential address to the Pavlovian Society of North America (Skinner, 1966).

At the age of 24, in 1928, Skinner enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University. With his enthusiasm and talent for building new equipment, after a dozen pieces of apparatus and some lucky accidents (described in his " A Case History in Scientific Method", 1956), Skinner invented the first cumulative recorder, a mechanical device that recorded responses of an animal. This box, along with the attached recording equipment, provided a way to collect more objective data about behaviour than scientists had been able to gather before. The device came to be known as the " Skinner box”. In a typical Skinner’s experiment, an animal (usually a rat in his early experiments) was placed into the box containing the bar. If the rat pressed the bar, it was rewarded with a pellet of food. It is important to note that in these experiments nothing forces an animal to press the bar. The first time it possibly does so accidentally. When the rat finds that food arrives, it presses the bar again. Eventually, the animal learns that if it is hungry, it can obtain food by pressing the bar. In further trials the task is made more difficult. The rat only gets rewarded if it presses the bar while a light is flashing. At first the animal is puzzled. Eventually it learns the trick. Then the task is made more difficult again. This time the animal only receives food if it presses the bar a certain number of times. After initial confusion, it learns to do it also. In that way Skinner had proved that, given time, animals could be trained to perform an amazing variety of seemingly complex tasks, provided two basic principles were followed. Firstly, the tasks must be broken down into a number of carefully graduated steps. Secondly, the animals must be repeatedly rewarded.

Skinner changed the name of instrumental conditioning to “ operant conditioning ". “Operant” refers to Skinner's idea that any organism " operates" on his environment - that is, performs actions that change the environment around it for better or for worse. Operant psychology is based on the idea that an action taken by a person or an animal often has consequences that occur naturally in the environment. This principal is called " operant conditioning". Reinforcement is something that makes it more likely that a given behaviour will be repeated. The consequences of a given action either reinforce the behaviour or do not.

Skinner claimed that this type of learning was not the result of a stimulus - response association but instead was an association between the operant response and the reinforcement. He considered all learned behaviour the result of selective reinforcement of random responses. Mental states (what goes on in our minds) have no effect on our actions. Skinner did not deny the existence of mental states; he simply denied that they explain behaviour. A person does what it does because it has been " reinforced" for doing that, not because its mind decided so. Skinner noticed a similarity between reinforcement and natural selection: random mutations are " selected" by the environment; random behaviour is also selected by the environment. A random action can bring reward (from the environment) that will cause reinforcement and therefore will increase the chances that the action is repeated in the future. An action that does not bring reward will not be repeated. The environment determines which behaviour is learned.

Perhaps Skinner's most significant contribution to the theory of conditioning was his work on partial reinforcement. He worked with " schedules of reinforcement" to study and manipulate behaviour. Experimenters and show trainers using Skinner's techniques have taught animals to perform any number of unnatural actions. For instance, it is possible to teach chickens to play toy pianos, and dogs to climb ladders, acting like firemen (see details in Chapter 6). Shaping, along with reinforcing, and operant, are the key words in Skinnerian behaviourism. Like Watson, Skinner claimed that a speech is a set of habits gradually built up over the years, as the process of autoshaping. According to Skinner, no complicated innate or mental mechanisms are needed. All that is necessary is the systematic observation of the events in the external world which prompt the speaker to utter sounds.

Some Skinner’s projects were flamboyant and became a part of “folk behaviourism”. One of such legendary projects was Skinner’s top secret project to train pigeons to guide bombs during World War II. As early as 1940, during a train trip, watching the birds flying, lifting and wheeling in formation as they flew alongside the train, Skinner had the idea to " bomb the bombers" basing on birds’ excellent vision and extraordinary manoeuvrability. He started in the spring of 1941 to explore the feasibility of this idea and bought pigeons in order to train them to peck when they saw a target through a bull’s-eye. They were harnessed to a movable hoist and movements of their beaks sent electric motors up and steered the hoist to the target. It is interesting that Skinner’s installation firstly met a negative answer from R. C. Tolman, another famous expert in animal behaviour (see Chapter 7). But after Pearl Harbor Tolman changed his mind. The Japanese kamikaze attacks gave him new incentive to promote his work, defining his pigeons as kamikaze ‘substitutes’. At this time in Russia thousands dogs were trained by Pavlov’s method as kamikaze against German tanks. They were previously trained to associate a dummy German tank with food. During a battle, hungry dogs ran down German tanks and detonated them. In ideal, the dog should drop explosive from its back but in reality it flew into a rage together with a hostile tank. Skinner trained his pigeons to recognise an intersection in an aerial photograph of Stalingrad. He proved that the pigeons could astonishingly remain reliable, even under stress conditions, acceleration, temperature and pressure difference and noise. With the means of films and installations, Skinner reported his latest improvements and finally, after an electrical engineer was sent in Minneapolis to evaluate Skinner’s work, he was invited to Washington to present his project now labelled Bird’s-eye-Bomb (and later The Project Pigeon). After a series of vote and expertise, the Project pigeon was, nevertheless, discontinued, because of another top secret project unknown to Skinner- an Anti-Aircraft Predictor. However, Skinner’s work inaugurated a new era in behaviourism, " engineering behaviour". This work was also useful for further development of behaviouristic movement. In particular, it turned out that pigeons behave more rapidly than rats, allowing more rapid discoveries of the effect of new contingencies. Skinner never again worked with rats.

Another, particularly peaceful but nevertheless “scandal” Skinner’s project was his “baby tender”. When Skinner's second daughter, Deborah, was born in 1944 he constructed what was essentially a large version of a hospital incubator for her, a tall box with a door at its base and a glass window in front. This " baby tender, " as Skinner called it, allowed a baby to spend time in a safe, thermostatically controlled environment while her father worked, and by all accounts grew up a happy and healthy child. The trouble began when Skinner published an article about baby tender in the magazine Ladies' Home Journal (Skinner, 1945). People jumped to the conclusion that Skinner was raising his daughter in a box for the purpose of conducting psychological experiments on his hapless child. Magazine articles that were published later painted Skinner as an unfeeling, inhumane parent. This of course was not the case. Deborah Skinner had good relations with her father; she is a successful artist and lives with her husband in London.

Skinner's principles of operant conditioning still play an important role in the way we approach learning and behaviour modification today. Programmed teaching materials providing immediate feedback to students' responses are utilised in today's classrooms to effectively teach certain types of material. Skinner's ideas have also been adopted to teach mentally retarded and autistic children, are used in industry to reduce job accidents, and in numerous applications in health-related fields, including prosy matters like bed-wetting and stuttering, and improve human learning ability.

It is hard to say whether such concrete applications exactly comply with dreams of the great behaviourist. Perhaps, Skinner desired to change the world, having little interest in paltry domestic concerns but willing to apply new science to human behaviour. The basic idea was that what a man does is the result of specifiable conditions and that once these conditions have been discovered; we can anticipate and to some extent determine his actions. Trying to make society a much better thing seemed to be number one on Skinner’s mind.

Ideas of behaviourism, in particular, the use of operant conditioning techniques to control and engineer human behaviour are reflected in many literary works, mostly in ironical manner. In fact, behaviouristic ideas were firstly represented in the novels and popular books of Skinner himself. In “Walden Two” (Skinner, 1948a) he gave an account on a Utopian Society where traditional child raising techniques where replaced with behavioural engineering. In 1971, Skinner wrote his most controversial book, “Beyond Freedom and Dignity”. In it he dismissed the notion that individual freedom existed. Man's actions were nothing more than a set of behaviours that were shaped by his environment, over which he had no control. These ideas were developed in “Reflections on Behaviorism and Society” (1978). Skinner says if humanity is to survive we must abandon such pre-scientific ideals as freedom and dignity, and set about controlling our environment and ourselves by means of a technology of behaviour, which will be comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology and which will induce people not to be good but to behave well.

Despite of lots of misinterpretations, Skinner did not consider people as puppets or robots guided by managers armed with behaviouristic ideas, but was deeply concerned in individuals as persons. He described processes of shaping of a human being with light vein of humour in the 2nd part of his autobiography “The Shaping of a Behaviorist” (1979).

By the middle of 20-th century behaviourists had been nearly buried under tons and tons of articles by energies of hundreds of experimentalists as well as of many generations of pigeons, rats, cats and rabbits which unceasingly pressed levers and pulled out ropes. It seemed to be a case of learning more and more about less and less. This became apparent especially when a short list of species had been enlarged apart of favourite laboratory animals such as rats, pigeons, dogs and cats. This contemporized with development of theory of instinct by Lorenz (1935, 1950) and Tinbergen (1942; 1951) and appearance of new data on innate behavioural patterns obtained by Hess (1956) and I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1961; 1967). Ethology as a new branch of behavioural sciences came of age, and this changed behaviouristic ideology (see details in Chapter 21). In 1961 Skinner’s former students, Keller and Marian Brelands published a paper “The misbehavior of organisms” (this title parodies the title of Skinner’s 1938 book “The Behavior of Organisms: an experimental analysis”). Basing on conception of instinct behaviour, Brelands predicted that if one begins with evolution and instinct as the basic format for the science, a very illuminating viewpoint can be developed which leads naturally to a drastically revised and simplified conceptual framework of startling explanatory power (see details in Chapter 20). This forecast came true, and this path led to Cognitive Ethology.