B.F. Skinner: Shaper or Destroyer?

B.F. Skinner: Shaper or Destroyer?

This paper promotes two points from James' statement, "there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it," and "reasonable arguments...are folly when... dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors." (Columbia, 1996) One, despite this and other challenges to misinterpretations and/or lies, an individual will basically believe what he/she chooses to believe. Two, when defending a position and/or challenging a lie, one needs to consider the source of those promoting lies and/or misinterpretations, whether it be from the heart of human crocodiles or boa-constrictors or from a human who has not yet accepted the fact that he/she has misunderstood.

One erroneous contention claims that Skinner "raised one of his daughters in a box and that she later committed suicide...."

Lauren Slater, author of Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, albeit, located one of Skinner's daughters. This daughter debunked the box rumor and reported that her father, instead, "was actually a kind and loving father. Skinner's other allegedly dead daughter is reportedly alive living in England... ("How Great Experiments Reveal," 2004, p. B08)

O'Donohue and Ferguson (2001) cite more positive statements from one of Skinner's daughters which include:

He [Skinner] was well read in a variety of fields, skilled in music and an oil painting and a true gentleman. I never heard him raise his voice in anger.... Characteristic, too, was a special affection for children, and his predilection to check the truth of an idea by observing directly rather than appealing to authority. Most characteristic of all, however was his devotion to improving the world in his enthusiasm for living life to the fullest. (Vargas, 1993, pp. 59-60, cited by O'Donohue and. Ferguson, 2001, p. 23)

Jensen and Burgess (1997, p. 78) note that Skinner regularly contended with rumors and misinterpretations of his radical behaviorism principles and methodology throughout his life. Negative, unfounded citations regarding Skinner reportedly averaged18 per year from 1987-1997, the Social Sciences Citation Index (1995) reports. Noam Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's (1957) Verbal Behavior is considered the most widely referenced misinterpretation. Unfortunately, Jensen and Burgess (1997, p. 78) purport, Kenneth MacCorquodale's cogent critique of this review rarely receives notice.

MacCorquodale (1970) correctly pointed out that Chomsky, lacking an understanding of Skinner's radical behaviorism, spent much of his time attacking theories of drive reduction and S-R principles, both of which are unrelated to the functional analysis of verbal behavior proposed by Skinner." (Jensen and Burgess, 1997, p. 78) MacCorquodale additional posits and corrects repeated mythology perpetrated in a number of textbooks and stresses that Chomsky neither proved nor demonstrated Skinner's analysis to be faulty, "he merely asserted it." (MacCorquodale, 1970, p. 84, cited by Jensen and Burgess, 1997, p. 78) Other writers such as Montague and Matson (1983, cited by Jensen and Burgess, 1997, p. 78) furthered misunderstandings outside of psychology as they wrote that that Skinner regarded humans as "mechanical robots" (p. 80, Ibid.) and "ignored subjective experience entirely." (Jensen & Burgess, 1997, p. 78)

O'Donohue and. Ferguson (2001) report that in addition to individuals attacking Skinner's writings and misinterpreted, Skinner was also regularly personally attacked. Attempting to discredit a person's argument based by personally attacking him/her constitutes an ad hominem (literally, "at the man"), an informal logical fallacy, O'Donohue and. Ferguson (2001) explain. When a person claims for example, that two plus two equals four, and another individual argues (and may even prove) that the person purporting that two plus two equals four is, in fact, "a baby seal clobberer (sic), robber, murderer, kidnapper, liar, cheater, and child abuser" (Ibid.)and that [he/she never eats his/her vegetables, this does not negate nor relates to the truth of the assertion that two plus two equals four. In a similar sense, whatever some who misinterpret Skinner may assert about his character is not relevant to the psychological truths he shaped.

Some opponents of Skinner claim that Skinner purported that animals are "simple emotionless mechanisms," and argue that individual who train elephants, dogs and/or other animals realize animals experience feelings and have "moods" just as humans.

Some note that when Konrad Lorenz, one prominent animal behaviorist, studied geese he observed one goose who hung its head, "whose eyes became sunken, who lost the heart to defend himself against others, when he came upon his partner's fox-ravaged corpse. Countless animal and bird species behave similarly." ("So Who Says Animals," 1996, p. 9) These opponents chide Skinner and accuse him of being heartless and that no notes in his "behaviorism" recount the potential for animals to display behavior they note. ("So Who Says Animals," 1996, p. 9) Debell (1992, p. 68) does not comment on whether animals do or do not experience emotions, but purports that any individual familiar with Skinner will not likely have a neutral reaction to his work. She also contends that the heated debates his ideas have triggered have made him "infamous," particularly due to the terms: "behavior modification, aversive control, punishment, determinism, and environmental control," which routinely stimulate strong emotional reactions. During the research for this paper, work by Bancroft, Carr, Open University (1995) caught this researcher's attention and serves to support the contention that Skinner's work contributed to shaping psychology, particularly his work related to learning.

Learning should be shaped," the key idea for the shaping approach reportedly which Skinner developed during the mid 1950s constitutes what is currently known as programmed instruction. Skinner (1968, 1986, cited by Bancroft, Carr, Open University 1995) contends that programmed instruction, "a specially designed written material that presents small amounts of written information to the student and a predetermined sequence, provides prompts to draw up the desired written response, calls for the response to be repeated in several ways in order to produce mastery, immediately reinforces correct responses, and allows a student to work through the program at his or her own pace."

Skinner purports that when well designed and used appropriately, programmed materials will result in the following:

Immediate reinforcement for the right answer.

Teacher will process the ability to monitor individual students progress more directly.

The high success level design into the program will cause students' motivation to remain high