Bfskinner Interview With B.F. Skinner Describe Your

BFSkinner

Interview with B.F. Skinner

Describe your life and work in the field of psychology.

Please call me Fred. As a boy, I loved building things, especially if they solved problems. I'm still that way. I have a lot of interests, which I guess you could figure out by looking around my study. I do most of my reading in that chair and because my eyesight is poor, a bought a large magnifying glass with a strong light. To keep it from jiggling, I attached the lens with these hooks, pulleys and fishing line to a counterweight. I can put the lens wherever I want and it will stay in place.

If you're wondering about the cardboard over the clock face, I put that up because I found I was getting distracted by checking it all the time. I write my ideas in longhand on large blank sheets of paper so I can record them in different positions but still see them all at once. I tend to do a lot of revision, and I keep old drafts in a cardboard box. I keep everything in cardboard boxes -- notecards, pencils, paper clips, tape and other supplies. I keep a notebook with me all the time so I can write down ideas. That Japanese sleeping capsule next to the television was a gift from the manufacturer. I sleep her sometimes, so if I wake in the middle of the night, I can get right to my desk without disturbing my wife. I'm a behaviorist, so I modified my environment to work for me (Vargas and Chance, 2002). I am an example of what I believe, that human nature can be viewed in terms of responses to environmental stimuli.

What were your major contributions to the field?

After I received my Ph.D. from Harvard, I spent five years there doing research before accepting a faculty position at the University of Minnesota. I spent three years as a professor at Indiana University and then went back to Harvard, where I was a professor for thirty-six years. I wrote a number of books, including The Behavior of Organisms, Science and Human Behavior, Verbal Behavior, The Analysis of Behavior, the Technology of Teaching, and Recent Issues in the Analysis of Behavior. I was very interested in the work of Pavlov and did my own work on programmed learning. I was also influenced by Bertrand Russell's ideas on behaviorism and of course by John B. Watson, who is considered the founder of behaviorism. ("B. F. Skinner," 2011).

Which psychological perspective or school of thought do your ideas most closely adhere to?

People do not initiate actions on their own, but only act in ways that have been successful for their cultures in the past (Greenberg, 1982). Watson rejected introspection and theories of the unconscious mind -- ideas that Freud had. Watson was interested in the behavior he could see in terms of physiological response to stimuli. It's a much more objective way of looking at the human mind because it is based on what one can actually see. Behavior therapy extends naturally from this school of thought.

Is this perspective or school of thought still in existence in psychology today? Why, or why not?