B.F. Skinner Biography

Skinner attended Hamilton college where he decided he would go on to become a writer. Following his years at Hamilton, was what he dubbed his “dark year,” where he produced a mere handful of short newspaper articles, and a few models of ships. He found himself a job working as a bookstore clerk, where he came upon books that would inspire his lifelong career in psychology, and these books were of Pavlov and Watson.

Now 24 years old, Skinner enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University. Still aching in his heart was the passion for designing and building various apparatuses. He designed experiments using rats as his test subjects, observing their behavior, and these experiments eventually led to his invention of the cumulative recorder, a device that records every response as an upward moving horizontal line. This led to a startling discovery that ousted Pavlov and

Watson's earlier discovery. A rat's response (in this example, pressing a lever) was not accelerated by any preceding stimulus, but rather, what followed the pressing of the lever. This process or arranging contingencies of reinforcement directly responsible for producing certain behavior he named “operant conditioning.” Using this theory, people have since been able to train animals to perform many tasks, as they learn to associate certain behavior with “rewards” the behavior is thus reinforced, and reproduced. Mice have been able to perform tricks, such as riding a unicycle, or squirrels operating a hang-glider contraption, this theory has many applications, both practical and impractical.

Skinner's science took a hiatus when he married Yvonne Blue, took up a teaching position in Minnesota, where they settled down, and began a family of his own, which would later include a daughter Julie. Skinner's patriotism during World War II drove him to attempt the creation of a missile guidance system, using what else but pigeons and his operant conditioning for training. With much enthusiasm he furiously trained pigeons to peck reliably at a target which would lock a missile to it. While his project was later dumped for a new technology that had also been under way (radar) it did lead to new discoveries. For one, Skinner never again worked with rats, as pigeons behaved much more rapidly, which would lead to faster research. You have to wonder, if the US military would be foolish (smart?) enough to use his pigeon guidance system, had radar never been discovered. I would

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