http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner

Bibliography on Wikipedia:

Early 1970s - B. F. Skinner on Education - Part I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXHmFZyKEVY
- They mention "Beyond Freedom & Dignity" in the intro. That book came out in 1971.
1:10 - Q: A lot of people misunderstand what you mean when you talk about freedom and control. I'd like to give you the chance to clarify yourself via an example: suppose one child is dependent on the teacher when doing an assignment, The other child is independent and seems to love learning for its own sake. Which child is more free?
1:50 - A: The "independent" child may be independent of the teacher but isn't independent of reinforcers. He's simply being reinforced by more sophisticated reinforcers.
2:30 - The indepndent one is further advanced. The teacher should aim to try to wean students from their dependencies just like a therapist should wean their client.
3:29 - There's no freedom in either case. The children FEEL free, but they're still under the control of other reinforcers.
3:55 - Q: You've written that our educational environments are defective. How would teachers within this environment go about helping the child modify his learning behavior?

• 1963 - YouTube - Behaviorism at Fifty
• 1967.12.29 - YouTube - Teaching Science in High School: What's Wrong?
• 1971.09.07 - YouTube - Behavioral Controls
• 1972 - YouTube - Token Economy: Behaviorism Applied
• 1972 - YouTube - An Interview with B. F. Skinner
• 1976 - YouTube - Self Management of Behavior
• 1979 - YouTube - A World of Difference: Skinner and the Good Life
• 1990 - YouTube - Learning (BFS starts at 9:22)

1987 - A THINKING AID
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 2-0080.pdf

1990.08.10 - APA Annual Convention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-GKbcSFNo

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. "The Case against Freedom"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD3VvDIhAhE

B. F. Skinner Lectures Psychiatrists and Psychologists. Part 1/7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VZUjncC_SY

2012(?) - Yale - Intro to Psych - Skinner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCKK6r15fro
- I skipped to the end where he talks about criticisms of behaviorism. I actually thought it was really interesting. I should listen to the rest of the lecture.

I have been looking for books on applied behaviorism for YEARS. I was amazed that I couldn't find any.

Wikipedia - Applied behavior analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis

Applied Behavior Analysis (2nd Edition)
http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Behavior- ... 0131421131


How to Think Like a Behavior Analyst: Understanding the Science That Can Change Your Life
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080585 ... M57XJFHFRA


Behavior Analysis for Lasting Change, Third Edition
http://www.amazon.com/Behavior-Analysis ... M57XJFHFRA
Table of Contents - http://sloanpublishing.com/table_of_contents23
Sample - Chapter 2 - http://j.b5z.net/i/u/2084689/f/balc_ch02.pdf
http://sloanpublishing.com/behavior_ana ... ing_change


Someone who is really into applied behavior analysis:
http://www.pinterest.com/lsokola/skinner-is-my-homeboy/
- I found out about ABA and the ABA books above from her Pinterest site. I think I had been googling pictures of BF Skinner when I came across her site.


2003 - The Behavior Analyst - The Negative Effects of Positive Reinforcement
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/264023596880277429/
- Seems worth reading


Sniffy The Virtual Rat
http://wadsworth.cengage.com/psychology ... niffy.html

Book Summaries

Beyond Freedom and Dignity

The book has good end-of-chapter summaries. I'll write them up here for anyone who is interested in knowing what the book is about (and also to refresh my memory).

Chapter 1 - A Technology of Behavior

Almost all our major problems involve human behavior, and they cannot be solved by physical and biological technology alone. What is needed is a technology of behavior, but we have been slow to develop the science from which such a technology might be drawn. One difficulty is that almost all of what is called behavioral science continues to trace behavior to states of mind, feelings, traits of character, human nature, and so on. Physics and biology once followed similar practices and advanced only when they discarded them. The behavioral sciences have been slow to change partly because the explanatory entities often seem to be directly observed and partly because other kinds of explanations have been hard to find. The environment is obviously important, but its role has remained obscure. It does not push or pull, it selects, and this function is difficult to discover and analyze. The role of natural selection in evolution was formulated only a little more than a hundred years ago, and the selective role of the environment in shaping and maintaining the behavior of the individual is only beginning to be recognized and studied. As the interaction between organism and environment has come to be understood, however, effects once assigned to states of mind, feelings, and traits are beginning to be traced to accessible conditions, and a technology of behavior may therefore become available. It will not solve our problems, however, until it replaces traditional prescientific views, and these are strongly entrenched. Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment. It also raises questions concerning "values". Who will use a technology and to what ends? Until these issues are resolved, a technology of behavior will continue to be rejected, and with it possibly the only way to solve our problems.


Chapter 2 - Freedom

Man's struggle for freedom is not due to a will to be free, but to certain behavioral processes characteristic of the human organism, the chief effect of which is the avoidance of or escape from so-called "Aversive" features of the environment. Physical and biological technologies have been mainly concerned with natural aversive stimuli; the struggle for freedom is concerned with stimuli intentionally arranged by other people. The literature of freedom has identified the other people and has proposed ways of escaping from them or weakening or destroying their power. It has been successful in reducing the aversive stimuli used in intentional control, but it has made the mistake of defining freedom in terms of states of mind or feelings, and it has therefore not been able to deal effectively with techniques of control which do not breed escape or revolt but nevertheless have aversive consequences. It has been forced to brand all control as wrong and to misrepresent many of the advantages to be gained from social environment. It is unprepared for the next step, which is not to free men from control but to analyze and change the kinds of control to which they are exposed.


Chapter 3 - Dignity

We recognize a person's dignity or worth when we give him credit for what he has done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior. If we do not know why a person acts as he does, we attribute his behavior to him. We try to gain additional credit for ourselves by concealing the reasons why we behave in given ways or by claiming to have acted for less powerful reasons. We avoid infringing on the credit due to others by controlling them inconspicuously. We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at." What we may call the literature of dignity is concerned with preserving due credit. It may oppose advances in technology, including a technology of behavior, because they destroy chances to be admired and a basic analysis because it offers an alternative explanation of behavior for which the individual himself has previously been given credit. The literature thus stands in the way of further human achievements.


Chapter 4 - Punishment

Except when physically constrained, a person is least free or dignified when under the threat of punishment. We should expect that the literatures of freedom and dignity would oppose punitive techniques, but in fact they have acted to preserve them. A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. Some ways of doing so are maladaptive or neurotic as in the so-called "Freudian dynamisms." Other ways include avoiding situations in which punished behavior is likely to occur and doing things which are incompatible with punished behavior. Other people may take similar steps to reduce the likelihood that a person will be punished, but the literatures of freedom and dignity object to this as leading only to automatic goodness. Under punitive contingencies a person appears to be free to behave well and to deserve credit when he does so. Nonpunitive contingencies generate the same behavior, but a person cannot then be said to be free, and the contingencies deserve the credit when he behaves well. Little or nothing remains for autonomous man to do and receive credit for doing. He does not engage in moral struggle and therefore has no chance to be a moral hero or recited with inner virtues. But our task is not to encourage moral struggle or to build or demonstrate inner virtues. It is to make life less punishing and in doing so to release for more reinforcing activities the time and energy consumed in the avoidance of punishment. Up to a point the literatures of freedom and dignity have played a part int he slow and erratic alleviation of aversive features of the human environment, including the aversive features used in intentional control. But they have formulated the task in such a way that they cannot now accept the fact that all control is exerted by the environment and proceed to the design of better environments rather than of better men.


Chapter 5 - Alternatives to Punishment

The freedom and dignity of autonomous man seem to be preserved when only weak forms of nonaversive control are used. Those who use them seem to defend themselves against the charge that they are attempting to control behavior, and they are exonerated when things go wrong. Permissiveness is the absence of control, and if it appears to lead to desirable results, it is only because of other contingencies. Maieutics, or the art of midwifery, seems to leave behavior to be credited to those who give birth to it, and the guidance of development to those who develop. Human intervention seems to be minimized when a person is made dependent upon things rather than upon other people. Various ways of changing behavior by changing minds are not only condoned but vigorously practiced by the defenders of freedom and dignity. There is a good deal to be said for minimizing current control by other people, but other measures still operate. A person who responds in acceptable ways to weak forms of control may have been changed by contingencies which are no longer operative. By refusing to recognize them the defenders of freedom and dignity encourage the misuse of controlling practices and block progress toward a more effective technology of behavior.


Chapter 6 - Values

The struggle for freedom and dignity has been formulated as a defense of autonomous man rather than as a revision of the contingencies of reinforcement under which people live. A technology of behavior is available which would more successfully reduce the aversive consequences of behavior, proximate or deferred, and maximize the achievements of which the human organism is capable, but the defenders of freedom oppose its use. The opposition may raise certain questions concerning "values." Who is to decide what is good for man? How will a more effective technology be used? By whom and to what end? These are really questions about reinforcers. Some things have become "good" during the evolutionary history of the species, and they may be used to induce people to behave for "the good of others." When used to excess, they may be challenged, and the individual may turn to things good only to him. The challenge may be answered by intensifying the contingencies which generate behavior for the good of others or by pointing to previously neglected individual gains, such as those conceptualized as security, order, health, wealth, or wisdom. Possibly indirectly, other people bring the individual under the control of some remote consequences of his behavior, and the good of others then redounds to the good of the individual. Another kind of good which makes for human progress remains to be analyzed.


Chapter 7 - The Evolution of a Culture

The social environment is what is called a culture. It shapes and maintains the behavior of those who live in it. A given culture evolves as new practices arise, possibly for irrelevant reasons, and are selected by their contribution to the strength of the culture as it "competes" with the physical environment and with other cultures. A major step is the emergence of practices which induce members to work for the survival of their culture. Such practices cannot be traced to personal goods, even when used for the good of others, since the survival of a culture beyond the lifetime of the individual cannot serve as a source of conditioned reinforcers. Other people may survive the person they induce to act for their good, and the culture whose survival is at issue is often identified with them or their organizations, but the evolution of a culture introduces an additional kind of good or value. A culture which for any reason induces its members to work for its survival is more likely to survive. It is a matter of the good of the culture, not of the individual. Explicit design promotes that good by accelerating the evolutionary process, and since a science and a technology of behavior make for better design, they are important "mutations" in the evolution of a culture. If there is any purpose or direction in the evolution of a culture, it has to do with bringing people under the control of more and more of the consequences of their behavior.


Chapter 8 - The Design of a Culture

A culture is like the experimental space used in the study of behavior. It is a set of contingencies of reinforcement, a concept which has only recently begun to be understood. The technology of behavior which emerges is ethically neutral, but when applied to the design of a culture, the survival of the culture functions as a value. Those who have been induced to work for their culture need to foresee some of the problems to be solved, but many current features of a culture have an obvious bearing on its survival value. The designs to be found in the utopian literature appeal to certain simplifying principles. They have the merit of emphasizing survival value: Will the utopia work? The world at large is, of course, much more complex, but the processes are the same and practices work for the same reasons. Above all, there is the same advantage in stating objectives in behavioral terms. The use of science in designing a culture is commonly opposed. It is said that the science is inadequate, that its use may have disastrous consequences, that it will not produce a culture which members of other cultures will like, and in any case that men will somehow refuse to be controlled;l The misuse of a technology of behavior is a serious matter, but we can guard against it best by looking not at putative controllers but at the contingencies under which they control. It is not the benevolence of a controller but the contingencies under which he controls benevolently which must be examined. All control is reciprocal, and an interchange between control and counter control is essential to the evolution of a culture. The interchange is disturbed by the literatures of freedom and dignity, which interpret countercontrol as the suppression rather than the correction of controlling practices. The effect could be lethal. In spite of remarkable advantages, our culture may prove to have a fatal flaw. Some other culture may then make a greater contribution to the future.


Chapter 9 - What Is Man?

An experimental analysis shifts the determination of behavior from autonomous man to the environment--an environment responsible both for the evolution of the species and for the repertoire acquired by each member. Early versions of environmentalism were inadequate because they could not explain how the environment worked, and much seemed to be left for autonomous man to do. But environmental contingencies now take over functions once attributed to autonomous man, and certain questions arise. Is man then "abolished"? Certainly not as a species or as an individual achiever. It is the autonomous inner man who is abolished, and that is a step forward. But does man not then become merely a victim or passive observer of what is happening to him? He is indeed controlled by his environment, but we must remember that it is an environment largely of his own making. The evolution of a culture is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia. But not theory changes what ist is a theory about; man remains what he has always been. And a new theory may change what can be done with its subject matter. A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

Cumulative Record

Part I: The Implications of a Science of Behavior for Human Affairs, Especially for the Concept of Freedom
Part II: A Method for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior--Its Theory and Practice, Its History, and a Glimpse of Its Future
Part III: The Technology of Education
Part IV: The Analysis of Neurotic, Psychotic, and Retarded Behavior
Part V: For Experimental Psychologists Only
Part VI: Creative Behavior
Part VII: Literary and Verbal Behavior
Part VIII: Theoretical Considerations
Part IX: A Miscellany
Part X: Coda

Some Quantitative Properties of Anxiety (Part IX)

How to Teach Animals (Part IX)

- This is a REALLY good article to read over and over. It was originally published in Scientific American. In it Skinner gives a fantastic layman's intro to behavior modification (in this case, a dog).

The Technology of Teaching

Chapter 1 - The Etymology of Teaching




Chapter 2 - The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching

Chapter 3 - Teaching Machines

Chapter 4 - The Technology of Teaching

Chapter 5 - Why Teachers Fail



Reason 1 - Aversive Control - Threatening students with punishment so that they learn out of the fear of the aversive consequences for not working. Skinner spends a lot of time talking about all the problems with this.

Reason 2 - Telling and Showing - "Unfortunately, a student does not learn simply when he is shown or told. Something essential to his natural curiosity or wish to learn is missing from the classroom. What is missing, technically speaking, is 'positive reinforcement'."

Reason 3 - Getting Attention - Focusing on trying to make the material more attention-grabbing, but doing it in a unsophisticated way so that the wrong behaviors are reinforced. For example, having a pretty picture in the book that reinforces the student looking at the picture, but doesn't reinforce reading and understanding the accompanying text.

Reason 4 - Making Material Easy to Remember - 1) Focusing on making the material easier, or 2) focusing on trying to hack human perception so that "material may be presented in a form in which it is irresistibly learned".

Reason 5 - The Teacher as Midwife - The belief that the teacher cannot really teach at all but can only help the student learn. In other words, the belief in maieutics. In still other words, the belief that students must learn through discovery as opposed to being shown/told.

Reason 6 - The Idols of the School: 1 - The belief that what a good teacher can do, any teacher can do.

Reason 7 - The Idols of the School: 2 - The belief that what a good student can learn, any student can learn.


Chapter 6 - Teaching Thinking

Part 1



Chapter 7 - The Motivation of the Student




Chapter 8 - The Creative Student

Chapter 9 - Discipline, Ethical Behavior, and Self-Control

Chapter 10 - A Review of Teaching

Chapter 11 - The Behavior of the Establishment