B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner

Burris Frederic Skinner was born on March 20th, 1904 in Susquehanna,

Pennsylvania. His mother, Grace M. Burrhus, was a stenographer and a secretary, in a law office and later in a railroad chief executive's office. His father,

William A. Skinner, was an attorney, who studied law with another local attorney at a New York Law School. Skinner's parents were both good students. His father had bought several sets of books, so there was a lot of reading material their children. Skinner said that his parents never used physical punishment, except for the time they washed his mouth out with soap for bad language. (Ulrich,

1997) B. F. Skinner was very adventurous child. He lead a 300 mile canoe trip down the Susquehanna River when he was only 13 years old. He was a natural inventor and he loved build things. One of his inventions included a device that automatically reminded him to hang up his pajamas in the morning. He played the saxophone in a jazz band during high school and played piano until his failing eyesight made it hard for him to read the music. In college, he was very independent, and sometimes even a prankster. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1926 and later received his P.h.D. in psychology at Harvard University.

(Ulrich, 1997)

John B. Watson

John Broadus Watson was born in Greenville, South Carolina on January

9th 1878. He went to college at Furman University and the University of Chicago.

Watson created "Psychological behaviorism" in 1912. He told the world about his theory of behaviorism in a 1913 paper entitled ``Psychology as the Behaviorist

Views It.'' In the paper he described Behaviorism as the part of psychology that shows behavior as "a series of observable movements in time and space". (Turner,

1997) He rejected both conscious and unconscious mental activities and defined behavior as a response to a stimulus. A few of John B. Watson's literary works include the following books and papers: Animal Education, Behavior, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, Behaviorism, and Psychological Care of

Infant and Child. (Turner, 1997)

Along with his own theories of behaviorism, Skinner developed the theory of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is based on the idea that "we behave the way we do because this kind of behavior has ...

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...duces the stimulus."(Skinner, 1938) For Skinner's Behaviorism Page 7 example, Skinners cat tries to remove his flea collar because it irritates his sensitive skin. Skinner removes the collar from the cat as a form of negative reinforcement. (Skinner,

1938) In his time, B. F. Skinner attempted to make a lot of changes in modern psychology. Made people didn't agree with his changes because he didn't think that psychology had to do with feels or emotions. He felt that psychology had suffered in the past because it tried to explain human behavior in terms of feelings and states of mind. Skinner thought that psychology had wasted a lot of time making theories about the mind and personality. He suggested that psychology should only deal with behavior that is "observable in the world in which it occurs." (Henderson, 1990) In conclusion, B. F. Skinner was a very intelligent man that viewed behavior as "a response to a stimulus." Though he may have based his theories mostly on animal testing and he many have even portrayed man as a being without feelings, creativity, or morality, he was truly great and saw behaviorism like no one had seen it before. (Skinner, 1938)