Bf Skinner Child Development Essay

Child Development

Name of Theorist:

Burrhus Fredric Skinner was an American Psychologist, Behaviourist, author, inventor, and social philosopher

Name of development theory:

Skinner conducted research on shaping behaviour through positive and negative reinforcement and demonstrated operant conditioning, a behaviour modification technique which he developed in contrast with classical conditioning. While it is commonly known that behaviour is affected by its consequences, Skinner's theory of operant conditioning further states that the process does not require repeated efforts, but is instead an immediate reaction to a familiar stimulus.

B.F. Skinner's Theory of Operant Conditioning

Skinner would place a rat in a cage known as a “Skinner box”

If you turn the pellet machine back on, which means when the bar is pressed it provides the rat with pellets once again, the behaviour of bar-pushing will come right back into existence, much more quickly than the first time the rat took to learn to do it the first time. This is because the return of the reinforcer takes place in the context of a reinforcement history that goes back to the very first time the rat was reinforced for pushing the bar. This then leads to what are called the schedules of

It is very straight-forward: Extinguish an undesirable behaviour (by removing the reinforcer) and replace it with a desirable behaviour by reinforcement. It has been used on all sorts of psychological problems such as addictions, neuroses, shyness, autism, even schizophrenia and it works particularly well with children. There are examples of back-ward psychotics who haven’t communicated with others for years who have been conditioned to behave themselves in fairly normal ways, such as eating with a knife and fork, taking care of their own hygiene needs, dressing themselves, and so