B. F. Skinner: Mistaken – or Misunderstood?
B. F. Skinner: A Life. Daniel W. Bjork. 298 pp. Basic Books, 1993. $25.00
B. F. Skinner: A Reappraisal. Marc N. Richelle. 242 pp. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.
$ 59.95
The chief offense of “political correctness” is its unreflective certainty – about which causes to
hail or demonize and about the necessity to take sides on every issue. Science has no room for
such dogmatism, of course. Yet, human nature being what it is, in the softer sciences, at least,
demonization of “outs” and automatic acceptance of “ins” is the rule rather than the exception.
For many years in experimental psychology, the “ins” have been the “cognitive” psychologists
and the “outs” the behaviorists, especially the radical behaviorist followers of B. F. Skinner,
whose life and work are the topics of these two books. As I write, cognitive psychology (and its
sexier successor, cognitive science) is somewhat in decline. But, following some great law of
succession – or perhaps just in response to the death of Skinner in 1990 – behaviorism is once
again creeping towards center stage.
What is behaviorism, and why is it so despised? The way it is defined by its opponents
gives some clues. A young cognitive hotshot recently characterized it this way: “A school of
psychology, influential from the 1920s to the 1960s, that rejected the study of the mind as unscientific, and sought to explain the behavior of organisms (including humans) with laws of stimulus-response conditioning.” Few modern readers would want to defend the “laws of stimulusresponse conditioning,” or to dispute the centrality of mind as the subject matter for psychology.
A movement reputed to advocate the first and deny the second is guaranteed to win few contemporary votes.
But there are in fact several varieties of behaviorism. Indeed, the major variety is socalled methodological behaviorism, which simply accepts the general principle that scientific
facts must be public (e.g., behavior) not private (e.g., mental events, feelings). Methodological
behaviorism has many devotees who never felt any conflict with cognitive psychology and happily changed labels when “cognitive” became the mode. They're not the target of the general
opprobrium. The real bad guy is undoubtedly the only form of behaviorism that continues to
survive as a self-conscious movement: the radical behaviorism of Skinner and his successors discussed by Richelle and Bjork.
Marc Richelle is a distinguished Belgian psychologist with ample experimental and personal credentials for a book on Skinner. He argues that the conventional picture of behaviorism
is a caricature: Skinner was never a believer in “stimulus-response conditioning,” for example.
Like many other followers of Skinner (and Skinner himself, when he was alive), Richelle believes that Skinner has been consistently misunderstood. “[I]n misrepresenting his ideas, his opponents have missed most of his genuine contributions to psychology, and have completely overlooked the fact that in many areas. . . he was indeed a forerunner (p. x).” Richelle goes on to defend Skinner against journalistic exaggeration (the “baby box” affair), the savage and damaging
attack on his views of language by the mathematical linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky in 1959, and charges that the reinforcement method is opposed to creativity and individual
freedom. Along the way, Richelle also presents interesting comparisons between Skinner and
the influential European behavioral scientists Konrad Lorenz, Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud.
Richelle's book is about Skinner's ideas, not his life. Daniel Bjork's book is a biography
of the man. If Skinner's ideas seem strange to many, Skinner the man will not seem less so.
Skinner's dedication to his ideas, to living his own life in a way consistent with them, and to laboring ceaselessly – until a few days before his death (at the age of 86, from leukemia) – to promote them, emerges vividly from Bjork's readable and sophisticated account. Skinner was born
in Susquehanna Pennsylvania of middle-class parents (his father was a lawyer). He began his
intellectual life with aspirations to become a writer, spent a “Dark Year” of self-doubt when he
found he had no talent for creative writing “I was to remain interested in human behavior but the
literary method had failed me (p. 57).” Skinner's salvation was the discovery of Watsonian behaviorism, as presented by his idol Bertrand Russell in an article which, Russell later averred,
was intended as a criticism. Nevertheless, Skinner was converted and made behaviorism his
own. He achieved eminence in his own right through two great skills: his rhetorical talents, he is
a brilliant, persuasive and deceptively transparent writer; and his experimental genius. He invented the Skinner box, a method for studying the process of instrumental (he called it “operant”) learning in an automatic, controlled fashion. It is hard to overestimate the importance of
this technology, which Richelle aptly labels “A New Microscope for Psychology.”
In his last years, Skinner returned full time to his original concern, human behavior and
how to improve it, in a series of popular books the most influential of which was the bestseller
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). Harnessing his persuasive skills to the exciting new experimental results that flowed from the Skinner-box technology exploited by his students made
Skinner an almost irresistible social force. Terms like “reinforcement,” “timeout” and “aversive
stimulus,” all with origins in the animal-learning laboratory, are now on the lips of educators,
social workers and behavioral therapists across the globe. In his popular writings, Skinner made
social engineering seem a duty.
He died with several manuscripts still unfinished after a life of rigid self-discipline (apparently relieved, from time to time, by episodes of sexual opportunism) and dedication to a philosophy that combined a liberal idealism of the 1930s Russell-Haldane type with American puritan utopianism and faith in the power of technology. These transitions in Skinner's life are engagingly described in Bjork's book.
Will Richelle's book change any opinions about Skinner? A few, perhaps. Certainly,
Chomsky's vicious attacks (which Skinner never answered) target a number of straw men, but
also score a few fair hits. A sympathetic reading of Skinner will find careful, albeit often brief,
discussion of most of the topics he was accused of slighting: instinctive behavior, creativity, language rules, theory. He was often guilty of ignoring the work of others, but was himself shunned
in turn. Skinner's distinction between “contingency-shaped” and “rule-governed” behavior finds
an echo in the later distinction between “procedural” and “declarative” learning, for example, but
Skinner got no credit for the anticipation. However, an unsympathetic reader will also find much
ammunition: Skinner's tendency to assert originality by discarding old terms in favor of neolo2
gisms (“operant” for “instrumental”, “phylogenic” for “phylogenetic”, “stimulus control” for
“generalization”, and several others); his consistent efforts to force the reader to traverse his persuasive prose entire, rather than “skipping” with the aid of an index (few of his books, including
his autobiography, have indices); his almost solipsistic neglect of contemporary work in other
traditions. Most disturbing to non-psychologists, perhaps, is his disdain for theory, which he accepted in principle, but never in fact, reserving his best rhetoric for dismissing theorizing (“conjecturing” appeals to the investigator “whose curiosity about nature is not equal to his interest in
the accuracy of his guesses” is one of the milder examples).
My own conclusion is that Skinner in his last years actually impeded the natural development of the behavioristic tradition. With behaviorism blocked, varieties of cognitive psychology – especially those much concerned with mind and consciousness – that verge on the mystical
have begun to sprout unchecked. Great theoretical advances that belong to the behavioristic tradition, such as artificial neural networks and complexity theory, have had to find uneasy harbor
in cognitive science, while behaviorism, which is nothing more than “the objective study of behavior,” in Watson's words, has been not destroyed but (worse!) rendered unfashionable. Will
skirts be higher next year? We'll see.
John Staddon
Duke University
October 1996 (Apparently prepared for, but never published by, the American Scientist)
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