B.F. Skinner
Name
Institution
B.F Skinner got his inspiration from the works of Ivan Pavlov, Edward Thorndike, and John B.Watson. As a young boy, Skinner was very outgoing and loved participating in outdoor activities. From Hamilton College, he got his B.A. in English and started writing articles. Later on, he went back to school and pursued a masters in psychology at Harvard in 1930 and later his doctorate in 1931. He decided to venture there researching for five years (Skinner, n.d.). In 1936, he moved to teach at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he met and married Yvonne Blue. He got two daughters, and the second one became famous from being raised from Skinner’s inventions, the air crib. At Indiana University, Skinner was the chairman of the psychology department. He did a lot of research while guiding the doctoral candidates and, in turn, became one of the best psychology writers.
For Skinner, he believed there was more to psychology and wanted it to be studied in a manner that can be physically observable. His experiments were greatly influenced by Pavlov’s work. Pavlov observed that the minute he rang the bell when he needed to feed the dogs, they would start salivating. Eventually, he rang the bell with no food, but he observed the dogs still salivating, showing that they were accustomed to a specific stimulus. Pavlov’s work was the basis of Skinner’s foundation on his career in the psychology field. Skinner found that animals are accustomed to finding a way to get mates, food, and shelter because they are conditioned by stimuli to do so. He invented an operant conditioning chamber to test the theory and placed a rat. A lever was placed inside so that it would get a pellet of food whenever the rat pressed it. The experiment expounded on what Watson had proposed towards the behaviorism approach.
He had a slight modification from what Watson and Pavlov believed and further proposed that an organism’s behavior does not depend on the preceding stimulus but on a reward that comes after the behavior has taken place. He thus developed the principle of reinforcement to show that an organism would most likely repeat an action that causes benefit to benefit even more.
Operant conditioning mainly observes how a person’s behavior can be controlled and influenced to behave desirably. According to Skinner(2019), operant conditioning theory stresses how people’s personalities can be altered by offering a reward and failing to do so. This shows how behavior can be influenced through reward and punishment. Teachers and even animal trainers use this school of thought to shape the way kids and animals behave respectively by the use of reinforcement and punishment. For organizations, they utilize this approach to observe external factors like the work environment to determine employees’ behavior. For instance, operant conditioning theory becomes applicable if an expected behavior observed in the workplace is learned rather than being reflexive. When employees are new to a company, they tend to learn the different behaviors exhibited in the company. The stimuli present while joining the company influence them to behave in a particular manner. For instance, in an organization, the hardworking people are the ones who receive acknowledgment through rewards, and the ones whose efforts are not recognized are the lazy ones. Thus, the personality types exhibited are mostly dependent on external factors like the person’s environment.
References
Skinner, B. F. (2019). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis. BF Skinner Foundation.
- F. Skinner. (n.d.). Department of Psychology. https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/b-f-skinner