interviews with B.F. Skinner

INTERVIEW #1 with B. F. SKINNER

On Behaviorism and Society

By Alex Steinberg, original article from 1990 in The Vassar Spectator

Alex Steinberg: Are all human actions strictly determined by the environment?

B. F. Skinner: Antecedent events come to be able to determine behavior when consequences have followed. The whole point of natural selection, operant conditioning, and the evolution of cultures, is that behavior is altered by the consequences that follow. They can be survival in the case of natural selection, operant reinforcement in the case of operant conditioning, and the survival of the group in the case of the evolution of cultures. I can set up an experiment in which a pigeon will respond, let's say, by pecking a key, or pecking a disc, only when the light is on and not when the light is off. So, the antecedent event is controlling the pigeon, but is controlling merely the probability that it will respond, not what it's doing. It is not like reflexes at all.

Alex Steinberg: So no one hundred percent indicator of behavior.

Skinner: There's no determination of behavior by stimuli. Stimuli, at best, control probability of action. Conditioned reflexes are stimuli with antecedents, but that only applies to glands, not to the organism as a whole.

Alex Steinberg: Of what consequence are dreams and fantasies in child development?

Skinner: The trouble with the word development is that it really assumes that it's all natural selection and that the course of development is built into the child at birth. I think if you take Erikson's stages of development, for example, you will see that each one of them refers to the contingencies of reinforcement to which the child is exposed at that time. There's no doubt that there is a certain amount of genetic determination here, and you'll see that when you compare children in different countries and different cultures. But a great deal goes on during the first year, and that explains a good deal of what happens the second, not merely the maturation.

Alex Steinberg: What is love?

Skinner: There are three kinds of love. The Greek had three words for it. Eros, which is erotic, is sexual love, but also it would apply to motherly love, and so on —the kinds of caring that have been determined by natural selection. And there is philos, which is the kind of love when you say "I love Shakespeare," "I love TchaikoAlex Steinbergky," and so on—things that you learn to like during your lifetime. And then there's agape, which is the word that Jesus is supposed to have used when asking Peter, "Do you love Me?" and Peter says, "Yes, I do." And then Jesus says, "Feed my sheep." Agape comes from the Greek root meaning to welcome to a culture, so it has to do with the strength of cultures. I think that one or another of those will explain the kinds of things we do. We have a love for country, a love for a people, love for our religion. Or, we have a love for things that have interested us. Or, we have the erotic kind of love that explains sexual behavior and mothers caring for their babies.

Alex Steinberg: What is the significance of purpose?

Skinner: We don't have to deal with purpose at all because selection by consequence—covering natural selection, operant conditioning, and the evolution of cultures —takes the place of purpose. No biologist will tell you that organisms struggle for existence or do what they do with a purpose of surviving. They do what they do because they have to survive, and they've done it. I don't think that people behave with the intention of getting some kinds of consequences; they behave because they have received those consequences in the past. There's no purpose, no intention, no orientation of the future to be accounted for. Mind as Matter

Alex Steinberg: Can the scientific investigation of behavior include the study of consciousness?

Is a basketball player responsible for how good he is on the court? He may be given great credit for winning the game, but, of course, he had very good coaches, he happened to be six and a half feet tall, he jumps very high, and so on. If you attribute what he’s done to all of that, then you can say there’s a person responsible.

Skinner: The question is, what we mean by that, of course. I believe that we can give a perfectly good account of how people come to look at their own behavior and become aware of what they are doing, of what they are feeling, and so on. It can all be accounted for without supposing any kind of state of consciousness. What you feel are conditions of your body, and some of those are very subtle, and have been made a great deal of by psychologists. But that that is some kind of non-physical substance just doesn't follow.

Alex Steinberg: So, then, consciousness is not subject to analysis of any kind.

Skinner: Not as a thing. But why people speak of being conscious of what they are doing is certainly capable of being studied.

Alex Steinberg: Can we claim with certainty that consciousness exists?

Skinner: Not as anything different from a physical structure.

Alex Steinberg: Can hypnosis be understood without an investigation of a subject's state of mind?

Skinner: Certainly. But I think it has to be very carefully investigated as a particular case of effective verbal suggestion.

Alex Steinberg: Is the treatment of such conditions as aphasia a proper role for psychology?

Skinner: No, I think that's brain science.

Alex Steinberg: If behavior is affected by incentive, then how: can behaviorists ignore desires, goals and motives?

Skinner: How do we interpret those things? Do I eat because I desire a food? No, I eat because I have received food and I have eaten in the past. Also, I eat because during natural selection, the species of which I am a member has been inclined to eat when certain kinds of foods have reached the tongue and mouth. We don't do something because we desire it, we use the word desire to refer to the greater tendency to do something because certain kinds of consequences have followed.

Alex Steinberg: Is it fundamentally fair or unfair to send people to jail if their behaviors were determined by forces beyond their control?

Skinner: Well, that's a very important question: whether it's fair or unfair. We don't send them to jail because that's fair in regard to what they've done, we send them to get them out of the way so they won't cause any more trouble. But I would certainly be in favor of alternatives to a punitive society. I've done my share in trying to get the schools to stop using paddles, and so on, and if I knew how to arrange a better environment so that people would not be criminal, I would be very happy to close the jails.

Alex Steinberg: Can all people be operantly conditioned in such a way that there would be no criminals in the world?

Skinner: That means a redesign of the whole structure of our culture, and I have no idea of whether it can be done. I tried to portray such a society in my book, Walden Two.

Alex Steinberg: Does responsibility have any true meaning in the abstract?

Skinner. We hold people responsible in the sense that we punish them if they misbehave, as one way of doing things. We're also responsible for the behavior which is favorable to other people. I think it's a question of the extent to which we try to control through punitive effects, or, for that matter, positive effects. Is a basketball player responsible for how good he is on the court? He may be given great credit for winning the game, but, of course, he had very good coaches, he happened to be six and a half feet tall, he jumps very high, and so on. If you attribute what he's done to all of that, then you can't say there's a person responsible. Perception and Self

Alex Steinberg: What are your thoughts on forms of intuition, such as extrasensory perception?

Skinner: I don't think that people can respond to the world except in the usual ways, through the usual senses.

Alex Steinberg: Does behaviorism rule out such things as conscience, ego, and the human soul?

Skinner: It rules out the notion of an initiating or originating person as a mind or a spiritual activity of any kind.

Alex Steinberg: In other words, there is no separation of body and soul, as in after death.

Skinner: No. When you die, your body ceases to exist, and so do you. Except for what you may have done for your fellow man, you don't survive afterward.

Alex Steinberg: That many newborn infants are especially submissive or self-assertive would refute the notion that all behavior is learned, wouldn't it?

Skinner: I don't think for a moment that all behavior is learned. Natural selection is a very powerful selective force. But it operates through variation and selection. Operant conditioning takes over for those conditions that are not stable enough to make natural selection possible. It's a great mistake to suppose that behaviorism is opposed to anything like the concept of innate behavior. Watson wasn't opposed to it; he was misunderstood because of something he said.

Alex Steinberg: Could any newborn baby be operantly conditioned so that he or she would one day become a mathematical genius, or an Olympic champion?

Skinner: That's the same question Watson talked about. I have no idea. I have never seen anyone like that, and I have no way of judging what kinds of people are going to be born.

Alex Steinberg: Are the public schools moving closer to, or farther away from, miniature Walden Twos?

Skinner: I think the public schools are a great disaster right now. We know how to improve them. There's no question about that at all. But the main things standing in its way are schools of education, the teachers unions, the teachers themselves, and so on. You cannot, now, make the changes needed to improve education, and it's a great disaster.

Alex Steinberg: What are the chief changes we need to make right away in education?

Skinner: The recognition of the importance of immediate effects. We do not give children immediate reports that they are successful. It takes devices. The teaching profession is the only profession that has not turned to computers and machines, and so on. If it did that, it would be much more effective—fantastically more effective.

Alex Steinberg: Can a young child be operantly conditioned toward a specific sexual orientation?

Skinner: I think there's no doubt that sexual behavior is reinforced by sexual contact, and if you arrange the right kinds of contingency, you probably could make a person interested in this or that kind of thing. Whether there is also natural selection at work here, which would protect homosexuals or heterosexuals, I don't know what the data really are.

Alex Steinberg: If evolution establishes the prima facie responses to stimuli, then why will many newborn infants respond so differently to the same stimulus?

Skinner: Obviously, there are different strains of natural selection that have contributed to a particular person from his parents.

Alex Steinberg: The philosophy you espouse has been called the theory of behaviorism. Do you regard behaviorism as a theory, or how does it differ?

Skinner: I don't think it's a theory at all. I think operant conditioning is something you just demonstrate; it happens to produce effects. I regard behaviorism as the philosophy of the science of behavior. It's relevant, it's structured scientifically, it has implications, and all of that. It's apart from the actual practice of operant conditioning, and so on. Waldens and the Modern Day

Alex Steinberg: How would Henry David Thoreau regard Walden Two.''

Skinner: Well, he was not interested in associating with other people. Walden One was a Walden for one, and I don't suppose he'd care very much about a Walden for two, or twenty, or two hundred. I haven't any idea how he'd feel about it. I've read a good deal of Thoreau, and I don't think I'd want to extrapolate.

Alex Steinberg: Why did you entitle your book after his?

Skinner: I very much admired Walden One. I had in mind setting up a "life of your own," but one that would be for a group rather than a person. I called the community Walden Two. Later I was going to call the book a quotation from Thoreau, "The Sound of the Morning Star," but there was another "Star" book on the market at the time, and the publisher didn't like that, so we called the book Walden Two.

Alex Steinberg: Don't current events suggest that state-sponsored social engineering has failed as a concept?

Skinner. We're seeing very good examples of what happens when governments try to be Communistic. They were unable to motivate people. The common good was not engineered well enough to be reinforcing, so I think it's easy to explain why Eastern Europe is in its present turmoil.

Alex Steinberg: If the common good is not reinforcing, then a Waldon Two is essentially unattainable.

Skinner: In Eastern Europe, unlike Walden Two, it's not that the common good is not reinforcing, but that it is never made to reinforcing. If you've ever been in Russia, nobody really cares whether they do what they're supposed to do. There are no sanctions. It's like American education: no teacher is any better off by improving education.

Alex Steinberg: In "Walden Two Revisited,"you write, "China may be closer [than Russia] to the solutions I have been talking about, but a Communist revolution in America is hard to imagine." You wrote this in 1976, toward the end of Mao Tse-tung's bloody rule, in which fifty million Chinese were killed, including the entire intellectual class. In retrospect do you still support the policies of Mao Tse-tung?

Skinner: Oh, I don't know enough about them to say I support them or would object to them at all. I simply can't keep up with everything in the world. I have not followed China, although I have a very good Chinese friend who is probably dead now. He was a scientist there; I haven't heard from him in several years. I really haven't followed it closely enough.

Alex Steinberg: Do you advocate revolution in the United States?

Skinner: I would love to see revolution in our schools, but I don't mean by that that I'm going to throw any bombs, or burn any schools, or burn any teachers, or attack the teachers union, or anything of that sort. I'm not that kind of person, and I wouldn't work that way. I should like very much to set up a school and have enough money to show how it can be done properly.

Alex Steinberg: Obviously a Walden Two society encompasses much more than just the educational system.

Skinner Of course.

Alex Steinberg: Suppose, without bloodshed, you could overthrow the government tomorrow. Would you?

Skinner: Not until I had something that I was sure could work in its place.

Alex Steinberg: You have been accused of advocating forms of both Communism and fascism. Do you consider yourself a Communist or a fascist?

Skinner: Oh, by no means. No. Many people have pointed out that Walden Two was my effort to reconstruct the small town in Pennsylvania that I grew up in, and there's a good deal of truth in that. This was a very small town. There were seven in my high school graduating class. We got personal attention from our teachers, and, as I look back on it now, it was an excellent environment. There were several groups: the Irish, the Italians, and so on. There were several Jewish families, but not a group of them there—no synagogue or anything. We all mixed, except I did meet a very charming Catholic girl, but I couldn't take her to my parties, and she couldn't take me to hers. But that was the only extent of any racial or religious discrimination. It was the ideal kind of thing.

Alex Steinberg: What are your current projects?

Skinner: Well, I'm writing a paper and doing a great many things. I'm not going to have very much time now because I have this leukemia. I'm just working very well. I don't put in quite as many hours a day as I used to, but I'm enjoying what I'm doing.

End of interview #1 with B.F. Skinner

Interview #2 with B.F. Skinner

By John Whitely in 1972, recording of the interview can be found here

transcript

John M. Whiteley 0:02 – The issues of freedom and control are among the most misunderstood of your work. I would like to provide the learning behaviors of two children, by way of example, one child's learning behavior is characterized by excessive dependence on the teacher at every stage of doing an assignment. The other child's learning behavior is characterized by an independence and apparent love of learning on its own, of self starting which child is the more free and which child is a more controlled

B.F. Skinner 0:42 – You see, you have you phrased the question by referring to one child as dependent on the teacher, and the other child as independent. He is independent of the teacher, but he's not independent of the natural world. He has already come under the control of the physical environment, which interests him. Rousseau raised his question 200 years ago. Rousseau didn't like personal dependence. He thought people harmed natural goodness, so he wanted everyone to be dependent on things, but that's the point that you are dependent on the physical environment just as much as you are dependent on people. I think we would agree. I believe that the child who is exploring the real world around him is farther advanced than a child who has to run to the teacher for approval, and the teacher, if he's any good, will make sure that child shifts his dependency to the world of things. Otherwise the teacher would remain essential, and that people don't want. Every teacher has to wean the student, just as every therapist has to wean his client, to get to break up these dependencies. However, if a child is really not getting much reinforcement out of life, then a little parental or or instructional approval will be enough to get the child going, but that should be withdrawn. You should break down the control exercised by another person and play up the control exercised by the environment. But there's no freedom involved in either case, the child will feel free. In both cases. In one case, he's free to go and ask the teacher if this is good, and he just says, yes. In the other case, he's free to try something new, and something interesting happens and he feels free, but actually he in one case is still under the control of personal approval. In the other case, he has come under the control of all of the interesting things that happen in the world at large when you when you begin to explore it.

John M. Whiteley 2:47 – You've written that our educational environments are defective. How would teachers within this environment go about helping the child modify his learning behavior?

B.F. Skinner 2:57 – Well, you have to do it First of all, by constructing the kind of environment that will bring the child under some kind of control. If you go into a disrupted classroom where the kids are late in arriving and they run around the room and so on, the teacher may be completely out of control. There, what you have to do is to set up some very conspicuous, rewarding or reinforcing contingencies. And you can do it with tokens, or with credit points, or with personal approval, or something of that kind. Make sure that the child is reinforced for coming to school, sitting down, getting to work and learning something. Now, you may have to make it very explicit to begin with something as conspicuous as a token that he can pocket in exchange for something at lunch or something like that. But you don't want that to go on forever. You don't want kids to live their lives just to collect tokens, any more than we want people to live their lives just collecting money. It's something else again. But you can then change from a token system to a credit system, from a credit system just to a bit of approval and a pat on the back. But then you want to get rid of that also and have the child come under the control of the instructional materials he's working with. I don't think you're going to do that by finding things that they're naturally interesting to the child. There are naturally interesting things, but the child is there to learn behaviors which will pay off naturally, only much later in his life. For example, beginning reading is not very rewarding. You can put four color pictures on every page of your reader, that kind of thing, but there are ways in which you can work out contingencies so the child is successful very quickly. It may be quite arbitrary. May get some feedback that this is the correct name for that object, and so on. And but with these spurious contingencies, call them anything you like, you can begin to build up fluent reading behavior, and then the child will begin to get reinforced, as we all are, from reading enjoyable things, but you can't move the enjoyable things immediately because they aren't enjoyable. He hasn't acquired enough behavior to read enjoyably. So you set up artificial contingencies, which might be just approval, but could be much better than that, to build the behaviors, which then come under the control of the natural contingencies built into books. We read books for the rewarding things that happen when we read. And you can't start there, but that's where you want the child to move as fast as possible.

John M. Whiteley 5:38 – What are the range of positive reinforcers open to a school. Seems to me, schools are operating in a very different way than the one you just described.

B.F. Skinner 5:48 – Yes, that when you ask yourself, as a teacher, as I have at the college level, what have I got that my students want? Sometimes a pretty discouraging question, but you can discover things which will be reinforcing to students at any level. And that has been done, a great deal of progress has been made. There are things in an ordinary even, say a ghetto classroom, lower grades or high school, that can be used as reinforcers. You can have special foods at lunchtime, access to play space, privileges to associate with other kids of your choice. More and more of these things have been brought into play as the kinds of contrived reinforcers. It can be used temporarily to get the kinds of behavior which will then eventually have their own natural consequences, which can be reinforcing that can be done. Fortunately for us all, the human organism is reinforced just for being successful with something and that just had survival value, and it can be used if you design instructional material properly. And I would say that programmed instruction is an example, then mere progress is reinforcing.

John M. Whiteley 7:08 – What do you mean that programmed instruction’s designed properly?

B.F. Skinner 7:12 – Well, I mean good programs in which the response you make demands something from you is not too easy, but it's still almost always right. And as a result of having made that, you were then able to go on and do something else that you couldn't do before. A good instructional program has some built-in reinforcers. You just leaf through toward the back of the book and see what you don't know, and obviously you don't know it. And then you look back and see what you've covered, and you do know that obviously something is happening. You're making progress. And before you know it, you know the whole program, and fortunately for us all, the human organism is reinforced by successful accomplishment.

John M. Whiteley 7:58 – So on a stage to stage basis through this program, text, you're rewarded as you go on. It seemed to me, however, that our educational environments are designed very differently. Typically, for example, you're punished if you don't do well. The School rewards its best, rewards for those people who accomplish the most, but almost by definition, within it, there can only be a few at the top, and children aren't rewarded on it, on a day to day basis, for accomplishing this.

B.F. Skinner 8:31 – There are all sorts of things wrong with the contingencies which now prevail, and I want to get away from them just as much as say the free school people do. But I think they're going the wrong way. They're not going to be able to get away from me, they always fall back on them eventually. No, you're quite right. All the way up through even through graduate school, the average student studies to avoid the consequences of not studying.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

End of interview #2 with B.F. Skinner

DMU Timestamp: May 18, 2025 19:27

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