Conceptual Theory of Bf Skinner

Conceptual-Theory-Empirical

Conceptual-Theory-Empirical

By B.F. Skinner

          I began to conceive of my theory of behaviorism when I worked in a bookstore in New York City, and I came across the works of Ivan Pavlov and John Watson. At the time, I had no academic background that would have prepared me for studying the work of these two men, but something about their work struck me, and interested me very much. Pavlov, of course, devised a famous experiment in which he sounded a bell that called his dogs to their supper, and he realized that the bell made the dogs understand that food was eminent. And that was interesting enough. But then he further realized that it was the sound of the bell itself that made the dogs begin to salivate. And the bell had nothing to do with food, per se, but only suggested that it would soon arrive. Watson’s work, twenty years after Pavlov’s, took Pavlov’s work and extended it and refined it, and arrived at a theory of classical conditioning, and this would be what my own work in behaviorism would be founded upon (Moore, 2005).

          It was from Pavlov’s and Watson’s work that I would develop my own theory of behaviorism. This theory basically asserted that inward mental processes were unimportant in understanding why an individual acted as he or she did, and that the important aspect of determining behavior was in what happened following a particular action. For instance, in the example of Pavlov, food followed the sound of the bell, and the dog’s found this rewarding, so they responded to the bell (Barash, 2005).

          I began to test my own theories empirically during World War II, when I was asked to participate in a project on the guidance of missile systems. I was able to train pigeons to direct missiles using my theories about behavior. After the war, I began to teach at Harvard, where I was able to further test, and refine, the theories that became behaviorism (Skinner, 1985).

References

Barash, D. P. (2005). B.F. Skinner, revisited. Chronicle Of Higher Education, B10.

Moore, J. (2005). Some historical and conceptual background to the development of B.F.