Austin Clyde

Mr. Waltman
Block 5/6
11 February 2014
Burrhus Frederic Skinner, the man addicted to lever presses, shared his new learning
model, operant conditioning, in a womens day magazine which read baby in box (23). While
the supposed fairytale of Deborah Skinner being reared in a box is slight true (Skinner had a
lushly formed environment for children to rest and play in), the actual impact of his extension of
the field Pavlov pioneered, was much superior to some utopian play pen. His discoveries were
quite strange for a man in a period of time where leather coaches and unscientific introspection
raged. His development of a conditioning chamber provided an objective way to study behavior,
which was certainly lacking in this time. Furthermore, allegedly rearing his daughter in a box for
her first couple years of life, and her suicide, undoubtedly added to the strange tinge his research
reeked of. It was in his boxes that he created a new category of learning, inspired by his favorite
Ivan Pavlov, which focused on learned response from an environment rather than reflexes to a
conditioned stimuli. He found a bizarre fixation in pigeons pecking at disks. Pavolv work in
reinforcement intervals and rates mechanized human behavior to appear he was a sibling of
Morgenthauinsofar he was a real politick: to propose a society built off of reward (also known
as extreme absolutism of thought, action, and life). In all of this he tried to prove that humans
have no free will at all. Mostly strange and bitter, his sweetness shines through his intentions.