Baguio Central University

Graduate School

MASTER OF ARTS IN NURSING

RADICAL BEHAVIORISM AND OPERANT CONDITIONONG

By: Burrhus Frederic Skinner

Biographical Background
 He was born March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania to Grace and William
Skinner.
 He was an American psychologist, author, inventor, social philosopher and poet
 Attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. While
attending, he joined Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity.
 Attended Harvard University after receiving his Bachelors degree in English literature in
1926. After graduation, he spent a year at his parent’s home in Scranton attempting to
become a writer of fiction. He soon became disillusioned with his literary skills and
concluded that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from
which to write.
 Skinner received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher until
1936. In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne Blue. The couple had two daughters, Julie and
Deborah
 He then taught at the University Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana
University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946–1947, before
returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained at Harvard for the rest
of his career and was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology from 1958 until his
retirement in 1974.
 He died of leukemia on August 18, 1990, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery
Cambridge, Massachusetts
 Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of
science called Radical Behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research
psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior
culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in
interest experimentally and in applied settings.
  Skinner discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in
psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of
responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement. In a June,
2002 survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.
He was a prolific author who published 21 books and 180 articles.

SKINNER’S OPERANT CONDITIONING

Beginning in the 1930’s, Skinner started his experimentation on the behavior of animals. 
Skinner's quest was to observe the relationship between observable stimuli and response. 
Essentially, he wanted to know why these animals behaved the way that they do.   Skinner
controlled his experiments by using “Skinner boxes.”   The Skinner box was a contraption that
would automatically dispense food pellets and electric shocks.   Skinner believed that the
learning. He observed in his Skinner boxes could apply to human behavior.  He called this
learning operant conditioning.  Operant conditioning can be described as behavior adjustments as
a result of greater or lesser negative or positive reinforcement and punishment.   Skinner
hypothesized that human behaviors were controlled by rewards and punishment and that their
behaviors can be explained by principles of operant conditioning.

PRINCIPLES OF OPERANT CONDITIONING

The main principles of operant conditioning, as defined by Skinner, are reinforcement,

punishment, shaping, extinction, discrimination, and generalization. 

KEY CONCEPTS OF OPERANT CONDITIONING

 Reinforcement
- The process in which a behavior is strengthened, and thus, more likely to happen again.

o PositiveReinforcement
- Making a behavior stronger by following the behavior with a pleasant stimulus.
For example, a rat presses a lever and receives food.
 o Negative einforcement
- Making a behavior stronger by taking away a negative stimulus. For example, a
rat presses a lever and turns off the electric shock

 Punishment
- The process in which a behavior is weakened, and thus, less likely to happen again.
   Negative Punishment
- Reducing a behavior by removing a pleasant stimulus when the behavior
occurs.  If the rat was previously given food for each lever press, but now
receives food consistently when not pressing the lever (and not when it
presses the lever), the rat will learn to stop pressing the lever.
  Positive Punishment
- Reducing a behavior by presenting an unpleasant stimulus when the
behavior occurs.  If the rat previously pressed the lever and received food
and now receives a shock, the rat will learn not to press the lever.

 Shaping
- Technique of reinforcement used to teach new behaviors.   At the beginning,
people/animals are reinforced for easy tasks, and then increasingly need to perform more
difficult tasks in order to receive reinforcement.  For example, originally the rat is given a
food pellet for one lever press, but we gradually increase the number of times it needs to
press to receive food, the rat will increase the number of presses.

 Extinction
- The elimination of the behavior by stopping reinforcement of the behavior.  For
example, a rat who received food when pressing a bar, receives food no longer, will
gradually decrease the amount of lever presses until the rat eventually stops lever
pressing.

 Generalization
 
- In generalization, a behavior may be performed in more than one situation.  For
example, the rat who receives food by pressing one lever, may press a second lever in the
cage in hopes that it will receive food.   

  Discrimination
Learning that a behavior will be rewarded in one situation, but not another.  For example,
the rat does not receive food from the second lever and realizes that by pressing the first
lever only, he will receive food.