Name: Christine Natividad Date: Feb 15, 2023

Block 2 BS Psychology
Teacher: Ms. Cervas

“Skinner's: A Case History in Scientific Methods 1956”

The article “Skinner's: A Case History in Scientific Methods 1956” was written by
Burrhus Frederic Skinner, an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social
philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his
retirement in 1974. The author begins to highlights the importance of conducting experiments
and collecting data in order to make progress in science. The author also explains how scientific
methodology can developed theories and be applied to many different fields. It shows how one
can apply their knowledge from one field to another, and it also illustrates how this works in
practice.

In the article details the fundamental studies carried out and methods created by Skinner,
such as Operant Conditioning, as well as how they were developed in his laboratory experiments.

Skinner's theory is based on the idea that organisms are motivated by rewards and punishments,
and that these two factors can be used to encourage the desired behavior or discourage unwanted
behavior. For example, if an animal is trained to perform a task for food pellets, it will continue
performing this task even when there are no pellets present—this is called "extinction." If the
animal is trained to sit quietly in its cage until it receives food pellets, then all other rewards will
be withdrawn from it after it has performed the task successfully (a Punishment).

The theory also states that behavior can be changed through conditioning, which involves pairing
an unconditioned stimulus (US) with an unconditioned response (UR). The US might be
touching a hot surface while the UR would be movement away from that hot surface. The UR
could then become conditioned as an escape route from danger; if you touch a hot surface now,
you'll move away from it as quickly as possible because you've been conditioned not to touch
things like hot surfaces at first sight!

 The major result of this experiment was that

some of my rats had babies. I began to watch
young rats. I saw them right themselves and crawl
about very much like the decerebrate or thalamic
cats and rabbits of Magnus. So I set about studying the postural reflexes of young rats.
Here was a
first principle not formally recognized by scientific
methodologists: When you run onto something interesting, drop everything else and
study it, I tore
up the Parthenon and started over.
If you hold a young rat on one hand and pull it
gently by the tail, it will resist you by pulling forward and then, with a sudden sharp
spring which
usually disengages its tail, it will leap out into space.
 I decided to study this behavior quantitatively
 Now, baby rats have very little future, except as
adult rats. Their behavior is literally infantile and
cannot be usefully extrapolated to everyday life.
But if this technique would work with a baby, why
not try it on a mature rat? To avoid attaching
anything to the rat, it should be possible to record,
not a pull against the substrate, but the ballistic
thrust exerted as the rat runs forward or suddenly
stops in response to my calibrated click
 Curves showing how the rate of eating declined with the time of eating comprised
the
other part of my thesis. But a refinement was
needed. The behavior of the rat in pushing open
the door was not a normal part of the ingestive behavior of Rattus rattus.

 Now, a steady state was something I was familiar

with from physical chemistry, and I therefore embarked upon the study of
periodic reinforcement.
I soon found that the constant rate at which the
rat stabilized depended upon how hungry it was.
Hungry rat, high rate; less hungry rat, lower rate.
At that time I was bothered by the practical problem of controlling food
deprivation.
Skinner's operant conditioning is a theory about how humans learn. It is based on
the idea that behavior can be changed by introducing positive or negative
consequences for that behavior.

Skinner reasoned that if an animal performs a certain action, it may receive

approval from others in its group and thus repeat that action again.

For example, if an animal wants to eat something, it may perform this action by
eating. If the animal eats something that causes pain or discomfort, then it will
stop eating this food. This is called punishment because the animal has stopped
doing what it wanted to do in the first place: eat food.

If an animal performs an action that leads to more food being eaten by itself or
others, then they will continue doing so again and again over time.