THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1984) 7, 473-475
Printed in the United States of America
The operant behaviorism
of B. F. Skinner
Of all contemporary psychologists, B. F. Skinner is per-
haps the most honored and the most maligned, the most
widely recognized and the most misrepresented, the
most cited and the most misunderstood. Some still say
that he is a stimulus-response psychologist (he is not);
some still say that stimulus-response chains play a central
role in his treatment of verbal behavior (they do not);
some still say that he disavows evolutionary determinants
of behavior (he does not). These and other misconcep-
tions are common and sometimes even appear in psychol-
ogy texts (e.g. Todd & Morris 1983). How did they come
about, and why do they continue? Although the present
BBS treatments will probably not provide an answer,
they may help to clarify some of the misunderstandings.
The articles sampled here represent a range of Skin-
ner's work (in the treatments, each article is referred to by
its abbreviated title). The first but most recent, "Selec-
tion by Consequences " ("Consequences," Skinner 1981),
relates operant theory to other disciplines, and in particu-
lar to biology and anthropology. The second, "Methods
and Theories in the Experimental Analysis of Behavior"
("Methods"), outlines some of the basic concepts of oper-
ant theory in the context of a discussion of methodological
and theoretical issues; it is an amalgamation of revised
versions of "The Flight from the Laboratory" (Skinner
1961) and "Are Theories of Learning Necessary?" (Skin-
ner 1950) and a portion of the preface to Contingencies of
Reinforcement (Skinner 1969). "The Operational Analy-
sis of Psychological Terms" ("Terms," Skinner 1945) is
the earliest work treated; its special concern is with the
language of private events, and many features of Skin-
ner's analysis of verbal behavior are implicit in it. "An
Operant Analysis of Problem Solving" ("Problem Solv-
ing," Skinner 1966a), continues the interpretation of
verbal behavior in distinguishing between rule-governed
and contingency-shaped behavior. "Behaviorism at
Fifty" ("Behaviorism-50," Skinner 1963) addresses the
status of behaviorism as a philosophy of science, and
points out some of the difficulties that must be overcome
by any science of behavior. "The Phylogeny and On-
togeny of Behavior" ("Phylogeny," Skinner 1966b), the
last of the works sampled, considers how evolutionary
variables combine with those operating within an organ-
ism's lifetime to determine its behavior.
© 1984 Cambridge University Press 0140-525XI84/040473-03I$06.00
A. Charles Catania
Department of Psychology, University of Maryland Baltimore County,
Catonsville, Md. 21228
Biography
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on March 20,1904, in
Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. After majoring in English at
Hamilton College, he tried a career at writing but gave it
up after finding he had nothing to say. Having a long-
standing interest in human and animal behavior and some
familiarity with the writings of Watson, Pavlov, and
Bertrand Russell, he then entered the graduate program
in psychology at Harvard University (Skinner 1976).
There he began a series of experiments that led to more
than two dozen journal articles and culminated in The
Behavior of Organisms (1938). In the manner of The
Integrative Action of the Nervous System (Sherrington
1906) and Behavior of the Lower Organisms (Jennings
1906), the work presented a variety of novel research
findings and provided a context for them. The extensive
data illustrated many properties of reinforcement and
extinction, discrimination and differentiation; the con-
cept of the three-term contingency was to become the
cornerstone for much else that would follow.
In 1936, after three years as a Junior Fellow in the
Harvard Society of Fellows, Skinner moved to the Uni-
versity of Minnesota. His basic research continued, but
during World War II he also worked on animal applica-
tions of behavior principles, including the training of
pigeons to guide missiles (Skinner 1960; 1979). Although
the project never got beyond demonstrations, a major
fringe benefit was the discovery of shaping, the technique
for creating novel forms of behavior through the differen-
tial reinforcement of successive approximations to a
response.
Another product of those days was the Aircrib, which
Skinner built for his wife and his second daughter (Skin-
ner 1945). It was a windowed space with temperature and
humidity control that improved on the safety and comfort
of the ordinary crib while making the care of the child less
burdensome. It was not used for conditioning the infant
(contrary to rumor, neither of Skinner's daughters devel-
oped emotional instability, psychiatric problems or sui-
cidal tendencies). Soon after came the Utopian novel,
Walden Two (1948). Some who later criticized the specif-
ics of that planned society failed to observe that its
experimental character was its most important feature:
473
Catania: Skinner's behaviorism
Any practice that did not work was to be modified until a
more effective version was found.
In 1945, Skinner assumed the chairmanship of the
Department of Psychology at Indiana University. Then,
after delivering the 1947 William James Lectures at
Harvard University on the topic of verbal behavior, he
returned permanently to the Harvard Department of
Psychology (Skinner 1983). There he completed his book
Verbal Behavior (1957) and, in collaboration with Charles
B. Ferster, developed the subject matter of schedules of
reinforcement (Ferster & Skinner 1957). Much else has
been omitted here (e.g. Science and Human Behavior
[1953] and teaching machines); the articles and books
Skinner has since written are too numerous to list. All but
one of the articles treated ("Terms") are drawn from those
later pieces; they constitute a sample of his most seminal
works. Many others are cited in the course of the treat-
ments.
Operant behaviorism
Operant behaviorism (or radical behaviorism) is the vari-
ety of behaviorism particularly identified with Skinner's
work. It provides the systematic context for the research
in psychology sometimes referred to as the experimental
analysis of behavior. Behavior itself is its fundamental
subject matter; behavior is not an indirect means of
studying something else, such as cognition or mind or
brain.
A primary task of an experimental analysis is to identify
classes of behavior on the basis of their origins. Some
classes of responses, respondents, originate with the
stimuli that elicit them (as illustrated by the stimulus-
response relations called reflexes). Others, called oper-
ants, are engendered by their effects on the environment;
because they do not require eliciting stimuli, they are
said to be emitted rather than elicited. Admitting the
possibility that behavior could occur without eliciting
stimuli was a critical first step in operant theory. Earlier
treatments had assumed that for every response there
must be a corresponding eliciting stimulus. The rejection
of this assumption did not imply that emitted responses
were uncaused; rather, the point was that there are other
causes of behavior besides eliciting stimuli. Adding oper-
ants to respondents as behavior classes did not exhaust
the possibilities, but it was critical to recognize that the
past consequences of responding are significant determi-
nants of behavior.
The consequences of a response may either raise or
lower subsequent responding. Consequences that do so
are respectively called reinforcers and punishers (punish-
ment has sometimes been confused with negative rein-
forcement, but positive and negative reinforcement both
involve increases in responding; they differ in whether
the consequence of responding is the addition to or
removal of something from the environment, as in the
difference between appetitive procedures and those in-
volving escape or avoidance). The particular reh; tions that
can be established between responses and their conse-
quences are called contingencies of reinforcement or
punishment.
But the consequences of responding are also typically
correlated with other features of the environment (some
474 THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1984) 7:4
consequences of stepping on the brake pedal or the gas
pedal, for example, depend on whether the traffic light is
red or green). When a stimulus sets the occasion on which
responding will have a particular consequence, the stim-
ulus is said to be discriminative. If responses then come to
depend on, or come under the control of, this stimulus,
the response class is called a discriminated operant. Both
respondents and discriminated operants involve an ante-
cedent stimulus, but the distinction between them is
crucial and depends on whether consequences of re-
sponding play a role. A response that depends only on the
presentation of a stimulus, as in a reflex relation, is a
member of a respondent class. One that depends on the
relations among the three terms - stimulus, response,
consequence — is a member of a discriminated operant
class. Thus, discriminated operants are said to be defined
by a three-term contingency. The three-term contingen-
cy is often neglected by those who think of behavior
change only in terms of the instrumental and classical
procedures of earlier conditioning theories.
Much of the research that helped to establish this
vocabulary was conducted in the experimental chamber
that for a while was known as the Skinner box (that term
was more often used by those outside than by those
within the experimental analysis of behavior). Simple
stimuli (lights, sounds), simple responses (lever presses,
key pecks), and simple reinforcers (food, water) were
arranged for studying the behavior of rats or pigeons.
Many responses automatically have particular conse-
quences (to see something below eye level, for example,
we look down rather than up). But natural environments
do not ordinarily include levers on which presses produce
food pellets only when lights are on. Operant chambers
were designed to create arbitrary contingencies; they
were arbitrary, but only in this sense. As for responses
such as the pigeon's key peck:
Such responses are not wholly arbitrary. They are
chosen because they can be easily executed, and be-
cause they can be repeated quickly and over long
periods of time without fatigue. In such a bird as the
pigeon, pecking has a certain genetic unity; it is a
characteristic bit of behavior which appears with a well-
defined topography. (Ferster & Skinner 1957, p. 7)
Given this recognition of genetic determinants in the
specification of operant classes, it is ironic that some
species-specific characteristics of lever presses and key
pecks later became the basis for criticisms of operant
theory. Perhaps these responses were not arbitrary
enough. But given that the concern was to study the
effects of the consequences of responding, it would hardly
have been appropriate to have sought out response class-
es so highly determined in other species-specific ways
that they would have been insensitive to their conse-
quences.
There are "natural lines of fracture along which behav-
ior and environment actually break" (Skinner 1935, p.
40). "We divide behavior into hard and fast classes and
are then surprised to find that the organism disregards
the boundaries we have set" (Skinner 1953, p. 94). Oper-
ant theory is not compromised by demonstrations that
some response classes are more easily established than
others, or that some discriminations can be more easily
established with some reinforcers than with others. Con-
sequences are important, but they do not operate to the

exclusion of other sources of behavior, including phy-
logenic ones. Phenomena such as autoshaping (producing
a pigeon's pecks on a key by repeatedly lighting the key
and then operating the feeder) were discovered in the
course of operant research, and present no more of a
problem to operant accounts than do the respondent
conditioning phenomena studied by Pavlov.
The discovery that behavior could be maintained easily
even when only an occasional response was reinforced led
to the investigation of schedules of reinforcement. Sched-
ules arrange reinforcers on the basis of the number of
responses, the time at which responses occur, the rate of
responding, or various combinations of these and other
variables. In more complicated cases, different schedules
operate either successively or simultaneously in the pres-
ence of different stimuli or for different responses. Rein-
forcement schedules have proven useful in such areas as
psychopharmacology and behavioral toxicology. The per-
formances generated by complex schedules are also
sometimes analogous to performances that in humans are
discussed in terms of preference, self-control, and so on
(e.g. see "Methods").
In its extension to verbal behavior, a primary task of an
operant analysis is again that of identifying the various
sources of behavior. Its concern is with the functions of
language rather than with its structure. In the tact rela-
tion, for example, an object or event is a discriminative
stimulus that sets the occasion for a particular utterance,
as when one says "apple" upon seeing an apple (tacting is
not equivalent to naming or referring to; the relation
called reference involves another class of behavior, called
autoclitic). Through the tact relation, verbal behavior
makes contact with events in the world. Other relations
include (but are not limited to) the intraverbal, in which
verbal behavior serves as a discriminative stimulus for
ather verbal behavior (as in learning addition or multi-
plication tables), the textual, in which written text pro-
vides the discriminative stimuli (as in reading aloud), and
:he mand, in which the verbal response specifies a conse-
quence (as in making a request or asking a question). Any
utterance, however, is likely to involve these and other
relations in combination; verbal behavior is a product of
multiple causation. Novel utterances may be dealt with
by showing how their various components (words,
phrases, grammatical forms) have each been occasioned
by particular aspects of a current situation; novelty, in
other words, comes about through novel combinations of
existing verbal classes.
More important, these elementary relations are only
the raw materials from which verbal behavior is con-
structed. A sentence cannot exist solely as a combination
of these elementary units. Speakers report on the condi-
tions under which they are behaving verbally (as when
someone says, "I am happy to report that . . ."), they
cancel the effects of their own verbal behavior (as when
they include "not" in a sentence), they indicate its
strength (as when they speak of being sure or uncertain),
and so on. In each of these cases, some parts of the
speaker's verbal behavior are under the discriminative
control of the various other verbal relations. These pro-
cesses, called autoclitic, are the basis for larger verbal
units (e.g. sentences) and for the complexities of self-
References /Catania: Skinner's behaviorism
editing, logical verbal behavior, and so on. The nestings
and orderings and coordinations of these processes are
intricate, but they can nevertheless be accommodated by
the discriminative stimuli and the responses and the
consequences of the three-term contingency. This sort of
analysis is illustrated in "Terms"; although that article
predated Skinner's development of the vocabulary of
Verbal Behavior, these relations are implicit in it, and
more is involved in it than simply the tacting of private
events.
These and other aspects of operant behaviorism are
discussed in the treatments that follow. For the commen-
tators, the articles are the stimuli, their commentaries are
the responses, and Skinner's replies are the conse-
quences. For Skinner, the commentaries are the stimuli
and his replies are the responses; some of the conse-
quences will be evident only in the effects of the treat-
ments on their readers. Other potential responses and
consequences produced by these treatments are even
more remote and also remain to be seen. To the extent
that they may correct some misreadings of operant theo-
ry, they are steps in the right direction. Given that we
have already taken more than a single step, our journey
has already begun. This is as it should be, because there is
much to explore and the journey will not be short.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Preparation of the introductory and concluding remarks was
supported in part by NSF grant BNS82-03385 to the University
of Maryland Baltimore County. Some passages from the intro-
duction were excerpted from Catania (1980), with permission of
the publisher.
References
Catania, A. C. (1980) Operant theory: Skinner. In: Theories of learning, ed.
G. M. Gazda & R. Corsini. F. E. Peacock.
Ferster, C. B. & Skinner, B. F. (1957) Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-
Gentury-Crofts.
Jennings, H. S. (1906) Behavior of the lower organisms. Macmillan.
Sherrington, C. (1906) The integrative action of the nervous system.
Scribner's.
Skinner, B. F. (1935) The generic nature of the concepts of stimulus and
response. Journal ofCeneral Psychology 12:40-65.
(1938) The behavior of organisms. Appleton-Ceiitury-Crofts.
(1945) The operational analysis of psychological terms. Psychological Review
42:270-77; 291-94.
(1948) Walden two. Macmillan.
(1950) Are theories of learning necessary? Psychological Review 57:193-216.
(1953) Science and human behavior. Macmillan.
(1957) Verbal behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
(1960) Pigeons in a pelican. American Psychologist 15:28-37.
(1961) The flight from the laboratory. In: Current trends in psychological
theory, ed. Wayne Dennis et al. University of Pittsburgh Press.
(1963) Behaviorism at fifty. Science 140:951-58.
(1966a) An operant analysis of problem solving. In: Problem solving:
Research, methods, and theory, ed. B. Kteinmuntz. John Wiley & Sons.
(1966b) Phylogeny and ontogeny of behavior. Science 153:1205-13.
(1969) Contingencies of reinforcement: A theoretical analysis. Prentice-Hall.
(1976) Particulars of my life. Knopf.
(1979) The shaping of a behaciorist. Knopf.
(1981) Selection by consequences. Science 213:501-4.
(1983) A matter of consequences. Knopf.
Todd, J. T. & Morris, E. K. (1983) Misconception and miseducation:
Presentations of radical behaviorism in psychology textbooks. Behavior
Analyst 6:153-60.
THE BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1984) 7:4 475
Call for Papers
Investigators in
Psychology,
Neuroscience,
Behavioral Biology, and
Cognitive Science
Do you want to:
• draw wide attention to a particularly
important or controversial piece of work?
• solicit reactions, criticism, and feedback
from a large sample of your peers?
• place your ideas in an interdisciplinary,
international context?
The Behavioral
and Brain Sciences B
an extraordinary journal now in its seventh year, provides a
special service called Open Peer Commentary to re-
searchers in any area of psychology, neuroscience,
behavioral biology or cognitive science.
Papers judged appropriate for Commentary are circulated
to a large number of specialists who provide substantive
criticism, interpretation, elaboration, and pertinent com-
plementary and supplementary material from a full cross-
disciplinary perspective.
Article and commentaries then appear simultaneously with
the authors formal response. This BBS "treatment"
provides in print the exciting give and take of an interna-
tional seminar.
The editor of BBS is calling for papers that offer a clear
rationale for Commentary, and also meet high standards of
conceptual rigor, empirical grounding, and clarity of style.
Contributions may be (1) reports and discussions of empiri-
cal research of broader scope and implications than might
be reported in a specialty journal; (2) unusually significant
theoretical articles that formally model or systematize a
body of research; and (3) novel interpretations, syntheses or
critiques of existing theoretical work.
Although the BBS Commentary service is primarily devoted
to original unpublished manuscripts, at times it will be ex-
tended to precis of recent books or previously published
articles.
Published quarterly by Cambridge University Press. Edi-
torial correspondence to: Stevan Harnad, Editor, BBS,
Suite 240, 20 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ 08542.
" . . . superbly presented . . . the result is
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This contrasts with the provincialism of special-
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