B.F. Skinner Theory of Behaviorism

B.F. Skinner Theory of Behaviorism

B.F. Skinner Theory of Behaviorism

B.F. Skinner is a famed psychologist associated with behaviorism. In general, behaviorism is the idea that human beings respond predictably to stimuli, and those who control those stimuli control the person. There is no free will as commonly conceived; only responses to perceived pleasures and pains. The basic idea, therefore, is that if you want to treat irrational behaviors, you must make certain that the irrational behavior is punished and the rational (opposing and opposite) behavior rewarded. Over time, the irrational behavior will disappear, because it eventually conditions the agent to realize that such behaviors lead to pain. Burrus Frederic Skinner was born in the small town of Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. Having graduated sanctioning the undergraduate education higher at Hamilton College, with literature as a main subject, he tried once the following year to make his debut as a writer. It was a period marked by Discouragement and failure: he discovered that he had nothing interesting to say. As he reported in his autobiography, Particulars of My Life [details of my life]: "I apparently a poor writer, but was it not rather the literature that was for me a poor method?” "I was struggling in a raging sea, in grand danger of sinking, but help was on the road (Scriven, 1956).

Why do people behave the way it does? This was probably first a practical question: how could a person anticipate and therefore prepare for what else could I do? Then it would become practical in another sense: how could induce a person to behave in a certain way? Eventually became the problem of understanding and explaining behavior. We tend to say, and often recklessly, that if one thing follows another, it is likely to cause it, following the old principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc ("After this, therefore because of this"). Among the many examples that can be found in the explanation of human behavior, one is of particular importance here. The person with whom we are most familiar with ourselves, many of the things we see behave just before going on inside of our body, and are easy to take them as causes of our behavior. If we ask why we talked about hostility to a friend, we can respond "because I felt anger." It is true that we feel anger before or as we speak, and so we take our anger and hostility because of our conversation (Finan, 1940). When asked why not take the dinner, we can say "because I have no hunger." We often feel hungry when you eat and, therefore, conclude that we eat because we feel hungry (Chomsky, 1959).

Just make sure that no other food available and he will eventually eat it. It seems that by depriving it of food (a physical fact) we have that hungry (a mental fact), and which have been hungry, have eaten nutritious food (a physical fact). But what drove the physical act of deprivation of ...