Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904 - 1990)

Burrhus Frederic Skinner is one of the most misunderstood psychologists of all times. He has been demonized tremendously throughout his career, and blamed for much of the problems of contemporary psychology. Skinner is regarded as the father of Operant Conditioning, but his work was based on Thorndike's Law of Effect.  He was born in a small town in Pennsylvania called Susquehanna, on March 20th, 1904. B. F had been a very active, outgoing child who loved building things, and enjoyed at school. Later incidents proved that his life was not without tragedies and troubles. Specifically, his brother at the age of 16 years died of an aneurysm in the brain (Dews, p. 1-27).

Skinner attended the University of Hamilton in New York, waiting to be a storyteller and poet. At that time, it only took a course in psychology, which was taught by William Squires, that changed his ambitions altogether. He generally did not fit in very well there, did not enjoy all the fraternity parties or play football. He wrote articles for the newspaper under the pseudonym school Burrhus of Sir Beerus, including write-ups critical of his own school, faculty, and even Phi Beta Kappa. Moreover, he was an atheist in a school that required assistance to the Masses. He attained graduation in the year 1926 (Hothersall, p. 45-87).

With the idea of ??development as a poet and writer, after graduation, he builds a studio in the attic of his parents to concentrate, but never actually did. He then wrote newspaper articles about problems at work, and life in Greenwich Village in New York as a bohemian. After traveling a few times and having read the book of Pavlov (named “Conditioned Reflexes”), Skinner decided that his future lay in psychology, especially in conditioning, so he decided to return to college, this time at Harvard. He engaged himself in research activities for five years, working as an assistant in the laboratory of biology under his Professor Crouzuer (Dews, p. 1-27).

In 1936, he moved to Minneapolis to teach at the University of Minnesota. It is here where he met his future wife Yvonne Blue. They had two daughters, one of them, the youngest, became the first child raised in a Skinner's inventions, the bed of air. However, it was the combination of a bed as a child with glass sides and air conditioning, was much like having ...