Let us consider the apparent result of the struggle of a wish to express itself. An example which permits us to observe the principal Freudian dynamisms is sibling rivalry. Let us say that two brothers compete for the affection of their parents and for other reinforcers which must be divided between them. As a result, one brother behaves aggressively toward the other and is punished, by his brother or by his parents. Let us suppose that this happens repeatedly. Eventually any situation in which aggressive action toward the brother is likely to take place or any early stage of such action will generate the conditioned aversive stimulation associated with anxiety or guilt. This is effective from the point of view of the other brother or the punishing parent because
it leads to the self-control of aggressive behavior; the punished brother is now more likely to engage in activities which compete with and displace his aggression. In this sense he “represses” his aggression … The same punishment may lead the individual to repress any knowledge of his aggressive tendencies. Not only does he not act aggressively toward his brother, he does not even “know” that he has tendencies to do so.19

Thus repression can be understood as a decrease in aggressive behavior as a consequence of the punishment that followed such behaving. It can also involve a decrease in activities associated with the aggressive behavior and therefore with the punishment, such as the earliest preparatory stages of this behavior that the individual recognizes in the activity of thinking. What Freud conceived of as a dynamic intrapsychic conflict is, for Skinner, a behavior pattern that results from conflicting contingencies of biological reinforcement and social punishment.

To summarize then, Skinner’s model claims that psychology can provide a useful understanding of people if it will give up the study of inner states and focus exclusively on observables: human behavior and the environmental events of which it is a function. Behavior is not under the control of the person or his or her “psyche,” it is under the control of the environment. We can talk about wishes or emotions, and also about the superego or repression, but only if we understand that these terms refer to patterns of behavior that occur as a function of contingencies of reinforcement and punishment. By studying such contingencies we can reliably predict and control behavior, as behavior is increased through reinforcement and decreased through punishment or extinction.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Let us turn now to Skinner’s analysis of Freudian concepts. Freud posited three distinct personality structures: the id, which consists of innate, socially unacceptable impulses; the superego, which consists of moral imperatives learned via socialization; and the ego, that part of the psyche that must realistically balance the opposing demands of id and superego as well as of the external world. Skinner believes that Freud has invented different inner structures to account for certain patterns of behavior that are a function of different conditioning histories. He writes:

Freud conceived of the ego, superego, and id as distinguishable agents within the organism. The id was responsible for behavior which was ultimately reinforced with food, water, sexual contact, and other primary biological reinforcers … On the other hand, the controlling behavior engendered by the community consists of a selected group of practices evolved in the history of a particular culture because of their effect upon anti-social behavior. To the extent that this behavior works to the advantage of the community—and again to this extent only—we may speak of a unitary conscience, social conscience, or superego.18

Skinner accepts the observation that people commonly display the distinct patterns of behavior that Freud identified, but he does not accept Freud’s explanation of these patterns as being caused by distinct psychic structures. Rather, the behavior patterns are a result of distinct contingencies of reinforcement and punishment in the environment. The id represents those behaviors controlled by biological reinforcers, the superego represents those behaviors controlled by social punishment, and the ego represents those behaviors controlled by practical contingencies.

Freud’s model further proposes a dynamic process whereby wishes in the id seek expression but are censored because of their unacceptability to the superego. Skinner’s alternative account runs as follows:

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

In the following years studying psychology, Rogers was exposed to the two approaches we have examined in previous chapters. His course work at Columbia first taught him to understand people from the outside by means of objective testing, as faculty members there scorned such things as intrapsychic dynamics and considered “Freud” a dirty word. Then his clinical internship at the Institute for Child Guidance trained him in the psychodynamic approach of understanding people through interpretation
of unconscious dynamics. Rogers began his professional life as a therapist by relying heavily on this psychodynamic approach.

In his early years working at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, however, he became disillusioned with what he was to call “directive” approaches to therapy, whether those were based on behavioral or psychodynamic assumptions. In an autobiographical chapter he wrote later in life, he pointed to three events from these years that promoted this disillusionment.

The first event occurred when he was working with one of his first clients, a boy with a compulsion to set fires. Rogers had read a Freudian analysis that argued that delinquency is symbolic of sexual conflict, and that if the sexual conflict is uncovered the delinquency will end. Using this model, Rogers worked with the boy to eventually trace his desire to set fires to his sexual impulse to masturbate. Rogers was delighted with this analytic success. He thus ended the therapy and the boy was released from the detention home on probation. When shortly thereafter the boy was found setting another fire, Rogers was jolted. He later recalled this as a moment when he was struck with the realization that authoritativeteachings could actually be wrong.

This incident began a shift in attitude that was exposed a few years later in the second event that Rogers recalled in illustrating his growing disillusionment with directive approaches to therapy. In his first year at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Rogers had led a discussion group on interviewing and had used a published account of an interview to demonstrate effective technique. The account was an interview a caseworker had conducted with a parent that Rogers originally had thought shrewd,
insightful, and on the mark.

But several years later, when Rogers dug up the interview to use again, he was appalled at what he found. Looking at this same interview, he now saw it as a legalistic line of questioning that convicted the parent of unconscious motives and wrung from her an admission of guilt. He now felt sure that “insight” gained in this way could certainly be of no lasting help to the client.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

As long as we conceive of the problem of emotion as one of inner states, we are not likely to advance a practical technology. It does not help in the solution of a practical problem to be told that some feature of a man’s behavior is due to frustration or anxiety; we also need to be told how the frustration or anxiety has been induced and how it may be altered. In the end, we find ourselves dealing with two events—the emotional behavior and the manipulable conditions of which that behavior is a function—which comprise the proper subject matter of the study of emotion.16

At this point we might be inclined to protest Skinner’s analysis of emotions. “I myself experience emotions such as anger and love and fear,” we might say, “as well as other internal states such as needs and thoughts. I know they exist as inner states because of my experience of them, and an understanding of these experiences is essential to an understanding of what it is to be human.” In fact, Skinner does acknowledge that there is a part of our world that is private in the sense of being accessible only to us. For example, we may be in a privileged position to report the “thought”: “I’m thinking of going home” This is because we have access to information unavailable to others: to covert movements on our part that anticipate this behavior perhaps, or to our past history of heading home when it starts to get dark out.

But, Skinner argues, in identifying this thought we are only making a judgment of the probability of a behavior using the same criteria an observer would use when judging probability from publicly observable events. What’s more, we would never have come to recognize such a private experience in the first place if our environment had not taught us to do so. Our parents taught us to recognize thoughts and needs and emotions by attending to our behavior and the events that control
it. For example, when they saw us crying they said “Are you feeling sad because your best friend just moved away?” Without this training from the external environment, Skinner argues, we would never come to “experience” sadness in the first place. “Strangely enough,” he writes, “it is the community which teaches the individual to ‘know himself.” ‘17 Strange indeed. Skinner’s model takes familiar ideas and turns them inside-out.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

The behaviors that co-vary in an emotion do so because they result in common environmental consequences. For example, behaviors that are stronger or more frequent in anger, such as striking or insulting, have the common consequence of damaging a person or object. The evolutionary basis for this is that it is biologically useful to inflict this damage when the individual is in competition with another for resources or when struggling with the inanimate world. A number of behaviors that are probable in anger are innately determined; others, however, are learned or conditioned.

For example, if an angry child attacks, bites, or strikes another child—all without prior conditioning—and if the other child cries or runs away, then these same consequences may reinforce other behavior of the angry child which can scarcely be innate— for example, teasing the other child, taking toys away from him, destroying his work, or calling him names.15

Emotions thus consist of a class of behaviors that are associated because they result in similar environmental consequences. If an individual finds another person cutting in line in front of him, that individual may strike the other, yell at the other, or insult the other, all with the consequence of removing the other and regaining his place in line.

It is common for people to infer an internal link between the preceding event and the operant behavior of an emotion, and to give that internal link a causal status. We say that being cut in front of made a man feel angry, and that the angry feeling then made the man yell. But according to Skinner the inferred feeling state is a useless fiction. How do we know that the man felt angry? If we judge this from the fact that he yelled, then we cannot use the angry feeling as an explanation for the yelling, for that would be circular. If we judge that the man felt angry from the fact that he was cut in front of, then the feeling state is of no use in the explanation of the behavior, for it is the external event that has
provided the explanation.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Skinner felt that punishment is the more commonly employed method of human control, but he persistently argued against its use. He had two primary complaints against punishment as a technique. For one, according to Skinner, punishment does not really work. The immediate effect of punishment is that the unwanted behavior is reduced, but the behavior will simply reappear when the punishing consequences are removed. For another, punishment has unfortunate by-products in the form of negative emotions, such as fear and rage.

But now we might be surprised to find Skinner using such language as “fear” and “rage.” We have understood him to focus exclusively on observable behavior and the environmental stimuli that control it. Does he not entirely deny the existence of inner states such as emotions, needs, and thoughts? Actually it is not so much that Skinner denies the existence of such states; rather he denies that they have any causal status in motivating human behavior. They are neither necessary nor useful as scientific explanations. As to whether they exist at all, Skinner does address such phenomena as emotions, needs, and thoughts, and indeed even takes on such Freudian concepts as the superego and repression. Using his model he re-defines these phenomena in behavioral
terms.

Let us look at his analysis of emotions, for example. Although our intuitive understanding of emotions may be based primarily on our subjective experience of them, Skinner claims that emotions can be usefully defined solely from the perspective of an objective observer. An emotion can be understood not as an inner state but instead as a predisposition to act in certain ways.

The “angry” man shows an increased probability of striking, insulting, or otherwise inflicting injury and a lowered probability of aiding, favoring, comforting, or making love. The man “in love” shows an increased tendency to aid, favor, be with, and caress and a lowered tendency to injure in any way. “In fear” a man tends to reduce or avoid contact with specific stimuli—as by running away, hiding, or covering his eyes and ears; at the same time he is less likely to advance toward such stimuli.14

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Intuitively, we distinguish between a respondent such as an eyeblink and an operant such as a wink by calling the former “involuntary” and the latter “voluntary.” But Skinner would assert that we are entirely wrong if we mean to imply by this that whereas respondents are not under the organism’s control, operants are. Both operants and respondents are fully under the control of the environment, not of the organism. It is simply that the nature of that control differs, making it less apparent in the case of operants.

In the case of respondents, the environmental stimulus occurs before the behavior, and it reliably elicits that behavior for all organisms in all situations because this has proven to be adaptive for survival. A burst of air in the eye reliably elicits blinking because that blinking protects the eye from foreign matter that could interfere with vision. In the case of operants, on the other hand, the environmental stimulus occurs after the organism’s behavior, and the relationship between behavior and environmental consequence is not constant across organisms or situations. A wink has consequence for people but not for rats; a person may draw a smile when he winks at his spouse and a scowl when he winks at his boss. Because of this variability, the environmental control
of opernts is less apparent than that of respondents. But it is no less a fact: Operant behaviors are fully controlled by their environmenta consequences, not by the organism. Skinner asserted that the idea of “self-determination” or “free will” is a fiction that has no place in the science of psychology. It was one of the claims that engendered alarm in many of his readers. According to Skinner there are three major processes by which operants are controlled by their environmental consequences: reinforcement, extinction, and punishment. Reinforcement is the process by which a behavior increases in frequency or is more likely to occur.

An operant behavior will increase in frequency if it is followed by the presentation of something favorable or by the removal of something unfavorable. Thus, Skinner’s rat increased lever-pressing when that behavior was followed by a food pellet. Likewise a spouse will be more likely to be an attentive listener when that behavior is followed by affection from their partner, and a worker will be more likely to persist at a task when that behavior is followed by praise from their boss. A behavior will decrease in frequency as a function of extinction or punishment. In extinction, a reinforcing consequence no longer follows from the behavior and so the behavior drops off. Skinner’s rat showed a decline in leverpressing when the food magazine jammed and stopped delivering food for it. In punishment, a behavior decreases in frequency because it is followed by the presentation of something unfavorable
or by the removal of something favorable. A child will be less likely to say a dirty word if the consequence of that behavior is to get a spank or to lose television privileges.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Skinner published the series of studies he had conducted at Harvard, first as a graduate student and later as a Junior Fellow, in his 1938 book The Behavior of Organisms. In over 400 pages the book reports his research in laborious detail with such heavy-going sentences as: “The completed chain may be written: sSD: visual lever. R: lifting —> sSD: tactual lever. R: pressing sSD: tray SD: sound of magazine. R: approach to tray S: food. R: seizing, where the second arrow is understood to connect the response with SD: sound only.”12 It is not the kind of narrative to titillate the heart or mind, and it is not surprising that the book left most readers cold. But a foreshadowing of Skinner’s later ability to affect his readers is found in his boldly choosing a broad title for the book, for the only “organism” Skinner had studied was the white rat.
Skinner firmly believed that the principles of animal behavior he had discovered in his work with rats could be effectively applied to understand all organisms, including people.

In 1953 when Skinner explicitly extrapolated his findings to a systematic treatment of human behavior in Science and Human Behavior, he had found a way to stir the pulse of psychologists, although as often in an expression of alarm and ire as of excitement. When he wrote a similar analysis for the lay reader in his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he had succeeded in arousing the general public. His picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “B. F. Skinner Says: We Can’t Afford Freedom,” and the article inside introduced him as “the most controversial contemporary figure in the science of human behavior,
adored as a messiah and abhorred as a menace.”13 We will have to wade through the thick waters of his basic conditioning principles to come to understand his provocative application of these principles to the study of people, but the effort will be well worth it.

What, then, are the basic principles of Skinner’s model? Skinner first proposes a distinction between two kinds of behavior, respondents and operants. Respondents are behaviors that are elicited in response to an environmental stimulus. For example, an eyeblink is a respondent elicited by a burst of air in the eye. But according to Skinner the majority of behavior by any adult organism, and the most complex and important type, is in the form of operants. Operants are not elicited by an environmental stimulus, but rather are enacted by the organism to operate on the environment. Once enacted, however, their environmental consequence will determine the probability that they will recur in future. For example, a wink is an operant that, once enacted, will be more likely to recur in future if it results in a smile from the other being winked at, and less likely to recur if its consequence is a scowl
from the other. According to Skinner, complex patterns of human behavior, such as the constellations of behavior that make up a romantic involvement or professional pursuit, are also operants whose maintenance is a function of their consequences, such as affection from the partner or praise from the boss.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Focusing now on the rate of behavior yielding food, Skinner realized that he needed neither the runway nor the clicking noise that his personal predilections had first led him to. He built a new apparatus in which the rat was required to press a lever to initiate the mechanical discharge of a food pellet and he began to record lever-pressing behavior. This lever-pressing behavior had the advantage of not being in the innate repertoire of a rat, as opposed to the running behavior of his previous design. The mechanical discharge of the food had the advantage of saving Skinner the work of distributing the food himself, and this proved to be the source of his second discovery. The mechanical discharge of food was conducted by a food magazine that he had fashioned from a
disk of wood he had found discarded in the department’s store room. One day the food magazine jammed and stopped distributing food. Rather than immediately fixing it, Skinner decided to record the rat’s lever-pressing behavior after food was no longer presented, and he discovered an orderly process of extinction of the behavior. For a short time the rat pressed the lever at a high rate, but then its behavior began to fall off, and when Skinner plotted the decline of the behavior he found that it showed a logarithmic course. Here was a second mathematical law of animal behavior.

A final group of findings emerged again as a result of environmental events rather than from his premeditated pursuit of a hypothesis. Skinner himself had made not only the mechanical apparatus for this research but also the food pellets that were delivered by it. Making the pellets was a time-consuming process, requiring him to mix a formula of wheat, corn, flax seed, bone meal, and salt and to cook it in a double boiler; the mixture was then put in a grease gun to deliver it in a long thin rope of paste, which was scored lightly by razor blades and, once dried, broken
up into cylindrical pellets. One pleasant Saturday afternoon Skinner found that he was low in his supply of pellets and would have to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening making them to keep up his experiments into Monday.

Not wanting to give up the beautiful day to that activity, he wondered why a food pellet had to be delivered with every press of the lever by the rat. Instead he tried reinforcing lever-pressing only once every minute. When he compared the rat’s rate of responding under this condition of periodic food with that under the condition of continuous food, he found systematic differences. Under continuous reinforcement the rat’s rate of behavior was high and constant; when food was given once a minute the rat’s behavior slowed down after reinforcement, but
then quickened as the end of the minute interval approached. However, the rat’s behavior under periodic reinforcement was remarkably stable and more resistant to extinction than that built by continuous reinforcement. Skinner had now discovered that different schedules of reinforcement would yield different rates of behavior, and the basic principles of his life’s work had been established.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest

Thus, although a host of experimental designs might be imagined, Skinner’s all involve the behavior of progress in the context of a restraining and threatening environment; indeed in this context the behavior takes on a dimension not only of progress but also of escape. That Skinner had chosen to focus on these elements in particular may be a result of personal concerns that he brought with him to graduate school. And now we might begin to wonder if his design of a rat emerging from a “darkened tunnel” is more than coincidentally reminiscent of the “Dark Year” out of which he had just emerged.

It was at the point of his third research design, however, that the force of environmental effects began to play a more decisive role. Skinner got tired of having to carry the rat back to the beginning of the runway after each run. He therefore modified the design from a one-way tunnel to a quadrangular tunnel with four legs, so that after eating the food at the end of the first leg the rat could run around three other legs to bring itself again to the beginning of the first runway. In this way the rat could run itself. But now came an unexpected event that was the key to Skinner’s future research program. After eating the food, the rat would sometimes wait a long time before continuing around the tunnel for
another run.

At first Skinner was annoyed at this. But when he timed the delays with a stopwatch and plotted them, he found them to show orderly changes. His analysis revealed that the rat’s rate of running around the runway was a square function of the time elapsed since it last got food. Here was the order that he had been looking for: It was in the effect of the presentation of food on the animal’s rate of behavior. Skinner had discovered a mathematical law to account for a pattern of animal behavior as reliably as the law of gravity can account for the movement of physical objects. What we might intuitively believe to be “voluntary” behavior was found to be determined by lawful effects of environmental
conditions.

Taken from :PSYCHOLOGY’S GRAND THEORISTS How Personal Experiences Shaped Professional Ideas - Amy Demorest