Burrhus Frederic Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.
Let this list of 42 quotations by the American psychologist B. F. Skinner lead you to an inspirational day. Recharge yourself with motivational people, kind, behavior sayings, and satisfy your hunger for a better life.
What are the best B. F. Skinner quotes?
We've made this hand-picked collection of quotes to show you what is B. F. Skinner truly willing to say and leave for generations. Whether an inspirational quote or a motivational message about giving your best, we can all benefit from the wisdom, captured within these words.
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way;
at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences
I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation;
if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.
I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
A person's genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
Punitive measures whether administered by police, teachers, spouses or parents have well known standard effects: (1) escape-education has its own name for that: truancy, (2) counterattack-vandalism on schools and attacks on teachers, (3) apathy-a sullen do-nothing withdrawal. The more violent the punishment, the more serious the by-products.
Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
Going out of style isn't a natural process, but a manipulated change which destroys the beauty of last year's dress in order to make it worthless.
A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.
Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.
Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
I don't believe in God, so I'm not afraid of dying.
I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.
I don't deny the importance of genetics.
However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.
When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word 'admire' then means 'marvel at.'
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
It is a surprising fact that those who object most violently to the manipulation of behaviour nevertheless make the most vigorous effort to manipulate minds.
Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality.
The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslap-ping, and many other ways of "winning friends.
Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.
I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man.
The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.
I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.
The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else.
.. 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.
The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.
I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
Great scientific contributions have been techniques.
We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
