Quotes About Skinner

As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner's laboratory.

Most folks didn't like Skinner. And those who did called him an acquired taste. Like sardines. Or the music of Jim Nabors.

I didn't know when Parliament started to pay my wages.

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.

I am naturally disciplined. It started early; you can't be all free and easy in a family of 10.

For Prince William, I focused more on doing a bad impression of a romantic lead than on Prince William himself.

The final state of affairs may not have been foreseen. Perhaps we are merely reading a plan into the world after the fact.

In Towcester he listened to Thomas Skinner. Skinner was a Dissenter called a Baptist. One of the ways Baptists differed from other denominations was that they did not believe infants should be baptized. They believed only a person who could make a mature judgment should be baptized. That ordinance about baptism was the source of their name. Thomas Skinner loaned Willy a book by Robert Hall called Help to Zion's Travellers.

Throughout the day I suddenly get bursts of excitement about not very much at all, like those things in public toilets that puff out air freshener.

Skinner observed the animals he was training to perform such acts with exceptional care. Any actions that approximated what he was aiming at were immediately followed by a reward of just the right size: not small enough to be inconsequential, and not so large that it devalued future rewards. Such an approach can be used with children, and works very well.

There was a joke that captured the antiseptic spirit of behaviorism that Skinner himself liked to tell: A couple makes love. Afterward, one of them turns to the other and says, "It was good for you. How was it for me?

I must have been one of the few New Lads who was teetotal.

Che c'è?» gli chiese Kibby, notando il suo sorriso contemplativo. «Stavo solo pensando che se cadessi in una botte con le Corrs nude, finiresti con il chitarrista che ti ciuccia l'uccello» sghignazzò Skinner.

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.

And a realization for Skinner, she still has his scarf, inside her mountaineering jacket, red wool at her neck. Some meaning there related to the kiss, but in a code he cannot unscramble. A tether is what it feels like, his scarf around her neck, preventing either of them from falling off the mountain alone.

Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person's head ("mentalism"), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way. Our

If freedom is a requisite for human happiness, then all that's necessary is to provide the illusion of freedom.