Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [176]
He consistently pooh-poohed the effort to understand the inner person:
We do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior… Thinking is behaving. The mistake is in allocating the behavior to the mind.51
All we need to know or can know, he said, are the external causes of behavior and the observable results of that behavior; these will yield “a comprehensive picture of the organism as a behaving system.”
Consonant with that view, he was a rigorous determinist: “We are what we are because of our history. We like to believe we can choose, we can act… [but] I don’t believe a person is either free or responsible.” The “autonomous” human being is an illusion; the good person is one who has been conditioned to behave that way, and the good society would be one based on “behavioral engineering”—the scientific control of behavior through methods of positive reinforcement.52
Skinner was a deft showman and popularizer; he was fluent, lucid, unabashedly egotistic, and charming. To demonstrate the power of his own technique of conditioning, he taught a pigeon to peck out a tune on a toy piano, and a pair of pigeons to play a kind of table tennis in which they rolled a ball back and forth with their beaks; millions who have seen these performances on TV documentaries think of Skinner as a Svengali, at least of animals. He presented his vision of the ideal, scientifically controlled society in the form of a utopian novel, Walden Two (1948), picturing a small society in which, from birth onward, children are rigorously conditioned by rewards (positive reinforcement) to be cooperative and sociable; all behavior is controlled, but for the good and the happiness of all. Despite wooden dialogue and a labored plot, it became a cult book and perennial favorite with undergraduates, and has sold well over two million copies.
But his fame with the public was greater than his standing with fellow professionals. As one admirer, the psychologist Norman Guttman, wrote in The American Psychologist some years ago:
[Skinner is] the leading figure in a myth… [the] scientist-hero, the Promethean fire-bringer, the master technologist… [the] chief iconoclast, the image-breaker who liberates our thoughts from ancient restrictions.53
Skinner was born in 1904 in a small Pennsylvania railroad town, where his father was a lawyer. As a boy, he had a great aptitude for building Rube Goldberg contraptions; later, as a psychologist, he would invent and build remarkably effective apparatuses for animal experimentation. In school and college he aspired to become a writer, and after college spent a year, much of it in Greenwich Village, trying to write. Although he closely observed the manifold forms of human behavior all around him, he discovered after a while that he had nothing to say about what he saw and, deeply dejected, gave up the effort.
But he soon found another and, for him, more practicable way to understand human behavior. In his reading he came across discussions of Watson’s and Pavlov’s work, read books by each of them, and decided that his future lay in a scientific approach to human behavior, particularly the study of conditioning. “I was very bitter about my failure in literature,” he told an interviewer in 1977, “and I was sure that writers never really understood anything. And that was why I turned to psychology.”54
He proceeded to Harvard. Introspective psychology reigned there, but he was no longer interested in what he called “the inside story,” and quietly went his own way, doing behaviorist research with rats. In his autobiography he recalls with pleasure having been something of a bad boy: “They may have thought that someone in