Psychology Paper
One of the most influential, yet controversial psychologists in the 20th Century was B.F. Skinner. Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, he spent his time inventing. A well-known invention from his childhood was used for a door to door business selling elderberries; he built a flotation system which could separate ripe from green berries. His inventions continued on to his high school years when he made a contraption used to spread “green dust” that helped the broom to pick up dirt. Skinner went on to further his education at Hamilton College. There, Skinner decided he would pursue a career in writing. After college, he lacked inspiration for writing and his only works consisted of a few newspaper articles. Instead of writing, he worked as a bookstore clerk where he became enthralled when reading about Pavlov and Watson. Skinner then enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University. Thus began Skinner’s journey into the world of Psychology.
While in college, Skinner experimented and uncovered new findings that Pavlov and Watson had missed. Skinner designed an operant chamber, known as a Skinner box. The box has a bar that an animal presses to release a reward of food or water. Inside the box is a device that records these responses. Skinner used the process of shaping during his experiments. Shaping is a procedure in which rewards, such as food, gradually guide the subject’s action towards a certain behavior. For example, the psychologist would begin by rewarding a rat for approaching the bar. Then, the rat would be rewarded for touching the bar. Finally, the rat would be rewarded for the end-behavior that all the other actions led up to: pressing the bar.
At 32 years old, Skinner married Yvonne Blue. Skinner and Yvonne had two daughters together. One of Skinner’s well-known inventions was designed for his second daughter, Deborah. He designed an enclosed heated crib with a Plexiglas window. This crib was designed to be more safe than regular cribs because it lacked bars with which infants could get their limbs trapped and it was warm enough so that blankets were not required, reducing the risk of suffocation. However, Skinner was criticized for his crib invention and accused of experimenting on his own children.
Not long after Skinner married Yvonne, he started a new teaching job in Minnesota but became restless when World War II began. Skinner wanted to contribute to the war effort so he began new experiments involving pigeons guiding bombs. Skinner’s Pigeon Project was discontinued to make way for other projects for the war effort. However, the Pigeon Project did play a vital role in the advancement of psychology. It was found that pigeons behave more rapidly than other animals that were previously used in experiments, such as rats. In 1945, Skinner and his family moved to Indiana so that he could hold the position of Chair of the Psychology Department at Indiana University. Three years later, Skinner and his family packed up to move again so that he could accept a teaching position in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. In 1961, Skinner and his collaborators identified the four schedules of partial reinforcement: fixed-ratio schedules, variable-ratio schedules, fixed-interval schedules, and variable-interval schedules. Fixed-ratio schedules reinforce behavior after a set number of responses. Variable-ratio schedules provide reinforcement after an unpredictable number of responses. Fixed-interval schedules reinforce the first response after a fixed time period. Variable-interval schedules reinforce the first response after varying time intervals.
On what seemed to be a normal day in November of 1953, Skinner attended his daughter’s math class for Father’s Day. This visit caused Skinner to design his first teaching machine. Skinner witnessed teaching procedures that he knew to be ineffective. Skinner had researched shaping and knew that delayed reinforcement hampered performance. The children would answer a full page of problems with no feedback for at least a day as to whether they answered problems correctly or incorrectly. He knew that this wasn’t the teacher’s fault. How could she grade 30 pages immediately so that each child would receive immediate reinforcement? Skinner went home that evening and started designing a teaching machine. This machine presented problems in random order to the students and gave feedback after each one. Three years later, Skinner had redesigned his machine to give programmed instruction, where through careful sequencing, the students could respond to material broken into small steps. The steps gave less and less information the farther the student went into the process. These machines were very effective in teaching students but the machine materials were poorly written, causing the machines to slowly lose production. Recently, Skinner’s work has started breakthroughs in teaching children to communicate effectively, autistic children especially.
B.F. Skinner was one of the most influential psychologists in American history. His experiments and research are still widely known today. Skinner died in 1990 of leukemia. Eight days before his death, Skinner spoke for the American Psychological Association convention to give his final critique of “cognitive science.” Skinner died battling the growing belief that cognitive processes—thoughts, perceptions, expectations—have a necessary place in psychology and also in the understanding of conditioning. Skinner categorized thoughts and emotions as behaviors that follow the laws that other behaviors do. However, there are many indications in recent research that cognitive processes are active in operant learning.
Sources
* Exploring Psychology in Modules
By: David G. Myers

* http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/AboutSkinner.html