I can't even remember where I acquired a copy of B. F. Skinner's About Behaviorism, but I do remember that I picked it up as a work book. In a basic ed psych course I teach a primer on behaviorism, and while I understand the basics of operant conditioning I felt it would be good to read it from the horse's mouth.
The history of paychology is fascinating to me, even if it is the story of a long line of White dudes. Human beings are complex, irrational beings who think they are logical and objective and who are anything but. Skinner, however, decides that he doesn’t agree with cognition as a concept and instead becomes the father of radical behaviorism, coining the concept of operant conditioning and changing how we as a people see our relationship with the environment. He says that cognition has too much weight placed upon it in understanding human behavior, and that instead we are at the mercy of our environment and our direct responses to external stimuli.
(Watch me pull up my pants and stretch my arms, because we are about to get into this, kids.)
The history of paychology is fascinating to me, even if it is the story of a long line of White dudes. Human beings are complex, irrational beings who think they are logical and objective and who are anything but. Skinner, however, decides that he doesn’t agree with cognition as a concept and instead becomes the father of radical behaviorism, coining the concept of operant conditioning and changing how we as a people see our relationship with the environment. He says that cognition has too much weight placed upon it in understanding human behavior, and that instead we are at the mercy of our environment and our direct responses to external stimuli.
(Watch me pull up my pants and stretch my arms, because we are about to get into this, kids.)
The first, and most important, thing I have to say is that Skinner has a point. (Go ahead and pick your jaw up off the floor if you haven’t been a student of mine and haven’t heard my point in Behaviorism as a whole.) It is vital that we as scholars understand where we came from, because even if the theory doesn’t explain everything (and no theory does, FYI), there are pieces of every psychological theory that have merit and have allowed researchers to build off of it. Skinner’s explication of operant conditioning is quite accurate, but he was rigid in his determination to convince everyone that it was the only and primary explanation.
On the chapter entitled, "Thinking," Skinner was lucky that I didn't throw my out-of-print copy in a dumpster fire while cursing his name. His big thing is the "so-called thinking processes," because he doesn't believe that cognitive processes are a part of decision making, as it's really a reliance on behavioristic decision-making that is either approach or avoidance goal-based. (While he didn't use the "approach/avoidance" terminology, that's essentially what he's getting at.) I rolled my eyes so hard I almost saw my brain in the back of my head.
On the chapter entitled, "Thinking," Skinner was lucky that I didn't throw my out-of-print copy in a dumpster fire while cursing his name. His big thing is the "so-called thinking processes," because he doesn't believe that cognitive processes are a part of decision making, as it's really a reliance on behavioristic decision-making that is either approach or avoidance goal-based. (While he didn't use the "approach/avoidance" terminology, that's essentially what he's getting at.) I rolled my eyes so hard I almost saw my brain in the back of my head.
There is no reason the operant conditioning can’t exist in tandem with cognitive processing. I don’t believe in throwing the baby out with the bath water. Just because his theory isn’t the be-all-end-all doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit. Maybe he could just slow down on the definite statements.
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