For many psychology students, Burrhus Frederic Skinner is simply the man behind the ‘Skinner Box’ and operant conditioning, but in fact there is much more to his story than that. He believed that our behaviour is controlled by the world we live in and envisaged ways to apply his principles to the creation of a utopian society — one where people were conditioned to behave in desirable ways.
Skinner’s rise to prominence began with the invention of the ‘Skinner Box’ (see Figure 1) which enabled him to demonstrate that rats could be conditioned to press a lever with increasing frequency when this behaviour was reinforced with food pellets. He developed a large number of increasingly complex ways of setting up the Skinner Box (using lights and an electrified grid, among other things).
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
