Quotes by B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner

American psychologist, behaviorist and author

Lived from: 1904 - 1990

Category: Psychologists | Writers (Contemporary)

Born: 20 march 1904 Died: 18 august 1990

Quotes 21 till 40 of 43.

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  • Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.
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  • Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
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  • Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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  • The consequences of an act affect the probability of it's occurring again.
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  • The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
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  • The extent to which human aggression exemplifies innate tendencies is not clear.
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  • 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.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
    Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • The simulated approval and affection with which parents and teachers are often urged to solve behavior problems are counterfeit. So are flattery, backslapping, and many other ways of winning friends.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called conditioning. In operant conditioning we strengthen an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.
    Science and Human Behavior
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of the world. Today he is the thing he understands least.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word admire then means marvel at.
    Beyond Freedom and Dignity
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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  • We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
    ― B. F. Skinner
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