B. F. Skinner's Theory Of Behaviorism

The school of psychological thought that B.F. Skinner is most well known for is that of behaviorism. Behaviorism is the psychological theory that individuals are born as blank slates, and that all actions are essentially learned responses to environmental stimuli. Before Skinner, behaviorism had its roots in scientists and psychologists such as John Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and Edward Thorndike. Their theories and experiments of conditioning responses to external stimuli based on other stimuli were very convincing to Skinner, who began developing the school of behaviorism into an applicable ideology. In order to understand Skinner’s theory, one must first understand the theory of classical conditioning. Classical conditioning, most notably theorized

But is spanking an effective form of punishment? That is, does it actually stop the “bad behavior,” or does it simply make things worse? One study conducted by Murray A. Straus, David B. Sugarman, and Jean Giles-Sims seems to suggest that child spanking has a negative effect on the child’s behavior as he or she matures. In their 1997 study “Spanking by Parents and Subsequent Antisocial Behavior of Children,” they sampled 807 mothers of children aged six to nine years old to determine if a causal relationship existed between corporal punishment as a child and antisocial behavior later in life. The results were very clear:
Forty-four percent of the mothers reported spanking their children during the week prior to the study and they spanked them an average of 2.1 times that week. The more spanking at the start of the period, the higher the level of ASB 2 years later. The change is unlikely to be owing to the child 's tendency toward ASB or to confounding with demographic characteristics or with parental deficiency in other key aspects of socialization because those variables were statistically controlled (Straus, Sugarman, Giles-Sims,

Brigitte Vittrup and George W. Holden surveyed 108 children aged six to ten years old after they watched videos of children being disciplined by either spanking, reasoning, withdrawing privileges, or time-out. The results show most children rating reasoning as the fairest form of punishment, and spanking as the least fair. This research illustrates that when parents spank their children, they are doing so in a manner that the children think is unfair, and therefore unnecessarily antagonize the child as opposed to disciplining him or her in a way that is