Bf Skinner Free Will Essay

From the beginning of time, it has been said that human beings have been granted the gift of free will. While this may be true, there is also another theory to explain human beings and their behavioral traditions. This theory comes from American psychologist, B.F. Skinner, and states that in fact, there is no such thing as free will. According to Skinner society has been conditioned throughout the times to behave in certain ways. While most people will side with the idea of human beings having free will, the fact that people may have been conditioned to perform certain actions and make decisions is an undeniable truth. Whether it’s going to school for years on end to work for good grades or make the decision to eat eggs for breakfast instead of candy, every action human beings perform most likely has a conditioned background. So, the question is, do human beings act on their own accord, or have we all just been trained

Dominating his field in the mid-twentieth century, Skinner came up with his own theory of behaviorism and its extension to radical behavior (Information Philosopher Website, n.d.). Skinner theorized that all human behavior is caused by operant conditioning and “reinforcement” of selected responses with either punishment or reward (Information Philosopher Website, n.d.). With this new theory, came Skinner’s idea that free will was just a made-up construct by human beings to explain their actions and decisions. After his new discovery, B.F. Skinner published a book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in 1913, to express his ideas that internal psychological states such as intentions, purposes, and goals are all predicted behaviors discovered by science, which ultimately led to the performance of multiple experiments on his part in order for Skinner to prove his new-found idea that free will does not, and never did, exist (Information Philosopher Website,