Bf Skinner's Aviorism Theory: B. F. Skinner

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B.F. Skinner is one of the most recognizable psychologist in modern psychology. He is credited with forming the behaviorism theory. This states that people are the way they are because throughout their life they have been conditioned to act that way through the use of positive and negative reinforcement. Alfie Kohn argues this point saying that positive reinforcement is a short term solution, it will not last forever. Both of their arguments can be see throughout a person’s life, the habits that stuck or the ones that stopped once they were no longer rewarded for it. B.F. Skinner believes a person acts the way the do based on conditioning throughout their life. Through the use of positive and negative reinforcement people can be trained …show more content…

Skinner believes “the job of science is not just to predict but control the world” (Stevenson, p. 193). He did many experiments on animals to prove his theory. Many critics argued that just because it worked on animals it does not apply to humans, but Skinner used the animals as a symbol for humans. One of his most famous experiments includes the invention of the Skinner box. An example of this is placing an animal into a box and playing a sound and then after hearing the sound they must preform the desired activity to receive a treat and if they do not then they will be given a negative reinforcement. After a period of time when the animal heard the sound they would do the action because that is what they were trained to do. “When the environment is arranged so that reinforcer follows a certain kind of behavior then that behavior will be performed more frequently” (Stevenson, p.199). He applied this to humans to form his theory. If you reward a person for performing a certain behavior, then they will learn …show more content…

A major example that I can remember is when I was young, in elementary and middle school, my parents would use a combination of negative and positive reinforcement to get me to do my homework. They would not allow me watch television until my homework was done and I could not go see my friends if I did very poorly on a test. By taking away those privileges I strived to do better. If I did do well on my report card, I was rewarded with going out to dinner wherever I wanted, which I rarely got to do otherwise. This instilled a work ethic in me for school work. While I did not enjoy the negative side of not doing my homework, I did enjoy being rewarded with not only a dinner but doing well in school. Now that I am on my own I can see how beneficial this was to my future. This lead to me in high school no longer needing them to tell me to do my homework, I had learned that if I wanted to get good grades I would have to work hard in school and study and do my homework. Working hard in high school allowed me to be in the honors program at Toledo, along with earning a scholarship. If this had failed and I did not continue to work hard in school, I would not be where I am today and also would have caused me to do poorly in college because I would not know how to do my homework in a timely

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