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B.F Skinner theory of personality
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Recommended: B.F Skinner theory of personality
Laura Huynh
Summer Assignment
AP Psychology
6 June 2017
Summer Assignment
John B. Skinner, known as B.F. Skinner, was born in Pennsylvania in March 20, 1904. His father was a lawyer and his mother stayed home. As a boy, he enjoyed building gadgets. He attended Hamilton College to pursue his passion in writing; however, he had no success. He later attended Harvard University to pursue another passion, human psychology. He studied operant conditioning using a box, also known as Skinner box. He studied the behavior of rats and pigeons and how they respond to their environment. He was the chair of psychology in Indiana College, but he later became a Harvard professor. He later published the book The Behavior of Organisms based
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He took an environmental approach to the study. His method was the use of the operant conditioning box also known as Skinner box helped understand different behaviors that occurred during different environments. He stimulated a system of rewards and punishments and reinforcements. When the pigeon or rat received a reward, the animal performed the behavior more often and when it received a punishment, it performed the behavior less. He first tested positive reinforcement which he made rats press a lever for food. It encouraged the rat to perform more of the behavior. He also used negative reinforcement which added an uncomfortable stimulus. He placed an electric current in the box. The rats learn to avoid it. They even learned to stop when he turned on the light indicating the circuit will soon turn on. This behavior was known as Avoidance or Escape Learning. Both positive and negative reinforcements encourage good behavior. He also used punishment. Unlike the reinforcements, punishments were used to discourage unwanted behaviors rather than promote good behavior. It was performed by adding an unfavorable stimuli or removing the rewarding stimuli. When the rat was punished, its unwanted behavior decreased. When Skinner, removed the punishment, the bad behavior returned. He placed a hungry rat. The rat would pull the lever for food, but no food would come out. The rat later stopped pulling it learning it had no purpose. He studied that the more the rat pulled the lever, the higher the probability that the rat will quit pulling it; he developed an equation known as response and extinction rate. Response rate, the domain, is that rate of how hard a person performed an action and extinction rate, the range, is the rate that the person performed the action less and less. As the response rate increase, so this extinction rate. He used a token economy, a type of positive reinforcement, which a person was given a “token” which can be
In Chapter 4, In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing, the author Lauren Slater starts the chapter off telling the true story of how a young woman, Kitty Genovese, was brutally murdered and raped outside of her apartment complex. What was most shocking in the aftermath is there were a total of 38 witnesses and not a single person did anything to help her. This raised many concerns as to why the witnesses did nothing. When they were being interviewed by the cops, they stated that they just did not want to get involved(p.94), thus “diffusing responsibility”, this is a term used by two psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane, who were very concerned with and wanted to understand why nothing was done to aid young Kitty Genovese as she was being stabbed and raped.
B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two is the fictitious account of an eclectic group’s visit to a modern utopian community started by psychologist T.E. Frazier. Authors often depict “perfect societies” in novels, as the subject holds wide appeal and great creative opportunity. Aldous Huxley envisioned a Brave New World; Lois Lowry wove the tale of The Giver. What sets Walden Two apart from such books? Simply stated, Skinner’s work truly does not seem as if it belongs in the fantasy or fiction genre, as the others do. The novel reads as an actual experiment, albeit one performed in a text-only version of the world. The author perfectly follows the steps of a scientific investigation throughout the plot, meeting nearly all goals of the scientific enterprise. This approach leaves readers practically incapable of brushing the novel’s bold statements off as fiction: to do so feels equivalent to denying a proven reality.
1984 best reflects the behavioral studies of B.F. Skinner for operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is “the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organism’s tendency to repeat the behavior in the future.” Skinner created an operant chamber, better known as the Skinner Box, which observed how rats responded to this conditioning and how, in relation, it could be applied to humans and not just animals. Skinner discovered that in giving rewards to the rat for pushing a lever on the other side of the box, the rat was encouraged to do it more for the same response. However, when Skinner put an electric shock on the rat when it had pushed down on the lever, he saw that the rat was discouraged to do it again in order to avoid the punishment of being shocked. This concept is what Skinner called “reinforcement”. Reinforcement is considered “any event that strengthens or increases the frequency of a preceding response.” Nevertheless, there are two types of reinforcement: positive an...
Chapter 4 discusses the several states of consciousness: the nature of consciousness, sleep and dreams, psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, and meditation. Consciousness is a crucial part of human experience, it represents that private inner mind where we think, feel, plan, wish, pray, omagine, and quietly relive experiences. William James described the mind as a stream of consciousness, a continuous flow of changing sensations, images thoughts, and feelings. Consciousness has two major parts: awareness and arousal. Awareness includes the awareness of the self and thoughts about one's experiences. Arousal is the physiological state of being engaged with the environment. Theory of mind refers to individuals understanding that they and others think,
Joey 's program will be based in Applied Behavior Analysis which was first introduced in 1913, when John Watson started a movement towards behaviorism with his article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” (Miltenberger, 2012). Based on Pavlov 's observations of classical conditioning, Watson suggested that human behavior could also be explained by the same means and that the process of classical conditioning was proper subject matter for psychology. He believed all human behavior were responses to external stimuli and environmental events (Miltenberger, 2012). B. F. Skinner took Watson 's theory of classical conditioning further to include operant conditioning. The highlight of Skinner 's theory is identifying what a behavior achieves through observing the behavior. It is only after the function of behavior is identified that we can alter the consequences to increase the probability of the desired behavior 's occurrence (Miltenberger, 2012). In operant conditioning behavior is changed through the manipulation of contingencies or the use of reinforcement or punishment after the desired or undesired response occurs (Miltenberger, 2012). Skinner was able to prove through his
He developed an experiment were he could measure the amount of saliva the dog had when he was presented food. He realized that these dogs would salivate before the food was given to them. The new stimuli would elite the response the dogs had. In his experiment he started ringing a bell before the food was given to dogs. Since dogs don’t salivate over a bell ringing there was nothing special about this. There was a relationship between the food and the bell ring. As time passed the dogs began to salivate once they heard the bell ring even though the food was not given to them yet. This was a response that the dogs had created to ringing bell.
1938) In his time, B. F. Skinner attempted to make a lot of changes in modern
Burrhus Frederic Skinner, also known as B.F. Skinner, was one of the most respected and influential psychologists in the twentieth century. Growing up in a rural area in Pennsylvania with around two thousand people, Skinner, along with his brother Edward, were forced to use their imagination to keep themselves entertained. At a young age, Skinner liked school. Once he graduated, he attended Hamilton College in New York where he received a B.A. in English literature. After receiving his degree he attended Harvard where he would receive his Ph.D. and invent the “Skinner Box”, and begin his experimental science in studying behavior. He called his study, “radical” behaviorism. After college, he would marry, and have two children. In 1990, he met his fate when he was diagnosed, and ultimately died from leukemia.
Skinner designed an experiment to test operant conditioning, known as a ‘Skinner box’ (Gross 2005). In the box, animals, such as rats, would be conditioned into certain behaviour. For example, by pressing a lever to receive food (Gross 2005).
It is universally understood that individuals experience change whether it be their basic schema or their everyday actions. These changes occur on various occasions throughout one’s life time. However, how these changes occur is undecided between theorists. Two important theories are the biological/evolutionary and learning theories. Learning theories can be understood through two theorists- B.F. Skinner, and John Watson. Biological/evolutionary theories are explained and enhanced by David Buss and Hans Esnyeck. The learning theories attempt to understand individual changes by studying the idea of learnt traits, characteristics and actions. Whereas biological/evolutionary theories attempt to understand the functions of these changes. Have chosen
Skinner is not a cognitive psychologist because he does not see evidence of an inner world of mental life that is relative to analyzing behavior nor to the physiology of the nervous system. In other words, he does not think the brain and its mental functions have proven enough evidence to verify their effectiveness in analyzing behavior within the field of psychology. Skinner has chosen not to be a cognitive psychology because of his belief that behavior cannot be changed by changing “the minds and heart of men”- yet that is the overarching purpose of cognitive psychology. Skinner believes that there is more to changing behavior such as the inclusion of altering the environments, both physical and social, in which we live. Without doing so, Skinner believes it is impossible to change
...ss to the field of behavioral psychology, he did face some criticism regarding the reliability of his experiments. Psychologists who do not support Skinner’s work claim that his research using rats and pigeons does not translate into human behavior. Many people believe that the human mind is much more complex than that of small animals. It is common among those in the psychology field to believe that reinforcement and rewards are not the only causes of behavior.
He first had to study rats. Skinner saw how the rodents discovered and used to a level in the box. The box dispensed food at varying intervals. Later, Skinner examined what behavior patterns developed in pigeons using the box. The pigeons pecked at a disc to gain access to food.
During the 1920s, Many psychologist and behaviorists started coming up with new ways of learning excluding classical conditioning. One of the most well known of this time was Burrhus Frederic Skinner, better known as B.F. Skinner. Though, some behaviorist, such as John B. Watson who performed the Baby Albert experiment, were a bit more extreme than B.F. Skinner, mostly because Skinner performed his experiments using rats rather than babies. Skinner’s belief was that it is much more simple and that it is easier to study observable behaviors versus internal ones. Skinner also believed that classical conditioning was not complex enough to explain something as complex and intricate as humans are. He is credited for what was a new form of learning,
B.F. Skinner is a major contributor to the Behavioral Theory of personality, a theory that states that our learning is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, modeling, and observation. An individual acts in a certain way, a.k.a. gives a response, and then something happens after the response. In order for an action to be repeated in the future, what happens after the response either encourages the response by offering a reward that brings pleasure or allows an escape from a negative situation. The former is known as positive reinforcement, the latter known as negative reinforcement (Sincero, 2012). A teenager who received money for getting an “A” is being positively reinforced, while an individual who skips a class presentation is being negatively reinforced by escaping from the intense fear and anxiety that would have occurred during the presentation.