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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 was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His mother, Grace Skinner, was an intelligent and strong housewife who quit her job as a typist after the birth of Skinner, and became a housewife. His father, William Skinner, was a local attorney in Susquehanna. Skinner’s parents raised him in an old fashioned, and hard working household.
Two years after Skinner’s birth, his brother Edward Skinner was born. The Skinner brothers kept themselves out of trouble in the railroad town of two thousand people by experimenting in building things out of makeshift materials. A couple things that the boys built were a shack in the woods, and a cart with an opposite direction steering wheel. Skinner would use these skills later on in his life. Skinner also occupied his time by writing short stories and novels. At the age of nine, Skinner joined the Junior Boy Scouts where he experienced camping, and learning how to be ind...
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...eading to behavior modification and the idea of token economy. Behavior modification is a fairly simple concept in which the negative reinforcement is removed and is replaced by a desirable reinforcement in order to achieve the wanted behavior. This type of modification has been used in treating many conditions such as addictions, autism, and many other psychological issues.
The idea of token economy is used in psychiatric institutes as well as juvenile halls by rewarding good behavior. The institution sets a certain set of rules forth, and if followed accordingly, they subject is rewarded for doing so. However, if the subject behaves poorly, the consequence would be the tokens being rescinded. These tokens can serve as many types of “currency” for the subject, and can be redeemed for anything desired by them, such as candy, cigarettes, or anything else available.
In Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box, the second chapter “Obscura” discusses Stanley Milgram, one of the most influential social psychologists. Milgram created an experiment which would show just how far one would go when obeying instructions from an authoritative figure, even if it meant harming another person while doing so. The purpose of this experiment was to find justifications for what the Nazi’s did during the Holocaust. However, the experiment showed much more than the sociological reasoning behind the acts of genocide. It showed just how much we humans are capable of.
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.
teach new skills and decrease challenging behaviors” (pg. 24). Based on my own observation, I’ve seen teachers implement a token economy (e.g., happy faces, stars, and stickers of different forms) to shape and reinforce positive behavior in the classroom. To maintain instructional control, tokens would be delivered immediately to a student when following simple instructions (e.g., following circle time, cleaning
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.
Memory is an important information for a student in which it has a capability to recall and learn from the past experiences that influence student's behavior. According to Lauren Slater's book "Opening Skinner's Box states that, "Memory is narrative that gives continuity and meaning to our existence"(216). For it is a memory that has a unique abilities and meaning to a students that wherever they go, they see memories that become their extensions of knowledge and identity. Since students has a capability to recall memory, they also have a capability to forget memories that will benefit them from learning. On the other hand, psychologists provides information through experimentation on how human works when positive reinforcement is presented.
In Opening Skinner 's Box, the author uses an assortment of imaginative scenarios in order to foster a more interesting narrative in the readers mind. In my opinion, this technique is a hit and miss, as it can alternately grasp your imagination and make the author seem very incredible. This chapter is an intriguing look at famous psychological experiments, but is overall weakened by the authors rampant imagination. When Slater describes an imaginary scene, like saying the odor in the air is of something rotting, she is plainly trying to foreshadow in her history made fictitious story. Her credibility is besmirched in her attempt to make the history more interesting, as she is preemptively trying to bias the reader. However,
1938) In his time, B. F. Skinner attempted to make a lot of changes in modern
Mark Twain, originally born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was the sixth child of a family of eight. Born to John and Jane Clemens on November 30, 1835, Twain was born in the small town of Florida, Missouri. At the age of four, Mark Twain and his family then relocated to Hannibal in the hope of drastically improving their living conditions. He later died of heart disease in Redding, Connecticut on April 21,1910. By lineage, Twain was of Southern decent, as both of his parents' birthplaces were that of Virginia. Slaveholding in the small community of Hannibal, with only a population of 2000 at the time, provided a variety of both a rugged lifestyle mixed with southern tradition. With a lifestyle previously mentioned, these played as a major influence in his major writings, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Chapter 9 encompasses three major topics token economy, contingency contract, and behavioral parent training. A token economy is a system for motivating clients to perform adaptive behaviors. Client are rewarded with tokens for completing an adaptive behavior and lose tokens for maladaptive behaviors. This is normally used in a group setting rather than for an individual. Joseph Lancaster set up a token economy system in a school and used the token method to motivate students to perform better academically. The Token economy started in the 19 century here in the United States. The economy today began with a program for hospitalized patients created by Teodoro Ayllon and Nathan Azrin in 1961.
Behavior modification, or behavioral therapy, trains individuals to replace undesirable behaviors with healthier behavioral patterns.
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
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on Nov. 30, 1835, in the small town of Florida, Mo. He was the fourth of five children. His father was a hard worker but a poor provider. The family moved to Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi, when young Clemens was 4 years old. It was in this river town that he grew up, and from it he gathered the material for his most famous stories. The character of Judge Carpenter is somewhat like his father; Aunt Polly, his mother; Sid Sawyer, his brother Henry; Huck Finn, a town boy named Tom Blankenship; and Tom Sawyer, a combination of several boys--including himself.
After earning his degree from Harvard in 1931, Skinner stayed as a researcher for five more years. He primarily focused on fully understanding behavior and finding the most impartial ways to measure it. These goals led to his method of operant conditioning and the creation of the Skinner box.
A token economy is a reinforcement system which encourages FEAB with conditioned reinforcers such as tokens to encourage people towards desirable behaviour (Miltenberger, 2016). Tokens are later exchanged for backup reinforcers to strengthen desirable behaviours and decrease the undesirable in a structured treatment environment or educational setting (Miltenberger,
This study investigates the effects of a token economy as an intervention to reduce disruptive and off-task behavior of third grade students in an open concept setting. The intervention is combines the use of a token reinforcement with a raffle style drawing. In fall 2017, about 50.7 million students will attend public elementary and secondary schools. Of these, 35.6 million will be in prekindergarten through grade 8 and 15.1 million will be in grades 9 through 12. An additional 5.2 million students are expected to attend private elementary and secondary schools.(The NCES Fast Facts Tool Provides Quick Answers to Many Education Questions (National Center for Education Statistics) n.d.). Educational systems have employed token economies as a