Skinners Operant Behaviour Essays - Behaviorism, B. F. Skinner

Skinner's Operant Behaviour B.F. Skinner's OPERANT BEHAVIOURISM and SELECTION BY CONSEQUENCES ~ a critical assessment ~ Reproduction was itself a first consequence, and it led, through natural selection, to the evolution of cells, organs, and organisms which reproduced themselves under increasingly diverse conditions. What we call behavior evolved as a set of functions furthering the interchange between organism and environment. -B.F. Skinner, Selection by Consequences- PHIL 225/02-1 First paper - 00/10/19 Known to some as the most influential American psychologist, B.F. Skinner was born in 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. Attempting to further psychology's quest for an accurate and comprehensive science of the mind, he produced some very rational and innovative writings; tackling problems that have stumped mankind since the beginning. We will examine his philosophies on the evolution of behaviour through selection by consequences. Around 1920, behaviourists seemed to have established what they thought made sense of human behaviour by composing them into two laws. The first explains the unconditioned reflexes that produce involuntary reactions by our bodies. Direct actions that bypass consideration, also known as biological wiring. The second law explained the phenomena of conditioned reflexes that, although aren't part of our original reflexes, can be learned and stored into memory. Similar to the first law but it included new reflexes such as Pavlov's dog salivating when the associated bell was rung. Although these laws made perfect sense, they were found to be lacking. They didn't, and couldn't, explain manifestations of new responses to old stimuli. How did they plan on explaining new inspiration or goal-oriented action of any kind if all we do is react in the same way to stimuli every time? How did a soccer player first conceive of trying to put a corner kick directly into the net if it had never been done before? How did Beethoven write music if he had no stimuli to respond to? Why did Ghandi go on a hunger strike if his natural response was to eat when he was hungry? Skinner thought that by examining these phenomena from an evolutionary standpoint we could better make sense of the psychology of behaviourism. The law of survival of the fittest best conveys this relation of evolution to behaviour. All humans born with an evolutionary advantage over others would lead easier and more successful lives, would therefore die at a slower rate than the rest, and eventually become the majority and replace the old. They would pass on their genes, which were better suited to survival under those circumstances. Through this process of selection, all species evolve, allowing only the strongest to survive. In the same way that nature evolves, Skinner postulated that our behaviour evolves, both directly and indirectly. First, by natural selection people who are born with a behaviour more suited to surviving, with characteristics such as foresight, skepticism, diplomacy and persistence, will most likely survive better than people born with characteristics like close-mindedness, weak impulse control and laziness for example. Second, by recognizing the effects of our responses to stimuli as desirable or undesirable, and therefore reinforcing our responses, those positive consequential responses would become more frequent and likely in the future, and those negative consequential responses would become less popular. Imagine that a small child throws his dish on the floor and his mother proceeds to scold him with harsh words in a strong and unpleasant tone of voice. The child will then associate throwing the dish on the floor with his mother's reaction. His association will strengthen every time he throws his dish on the floor until the day he remembers her reaction before throwing his dish and stops himself to avoid her response. (Being somewhat of a stingy idealist, Skinner was against negative reinforcement and would not have used this example) With this in mind Skinner added a new variable to the two original laws of behaviour: the consequential response. He used the term operant to define the response to stimuli in terms of past memory of consequences to similar responses to similar stimulus. He therefore tried to explain (and succeeded in my opinion) that response to stimuli could be an involuntary reflex or a learned reaction based on memory. This result goes to justifying reaction to a new stimulus as well. If the subject does not