B. F. Skinner's Operant Conditioning

B.F. Skinner is well known for his work on behaviorism and operant conditioning. He also once said that free will was an illusion. He firmly believes that everything we do is because of conditioning. He was inspired by Pavlov and Watson’s work so much that he went to Harvard for it. B.F. Skinner first majored in literature, but then gave up on writing after struggling for a while. He then went to Harvard to get his degree in psychology. Skinner eventually graduated and got a job at the University of Minnesota. He published The Behavior of Organisms and started working on his utopian novel Walden II. He worked in Minnesota for nine years then was head of psychology at the Indiana University. Skinner became a Harvard professor in 1948 and stayed there until his retirement. He also wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971 which declared that humans didn’t have free will and that we’re controlled by stimuli. Skinner died eighty-six years old in 1990.
Skinner thought classical conditioning was too simple to explain something like the human mind. Skinner went to work to expand on the finding of Thorndike and Watson. Skinner worked to expand Thorndike’s Law of Effect. Skinner eventually coined the word “operant conditioning”. Skinner built a device called “Skinner’s box”. The device consists of a lever connected to a food dispenser, only dispensing when the lever is pressed. He found that the rat will reduce “error” between attempts and goes directly to the lever. The device has reinforced the rat’s behavior. From this experiment, Skinner discovered positive and negative reinforcement. A positive reinforcement means giving a stimuli and a negative reinforcement is taking away a stimuli, along with punishment. Punishment weakens the behavior rather than reinforcement which strengthen the behavior. Positive and negative reinforcement works on punishment too. The Skinner Box also showed that the reinforcement had to be scheduled or else the rats will start giving