B.F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism

B. F. mule driver, as he is known popularly, had made much contribution to psychology as he made confusions and debates. In delving into mule skinners works, it is not surprising that researching about him and his ideas allow for overwhelm a student by the immense literature on essential behaviouristic psychology as rise up as ordain be lost in the confusion and humdrum of his theory. Thus, it is important in the register that it should be divided into smaller units as to delineate subjects about the whole topic. The first part will deal with a briefly biography of mule skinner.This will only trace his c arer but will besides include umpteen sketches of his life that may move over contributed to his line of thought and thinking. Presented in the following section are some ideas about his bow behaviourism and a rather shallow taste of it. The difficulty in here however is that as one goes deeper into subject Behaviorism, the more it is complex and mistake that the br evity of this paper will not permit. The third part is the presentation of some of the influences ascendent Behaviorism had made in opposite handle of study.Many authors and many scholars would claim that stem Behaviorism had influenced their fields, although only some of these fields will be presented. On the next section, a presentation be made on the criticisms on paper Behavior. With a gigantic amount of literature written by B. F. muleteer, it is in no doubt that there will also be a great amount of published criticisms on Radical Behaviorism and only a few have made their way here. As a whole this paper will not be an ambitious research about B. F. mule driver and Radical Behaviorism but just to answer on the surface as (1) Who is B. F. mule skinner? (2) What is Radical Behaviorism? (3) What are the fields of study influenced by Radical Behaviorism? , and (4) What are the criticisms directed towards Radical Behaviorism and to B. F. mule skinner in particular? Biography Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania in March 20, 1904 (Hall, Lindzey & Campbell, 1998). His fuck off was an intelligent and strong ho consumptionwife and his father, a modest lawyer practicing in the area (Vargas, 2004).According to Hall, Lindzey & Campbell (1998) as well as Vargas (2004), Skinner lived his early life with much warmth and stability his parents giving him much liberty on bumpy and his inventiveness. As Skinners daughter, Julie S. Vargas (2004) would attest that her grandm separate gave her father the freedom to discover things and to develop his abilities. On the other hand, she was also strict in neighborly matters, such as etiquette, and the early days man devised many things to help him remember his mothers social controls (Vargas, 2004).Nonetheless, the family gave emphasis on receptive debate over things and topics, although they have some conservative stance on certain things. With an interest on Literature, having been encour aged by Robert Frost, Skinner attended a small liberal arts school of Hamilton College where he majored in English, determined to become a writer (Hall, Lindzey & Campbell, 1998). He was not successful though in writing, then he left home for crude York and went to Harvard University for graduate studies (Vargas, 2004).In 1931, he received his Ph. D. and moved to the University of atomic number 25 in 1936 for an academic position, where for 9 years he would claim and establish a name as one of the most influential experi rational psychologists of that time (Hall, Lindzey & Campbell, 1998). He then went to the University of Indiana for a short stay, in 1945 and returned to Harvard in 1948 to stay for the duration of his entire career until his retirement in 1974, where he would better all his ideas and theories (Vargas, 2004).Finally, on March 18, 1990 one of the most celebrated and controversial psychologists of all time died of leukemia, departure behind a ripple effect of his lifes work as the Operant procedures have crated entire fields of science (Vargas, 2004) Radical Behaviorism Radical Behaviorism is a term attributed to B. F. Skinner (Schneider & Morris, 1987), tell as a distinction from the so-called Methodological Behaviorism and the rest of psychology (Malone & Cruchon, 2001). To contrast the 2 mixtures of conductism, it is noteworthy to define both.By definition, Methodological Behaviorism is the view that there is a distinction between humans and private events and that psychology (to remain scientific) burn deal only with public events private events are mental and, therefore, beyond our reach the arid philosophy of truth by agreement (Skinner, 1945) that something is meaningful or intent only if at least two observers agree on its existence. (Malone & Cruchon, 2001) According to Skinners viewpoint, Radical Behaviorism is quite different because, it does not distinguish between private and public events.In so doing, it omits vigour commonly thought of as mental, but it treats seeing as an activity similar in kind to walking (Malone & Cruchon, 2001). This is because Skinner deny the mind/body dualism of the mentalists and the methodological appearanceists (Malone & Cruchon, 2001). As an example, Malone and Cruchon (2001) succinctly described that sentiment is something that we do, just as is walking, and we do not think mental thoughts any more than we walk mental steps. Personal experience is not necessarily private experience.That part of the world within our bodies is difficult to describe because society has a difficult time teaching us to name it. (Malone & Cruchon, 2001) In other words, Skinner departed from analyzing behaviour as actions affected by our thoughts rather he argued that thoughts are effects themselves to a degree from our actions (Malone & Cruchon, 2001). With the term mannerism attached to his ideas, he was associated with the Stimulus-Response Theory, but he repudiated it (Hall, Lindz ey & Campbell, 1998) because accordingly his study of behavior should beredefined as studying the interactive dealinghip between an organism and the environment in which it behaves. The quondam(prenominal) and present environments provide the stimuli that set the occasion for behavior, and the organisms actions operate (hence operant) on the environment. Actions have consequences, and these consequences work the behavior of the organism. (Leahey, 2003) In addition, Skinner said that in Radical Behaviorism, it is not about the stimulus-response stance because preferably of saying that the organism sees, attends to, perceives, processes, or otherwise acts upon stimuli, an operant analysis holds that stimuli acquire control of behavior through with(predicate) the part they turn of events in contingencies of reinforcement. Instead of saying that an organism stores copies of the contingencies to which it is exposed and later retrieves and responds to them again, it says that the or ganism is changed by the contingencies and later responds as a changed organism, the contingencies having passed into history. (Skinner, 1987)That is, All operants and stimuli are members of classes of similar phenomena, defined by the environmental relations in which they participate. (Ritzer, 2005). This is foster said in the article Evolution of literal Behavior as species-specific behavior did not evolve in order that a species could adapt to the environment but rather evolved when it adapted, so we say that operant behavior is not strengthened by reinforcement in order that the individualist can adjust to the environment but is strengthened when the individual adjusts.(Skinner, 1986) This is to say that Skinners Radical Behaviorism rests on the study of behavior in a sense that behavior is not caused by the stimuli but depends on the actions that a person reacts to in a certain setting (environment) resulting into another reaction, thus The environment not only triggered b ehavior, it selected it. Consequences seemed, indeed, to be more important than antecedents. (Skinner, 1987). Some Influences by Skinners BehaviorismSurely, the influence of Radical Behaviorism in the applied fields has been proven by academic scholars in numerous research books as part or a whole of some other fields in psychology. One such field is Human Geography, so called because it is concern with the spatial specialization and organization of human activity and with human use of the physical environment (Norton, 1997) and is concerned mainly of human behavior in an environment.In here, Norton (1997) corroborated that Human Geography is related to Radical Behaviorism because the principle of cultural physicalism as an approach to the study of the former is similar to latter as Radical behaviouristic psychology is concerned with the identification of the principles of individual behavior and talks about reinforcers and punishers, while cultural materialism is concerned with free radical behavior and talks about benefits and costs. Both argue that behavioral responses to environmental variables precede mental rationalizations as to the reasons for responses. (Norton, 1997) Norton (1997) further adds that the research approach of Human Geography is the analysis of behavior in landscape, advocating the use of Radical Behaviorism. Secondly, it has also influenced the approaches of the analysis of Human Cognition as Barnes and Holmes (1991) would contend. This is because, they said that, radical behaviorism does, on the contrary, and as opposed to earlier forms of behaviorism, direct considerable attention towards phenomena called cognitive. (Barnes and Holmes, 1991), giving credit to the importance of the contextualistic berth in the analysis of human thought. Further, they said that, its current burgeoning of interest in human behavior, and particularly voice communication and symbolic control, have yet to be fully appreciated and explored (Barnes and Holmes, 1991), such that Radical Behaviorism, can play an important role in developing psychology into a fully formed science (Barnes and Holmes, 1991). Third, as formulated by Skinner, one such field influenced by Radical Behaviorism is the analysis of Verbal Behavior and communication.In the study conducted by Forsyth (1996) on the Language of Feeling, he identified Behaviorism as a good approach to such an analyses furthering understanding of the communication process. He said that the functional analysis of vocal behavior has served as the cornerstone for behavior analytic research and theory about emotional behavior beginning with how people learn to label and describe their experience using language, commending its use in clinical behaviour analysis.Fourth, an interesting proposal of the use of Radical Behaviorism is the simulation or extra of a community called Walden Two (Cullen, 1991), based on a novel by Skinner of the equivalent title. The interesting part is that thi s proposal carried out for a community of disabled children having behavior deficits. This community was called Comunidad Los Horcones which was started in 1971 and has continued up to the present, followed the guiding rules based on the novel (Cullen, 1991).Cullen (1991) argued that the guiding principles of Radical Behaviorism can sustain a community, nonetheless the presence o only a handful of these kinds of community puzzle out it less probable for practical use. In the outset, the promise that, it might provide the basis for sensible homework in the lives of people with learning disabilities (Cullen, 1991). Criticisms Skinners Radical Behaviorism came out into the academic knowledge domain without and exemption from criticisms.According to Malone and Cruchon (2001), Skinners over-simplification of in his prose on the principles of Radical Behaviorism to gain public readership caused further criticisms because those who read it misunderstood it further. They said that these criticisms are, attributable to the opacity of his prose and the excessiveness of his proposed applications (Malone & Cruchon, 2001).Thus, the writings of Skinner led to many misconceptions as well as misinterpretations of Skinners works (Ruiz, 1995). Skinner have regretted this himself later in his life as he eventually complained at having to redress misconstructions in the literature (Ruiz, 1995). On the other Ruiz (1995), argued that Radical Behaviorism attracted strong objections from feminist critics and listed the following points as basis for that criticism as misinterpretations that it is(a) a mechanistic stimulus-response psychology (b) is primarily concertned with the behavior of small organisms in experimental chambers (c) conceptualizes the organism as a passive recipient of external forces (d) denies or ignores innate contributions to behavior in its extreme environmentalism (e) requires that we break up behavior down to elemental units of analysis and (f) deals only with overt behavior and so denies or ignores indwelling experience such as feelings and thought. (Ruiz, 1995)Quite interestingly is that Skinners Radical Behavior, undoubtedly had been misconstrued with these labels and had been the source of raspy criticisms from many quarters (Ruiz, 1995). Furthermore, Ruizs (1995) first entry in the misinterpretation list about Radical Behaviorism as a mechanistic stimulus-response psychology, was also claimed by Hall, Lindzey and Campbell (1998). In the long run, Skinner suffered misinterpretation rather than the validity of his Radical Behaviorism as a science.All three sources would agree that Skinner was misinterpreted and misunderstood (Malone & Cruchon, 2001 Ruiz, 1995 Hall, Lindzey & Campbell, 1998), because his readers and supporters as well as critiques always place labels on approaches, techniques or methods of analyses. Conclusion B. F, Skinner is a rum scholar of the 20th century, having to influence a handful of fields of study. In retrospect, Skinner started out with a humble beginning and his upbringing may have contributed to the immense power of thinking.His Radical Behaviorism, was an attempt of Skinner to delineate his ideas from the whole of behaviorism and the rest of psychology. In such doing, a radical breed of approach had taken shape. His ideas on Radical Behaviorism eventually influenced many other fields of study for application and as an approach to many experiments. On the other hand, with such a remarkable approach, B. F. Skinner and Radical Behaviorism had been attacked by numerous criticisms simply because of its complexity Skinner himself often over-simplify his writings to cover a wider audience that also caused much confusion and labeling on Radical Behaviorism.Nonetheless, many students and scholars also interpreted and cleared-out his ideas for better understanding such as Malone and Cruchons work (2001). Finally, Skinners Radical Behaviorism, according to most articles and proposit ion has a great promise to give for the science of psychology. While it is a fact, as many sources would say, that Skinners works are misinterpreted and confused, there is no way that in the subsequent debates and further studies on his Radical Behaviorism that it will shed more understanding to a wider audience.Thus, it is only in the hands and minds of later scholars to interpret Skinners work more fully. References Barnes, D. , & Holmes, Y. (1991). Radical behaviorism, stimulus equivalence, and human cognition. Psychological Record, 41(1), 19. Cullen, C. (1991). Experimentation and planning in community care. Disability, Handicap and Society plenty 6, No. 2 115-128. Carfax Publishing Co. Forsyth, J. (1996). The language of feeling and the feeling of anxiety Contributions of the behaviorisms toward Psychological Record, 46(4), 607. Hall, C. S. , Lindzey, G. & Campbell, J. B. (1998).Theories of personality 4ed. New York, N. Y. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Leahey, T. H. (2003). Chapter 6. Cognition and learning in Irving V. 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