Research figure: B. F. Skinner · Written by Artificial Sapiens
B. F. Skinner's Science and Human Behavior (1953) is a systematic attempt to explain human action through the same functional principles that had been established in the experimental analysis of behavior. Written as an introductory psychology textbook, the work develops a science of behavioral relations from laboratory procedures and extends its interpretive framework to thinking, emotion, self-control, social interaction, government, religion, psychotherapy, education, economics, and culture. Its central proposition is that human conduct can be studied by identifying the environmental and historical conditions under which actions occur and the consequences that sustain or alter them. The book remains important as a comprehensive statement of Skinner's scientific and social project, while the evidential status of its claims differs substantially across chapters. Skinner, 1953 · Pilgrim, 2003.
What Is Science and Human Behavior?
Published by Macmillan in New York in 1953, Science and Human Behavior consists of 461 pages in the original volume, including its index, and 29 chapters organized into six major sections. The book is an authored theoretical and interpretive synthesis, rather than a report of one experiment or a clinical treatment manual. Skinner's explicit ambition is to demonstrate how a natural science of behavior can interpret both relatively simple operant performances and socially consequential human practices. Bibliographic records and the B. F. Skinner Foundation agree on the date, author, and original publisher. The 1965 Free Press paperback and the 2025 extended edition are later editions and should be distinguished from the original work. B. F. Skinner Foundation bibliography · Google Books · 2025 extended edition.
The subtitle readers sometimes supply—an all-purpose explanation of why people do what they do—can obscure its actual intellectual form. Skinner begins with the requirements of a science, develops a set of functional concepts, and then uses those concepts to interpret phenomena for which direct experimental control is often impractical. An interpretation is an empirically informed extension of principles: its coherence alone cannot establish that the proposed variables fully explain an individual case. This distinction is indispensable when evaluating the book's scientific claims. Michael, 2003 · Pilgrim, 2003.
Historical Origins and the Problem Skinner Wanted to Solve
From the law of effect to an operant science
The historical origins of Skinner's approach reach back to Edward Thorndike's law of effect, which connected the consequences of an action with changes in the likelihood of its recurrence. John B. Watson's 1913 behaviorist program subsequently advocated an objective science of behavior. Skinner developed a more specific research strategy around individual organisms, manipulable contingencies, continuous measurement, and the differentiation of operant from respondent processes. His distinctive contribution was the experimental analysis of operant behavior and the larger interpretive philosophy associated with radical behaviorism. Neither the law of effect nor the initial behaviorist program originated with Skinner. Morris, Altus, and Smith, 2013 · Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Skinner's The Behavior of Organisms (1938) supplied an earlier experimental and conceptual foundation. During the following years he developed a broader philosophy of psychological explanation, including a 1945 treatment of psychological terms and private events. By 1953 he had also published Walden Two (1948), a fictional exploration of the intentional arrangement of social practices. Science and Human Behavior brought these lines together in a textbook-length exposition. The historical sequence matters: the social chapters follow an established laboratory program and earlier cultural speculation; the book is a consolidation and extension, not the invention of operant conditioning in 1953. Morris, Altus, and Smith, 2013 · Skinner Foundation bibliography.
Why a textbook became a manifesto
Skinner intended the book for teaching introductory psychology, although its structure differed substantially from the survey textbooks of the period. Rather than catalog separate mental faculties, personality theories, and fields of application, he organized the presentation around a small collection of behavioral processes and asked how far they could illuminate human conduct. The choice was pedagogical and methodological: he sought a common explanatory vocabulary across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Carol Pilgrim's fiftieth-anniversary historiography documents the circumstances of composition, the controversy surrounding its reception, and its subsequent influence in instruction; Jack Michael characterizes it as a tutorial in behavioral interpretation. Pilgrim, 2003 · Michael, 2003.
The Original Book's Six-Part Architecture
The organization is itself an argument. The first section asks whether a science of human behavior is possible. The second describes elementary behavioral processes. The third interprets the individual person, including private events and self-control. The fourth treats interpersonal relations. The fifth examines institutional agencies, and the sixth addresses cultural planning and social control. This ordered expansion from laboratory concepts to social institutions is the book's central structural achievement and the source of many of its methodological controversies. Skinner, 1953.
Part I: The Possibility of a Science of Human Behavior (chapters 1–3)
The opening chapters, “Can Science Help?,” “A Science of Behavior,” and “Why Organisms Behave,” introduce Skinner's argument that human action presents legitimate causal questions. He examines the practical power of scientific methods and the social risks that accompany the capacity to predict and influence behavior. A scientific account, on his view, should identify relationships among behavior, current conditions, and individual history that permit prediction and effective intervention. The account draws attention to causes that everyday explanations often overlook, including reinforcement histories and variations in opportunity. Skinner, 1953 · Goddard, 2017.
Skinner's analysis of causation places special weight on the conditions that can be investigated and altered. Everyday references to intentions and dispositions can serve as summaries of regularities, but he insists that an explanation gains empirical leverage by examining the histories and contingencies in which those regularities are produced. This emphasis gives the book its distinctive explanatory direction. It also raises a question that runs throughout the text: how adequately can a framework developed under controlled laboratory conditions account for language, institutions, and long-term cultural change? Michael, 2003.
Part II: The Analysis of Behavior (chapters 4–14)
The lengthy second section provides the conceptual machinery: conditioned reflexes, operant behavior, shaping and maintenance, discrimination, environmental control, deprivation and satiation, emotion, aversion, avoidance, anxiety, punishment, functional analysis, and complex behavioral cases. Its sequence moves from laboratory-observable processes to situations involving interacting variables. Chapter 5 develops operant behavior; chapter 6 discusses shaping and maintaining operants; chapters 7 and 8 develop stimulus control. Chapters 9 through 12 attend to motivating conditions and aversive processes, and chapters 13 and 14 discuss functional classifications and complicated cases. Skinner, 1953.
An operant is a class of responses related to its consequences. Reinforcement is defined functionally by its effects on subsequent responding under specified conditions. For a response to be reinforced, its consequence must alter the relevant future probability; a consequence described colloquially as a “reward” cannot be assumed to function as a reinforcer. Skinner accordingly treats behavior as a relation involving antecedent circumstances, an action, and the consequences that follow it. Later behavior-analytic teaching often compresses this relationship into the three-term contingency, although the book's analysis includes additional motivating and historical variables. Skinner, 1953 · Michael, 2003.
Shaping describes the selective reinforcement of successive approximations to a target response. Discrimination concerns differences in responding under distinct stimulus conditions because of differential consequences in the organism's history. Deprivation and satiation illustrate that the effectiveness of a consequence depends on current conditions, not simply on a fixed stimulus property. Together these concepts explain why the same environmental event can influence different organisms, or the same organism at different times, in different ways. The relevant causal history is part of the analysis. Skinner, 1953.
His treatment of punishment distinguishes the suppression of behavior under aversive contingencies from the acquisition of an effective alternative repertoire. The book raises concerns about collateral effects of aversive control and about arrangements that may sustain avoidance, concealment, or counteraction. Modern conclusions about particular educational or clinical interventions require direct contemporary outcome and safety evidence, as well as a clear definition of the procedure; Skinner's theoretical discussion does not by itself establish the effectiveness or acceptability of any present-day intervention. Skinner, 1953 · Innis, 1981.
Part III: The Individual as a Whole (chapters 15–18)
Chapters 15–18 address “Self-Control,” thinking, private events, and the self. Here Skinner argues that an individual can alter the conditions affecting their own future behavior. A person may arrange cues, reduce contact with temptations, seek helpful consequences, or change the setting of a difficult choice. Skinner interprets these acts of self-management as behavior that itself has a history and determinants. The explanatory move avoids treating self-control as an unexplained faculty or a single inner resource. Skinner, 1953 · Brigham, 1980.
Thinking receives a functional treatment through the ways behavior can become covert, incomplete, self-directed, or involved in solving problems. These passages form a bridge between Skinner's laboratory concepts and his later book Verbal Behavior (1957), while remaining a distinct argument in their 1953 context. Subsequent cognitive psychology developed independent experimental and computational accounts of memory, representation, planning, and decision-making that cannot be read back into Skinner's original terminology. Skinner, 1953 · Balleine and Dickinson, 1998.
Chapter 17, “Private Events in a Natural Science,” is particularly important for distinguishing Skinner's radical behaviorism from an exclusively externalist caricature. Feelings, sensations, and other events accessible primarily to one person enter his analysis; the explanatory question concerns how people learn to describe them and how such descriptions relate to the wider behavioral system. His use of the term “private” marks a problem of access and verbal report, not a claim that the experiences are unreal. At the same time, treating these phenomena within a functional system leaves empirical issues about neural mechanisms, subjective reports, and representational processing open to independent research. Skinner, 1953 · Morris, Altus, and Smith, 2013.
The chapter on the self continues the same approach. A person's apparent continuity is interpreted in relation to organized repertoires, social circumstances, and learned ways of observing and describing one's behavior. Skinner's explanatory interest is directed toward the conditions that produce a coherent pattern of conduct over time. Such an analysis can illuminate identity-related behavior while leaving open questions addressed by contemporary personality theory, developmental psychology, autobiographical memory, and social cognition. Skinner, 1953.
Part IV: The Behavior of People in Groups (chapters 19–21)
The fourth section considers social behavior, personal control, and group control. Skinner analyzes other people as part of the environment in which behavior occurs, while recognizing that individuals respond to one another and thereby create reciprocal relations. A request, rule, threat, promise, or expression of approval can alter behavioral contingencies. Group norms may be maintained through distributed social consequences without requiring a single centralized authority. Skinner, 1953.
This extension is analytically attractive because it links interpersonal practices to observable arrangements. Its evidential challenge is that reciprocity, communication, authority, roles, and collective action can interact across timescales and institutions. Establishing specific causes often requires social experiments, field studies, longitudinal designs, or natural experiments beyond the single-organism laboratory method. The book provides a conceptual program for investigating those relations; it does not experimentally demonstrate every interpretation that it presents. Michael, 2003 · Stillman, 1975.
Part V: Controlling Agencies (chapters 22–26)
Chapters 22–26 examine government and law, religion, psychotherapy, economic control, and education. Skinner treats these as organized settings in which people arrange consequences for other people's behavior, sometimes systematically and sometimes through enduring convention. Legal sanctions, religious approval or disapproval, economic incentives, therapeutic responses, and instructional feedback are therefore compared using functional questions: what behavior is being affected, under which conditions, and with what consequences for whom? Skinner, 1953.
The analysis of psychotherapy is historically significant because it describes clinical relations in behavioral terms, including the potentially aversive effects of social environments. The chapter precedes many developments in contemporary evidence-based psychotherapy. It must not be treated as a present-day diagnostic manual, a demonstration that one form of therapy is superior, or a substitute for validated treatment recommendations. The same historical discipline applies to Skinner's account of education: it helped motivate later experimentation with programmed instruction, while modern instructional effectiveness depends on task, learner, implementation, comparison condition, and measured outcomes. Skinner, 1953 · Morris, Smith, and Altus, 2005.
The chapters on government, religion, and economic control also raise normative questions. Describing how a practice influences behavior does not settle whether it is justified, legitimate, equitable, or democratically accountable. Skinner's method turns social power into a scientifically examinable topic, but the values by which power should be evaluated require explicit ethical and political argument alongside empirical evidence about its effects. Stillman, 1975 · Goddard, 2017.
Part VI: The Control of Human Behavior (chapters 27–29)
The closing chapters, “Culture and Control,” “Designing a Culture,” and “The Problem of Control,” explicitly ask what follows when the technology of behavior becomes socially available. Skinner regards cultural practices as conditions that can maintain, suppress, and shape patterns of action. He also recognizes that improved capacity to influence behavior creates risks when powerful agencies use it for narrow interests. Later writings, especially Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and “Selection by Consequences” (1981), develop related philosophical and cultural arguments, but the 1953 book must be interpreted within its original historical moment. Skinner, 1953 · Skinner, 1981.
A decisive distinction emerges here between prediction, influence, and justification. The ability to arrange conditions under which a response becomes more likely supplies a potential instrument of governance or education. It supplies no automatic answer to whose objectives should prevail or who may contest them. Subsequent behavior-analytic work on countercontrol, political critiques of Skinner's social philosophy, and contemporary debates over persuasive technologies give this dimension of the book a continuing intellectual relevance. Goddard, 2017 · Countercontrol in behavior analysis.
How Skinner Builds Scientific Explanations
Functional relations rather than descriptive labels
The methodological core of the book is the functional relation between behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs. A descriptive label such as “aggression,” “motivation,” or “self-discipline” can identify a topic, but it does not yet specify the variables responsible for different instances of responding. The analyst asks what happened before an action, what followed it, how similar episodes occurred previously, and which motivating conditions might change the effect of the consequence. This approach is particularly valuable when the same outward act can serve different functions or several visibly different acts can produce the same consequence. Skinner, 1953 · Michael, 2003.
The distinction between topography and function is also why Skinner warns against classifying behavior solely by its visible form. Two people may leave a room for different reasons: one escapes an aversive stimulus, another obtains social attention, and a third follows a familiar routine. Their apparently identical movements can have different controlling relations. The explanatory unit is therefore contextual and historical. A functional hypothesis becomes scientifically strong when its predicted contingencies can be tested and alternative relations systematically evaluated. Skinner, 1953.
Experiments, measurement, and interpretation
Skinner's foundational program emphasized the repeated observation of individual organisms under controlled arrangements of stimuli and consequences. Operant chambers, response devices, cumulative records, and systematic changes in reinforcement schedules permitted fine-grained study of response rates and their dependence on experimentally arranged contingencies. The book imports the explanatory principles of that research into larger human domains. Readers should therefore distinguish a directly manipulated contingency from a plausible interpretation of naturally occurring social practices. Morris, Altus, and Smith, 2013 · Pilgrim, 2003.
The book does not report a single clinical trial with randomized patients, a longitudinal cohort validating its claims about government, or a universal experiment showing that every human decision follows one reinforcement rule. Its interpretive unity rests on extrapolation from established behavioral principles and extensive examples. This is a defensible historical reading of its genre; its broadest propositions remain research programs or philosophical claims where direct empirical tests were unavailable. Michael, 2003 · Pilgrim, 2003.
Respondent and operant learning
Respondent processes involve responses elicited in relation to antecedent stimulation and learned stimulus relations; operant processes involve changes in the probability or distribution of behavior as a function of consequences. Skinner's 1953 analysis includes both and emphasizes their possible interaction. The distinction remains methodologically useful, though contemporary learning science investigates more complex interactions among associative learning, prediction, action-outcome contingencies, physiological regulation, and cognitive control. Skinner, 1953 · Balleine and Dickinson, 1998.
Self-Control, Emotion, and Thinking: The Book's Most Consequential Interpretations
The treatment of self-control remains one of the book's most productive contributions to later behavioral discourse. For Skinner, self-management involves one response altering the conditions of another response. A person who moves food out of sight, establishes a public commitment, or arranges reminders changes the environment in which future behavior takes place. This yields an investigable mechanism and a practical vocabulary for arranging contingencies. Thomas Brigham's 1980 reconsideration explicitly returns to Skinner's 1953 account while discussing points of disagreement between radical and cognitive behavior theories. Skinner, 1953 · Brigham, 1980.
Skinner's interpretation of emotion includes bodily conditions, eliciting events, and changes in the probability of responses under such conditions. Fear, anxiety, and avoidance are not treated simply as labels assigned to mysterious internal causes: each prompts examination of contingencies and physiological or environmental conditions. The account gave behavior analysts conceptual tools for discussing private experience and aversive control. Modern affective neuroscience, cognitive appraisal research, and clinical assessment investigate additional processes and evidence that require separate treatment. Skinner, 1953.
His discussion of thinking is similarly systematic but interpretive. Behavioral histories, covert responding, problem-solving sequences, and stimulus control are proposed as ways to investigate apparently internal activities. Contemporary theories of working memory, executive function, planning, and model-based decision-making provide distinct explanatory resources with their own experimental tests. These developments should be compared with Skinner's account as independent models, rather than represented as translations of terms invented in 1953. Skinner, 1953 · Balleine and Dickinson, 1998.
Social Control, Culture, and the Ethics of Behavioral Technology
The book's social chapters make the most ambitious extrapolations. The possibility of arranging consequences for others places behavior science in direct contact with law, labor, institutional care, family relations, schooling, and politics. Skinner asks readers to examine how coercion, approval, deprivation, rules, and rewards maintain social practices. In his view, the question is not exhausted by naming an agency as benevolent or authoritarian; its operating consequences need to be analyzed. Skinner, 1953.
That ambition brings three persistent ethical questions into focus. First, the interests of the person who selects a goal can diverge from the interests of the person whose behavior is being shaped. Second, apparently effective short-term control can conceal delayed or distributed harms. Third, the ability to withdraw consent, challenge authority, or resist manipulation matters independently of a procedure's technical efficiency. Analyses of coercive behavioral practices and of Skinner's political philosophy document the need for ethical standards beyond success in changing behavior. Stillman, 1975 · Innis, 1981.
Murray Goddard's later review revisits Skinner's concern about the harmful use of behavioral influence, including parallels with advertising and gambling systems. The relevance to the Artificial Era is direct at the level of research questions: digitally mediated choice architectures can arrange cues, reinforcement, and feedback at scale. Evaluating a specific technology still requires independent evidence about mechanism, benefits, risks, and agency. Neither the book nor contemporary technological analogies establish claims about the consciousness or subjective experience of artificial systems. Goddard, 2017.
Initial Reception and Fifty-Year Reassessment
Science and Human Behavior received scholarly discussion from the outset. A review by Harry Prosch appeared in Ethics in July 1953, and the book was reviewed in Science Education in 1954. These contemporary records establish early circulation into philosophical and educational debates. Contemporary reviewers recognized the ambition and coherence of Skinner's natural-science argument while also finding it provocative for familiar views of human agency, society, and psychology. Prosch, 1953 · Science Education review, 1954.
The fiftieth-anniversary symposium in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior illustrates another phase of reception. Pilgrim examined the book's origin, first response, and enduring teaching role. Michael analyzed its method of interpretation and its utility for behavior-analytic reasoning. These articles are scholarly reflections by researchers in the tradition; they document influence and interpretive significance, not experimental proof of every claim in the original volume. Pilgrim, 2003 · Michael, 2003.
The book's relationship to applied behavior analysis also requires exact attribution. Skinner provided foundational principles and influential conceptual extensions. The emergence of applied behavior analysis as a distinct empirical discipline involved subsequent researchers, published demonstrations, and the explicit articulation of applied standards by Donald Baer, Montrose Wolf, and Todd Risley in 1968. Morris, Smith, and Altus conclude that Skinner's influence was foundational while differentiating that influence from the field's later institutional and scientific founding. Morris, Smith, and Altus, 2005 · Baer, Wolf, and Risley, 1968.
Modern Scientific Evaluation
What remains experimentally robust
A substantial body of behavioral research supports the importance of environmental contingencies, reinforcement histories, stimulus discrimination, and the relations between actions and consequences. These principles remain relevant to experimental learning, behavioral measurement, and the design of interventions. Specific effects depend on organisms, tasks, contingencies, deprivation or motivation, and the conditions under which behavior is measured. A robust learning process should never be inflated into a claim that a single theory exhaustively explains all complex human conduct. Balleine and Dickinson, 1998 · Morris, Smith, and Altus, 2005.
Goal-directed action and habits
Contemporary instrumental-learning research distinguishes action-outcome control, including sensitivity to the value of outcomes and causal contingencies, from more habitual forms of response. Balleine and Dickinson's review presents evidence from outcome devaluation and contingency manipulations for distinctions that exceed a single undifferentiated stimulus-response account. These experiments extend the study of consequences while putting pressure on simple explanations of why people continue or discontinue an action. Their framework is a later scientific development with its own methods and concepts. Balleine and Dickinson, 1998.
Extinction, context, and relapse
Skinner's functional discussion of extinction remains historically important, but later investigations show that the reduction of responding can be context sensitive and can involve new inhibitory learning. Bouton's review focuses predominantly on Pavlovian extinction; its findings cannot be applied without qualification to every operant or clinical context. Research on operant renewal and related procedures separately develops the instrumental evidence. The general implication is that observed response reduction in one situation may fail to generalize to another, an issue relevant to education and behavior change. Bouton, 2004 · Bouton and Todd, 2014.
Neuroscience, computation, and learning
Neural and computational research has produced models of reward prediction, valuation, decision-making, and action selection that were unavailable to Skinner. Some models share an interest in how consequences modify future action, yet they explain behavior through additional representational or neural assumptions and are evaluated through distinct experimental methods. Skinner's 1953 text is therefore a foundational historical point of comparison, not a source for present-day neural measurements or contemporary algorithms. Balleine and Dickinson, 1998 · Sequential choice review.
Limits of evidence and translation
The evidence supporting elemental operant processes is stronger and more experimentally direct than the evidence for several of Skinner's social and cultural extrapolations. Laboratory control permits precise causal tests within a limited task; generalization to workplaces, communities, schools, political institutions, and clinical settings introduces interacting histories, goals, relationships, and institutional incentives. A comprehensive assessment must distinguish the strength of a principle, the validity of a particular functional interpretation, and the measured success and safety of a particular application. Michael, 2003 · Stillman, 1975.
Relationship to Skinner's Other Books
The Behavior of Organisms (1938) establishes the earlier experimental framework of operant analysis. Walden Two (1948) dramatizes questions of cultural design through fiction. Science and Human Behavior (1953) systematizes behavioral principles for a general psychology readership and applies them to private, social, and institutional life. Verbal Behavior (1957) presents a more sustained functional account of language. Schedules of Reinforcement (1957) is a coauthored empirical monograph by Charles B. Ferster and B. F. Skinner. The Technology of Teaching (1968), Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), and About Behaviorism (1974) develop other educational, political, and philosophical questions. These books have distinct subjects, evidence bases, and interpretive stakes. B. F. Skinner Foundation full bibliography.
The order of publication clarifies scientific authorship. Thorndike's law of effect precedes Skinner's program; Watson's early behaviorism is a separate historical formulation; Ferster's contribution to the reinforcement-schedules monograph is joint and explicit; and the eventual applied discipline was developed by a community of investigators. Science and Human Behavior should be credited for its integrative interpretive architecture without assigning those neighboring achievements exclusively to Skinner. Morris, Smith, and Altus, 2005 · Morris, Altus, and Smith, 2013.
What the Book Contributes to Psychology Today
The book's durable contribution is a disciplined habit of asking functional questions about behavior. Why does this action occur here and now? Which aspects of the environment signal an opportunity for it? Which consequences have followed it? What historical conditions altered its probability? What changes when the social setting changes? Such questions support careful experimental design and the evaluation of behavioral interventions. Their usefulness is compatible with asking additional cognitive, developmental, neural, cultural, and ethical questions. Michael, 2003 · Pilgrim, 2003.
The publication also insists that a science of behavior has public consequences. Its most challenging passages concern institutions that can structure human choice and influence one another's conduct. Contemporary researchers can use the book to recover important scientific questions about social control while evaluating its normative propositions through independent political, ethical, and empirical inquiry. This integrated historical reading gives the work its strongest present-day relevance. Goddard, 2017 · Stillman, 1975.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Science and Human Behavior first published?
The original book was published in 1953 by Macmillan in New York. Subsequent Free Press paperback editions and the 2025 extended edition preserve its bibliographic history while adding different edition-specific features. A current edition date should not replace the historical date of the work. Foundation bibliography · Sloan Publishing.
How many chapters are in the book?
The original edition contains 29 numbered chapters arranged in six sections. The six sections progress from the possibility of a behavioral science to experimental principles, the whole individual, social groups, organized agencies, and cultural control. Google Books.
Is the book about operant conditioning alone?
Operant learning supplies its explanatory foundation, but the volume extends to respondent conditioning, emotion, thinking, private events, self-control, interpersonal relations, institutions, and culture. Its central literary and scientific achievement is the systematic application of a functional vocabulary across those domains. Skinner, 1953.
Did Skinner demonstrate that every human action is controlled by reinforcement?
The book argues for a broad science of behavioral determinants and illustrates many cases. It does not contain experimental demonstrations of every claim about social systems, private experience, and cultural change. Specific modern explanatory hypotheses require direct tests, suitable measurements, and consideration of competing accounts. Pilgrim, 2003 · Balleine and Dickinson, 1998.
Does Skinner recognize thoughts and feelings?
Yes. The chapters on emotion, thinking, private events, and the self explicitly address them as topics of investigation. Skinner's distinctive proposal concerns how these events should be analyzed and how reports about them are learned, rather than whether people experience them. Skinner, 1953.
Is Science and Human Behavior a modern clinical practice guideline?
It is a 1953 theoretical and educational book. Its chapters on psychotherapy and education belong to the intellectual history of behavioral psychology. Decisions about diagnosis, treatment, consent, safety, and outcomes require appropriate contemporary clinical guidelines and evidence relevant to the population and intervention under consideration. Morris, Smith, and Altus, 2005.
Related Articles
B. F. Skinner — An integrated scientific account of Skinner's life, experimental program, books, philosophy, and influence.
Learning Theories in Education: Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, and Sociocultural Learning — The subject-centered comparison of major accounts of learning, including the role of consequences in instruction.
Behavior Change Techniques: What Research Supports — Contemporary evidence and distinctions across behavior-change methods, beyond the historical interpretation of Skinner's book.
B. F. Skinner's Contingencies of Reinforcement — The 1969 theoretical essays and their scientific context.
B. F. Skinner's The Technology of Teaching — Skinner's 1968 account of teaching and learning.
B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity — The 1971 philosophical arguments about freedom and dignity.
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