B. F. Skinner

The boy in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, built things. With his friend Doc Miller he strung a telegraph line between their houses, though the messages came out so garbled they ended up phoning each other, and when their elderberry business kept picking green fruit he built a bent metal trough that floated off the unripe berries. A teacher tried to talk him out of his fear of hell and made him an atheist instead. His younger brother Edward died at 16 of a brain hemorrhage. He took an English degree at Hamilton College in 1926 meaning to write novels, went home to his parents, and spent two years failing at it. Robert Frost encouraged him. He decided he had nothing to say.

He read John B. Watson, took a Harvard doctorate in 1931, and spent the next 60 years arguing that behavior is shaped by its consequences and that nothing is explained by adding an inner self. He built the operant conditioning chamber and the cumulative recorder to measure it, and with Charles Ferster published Schedules of Reinforcement in 1957, the same year as Verbal Behavior. He designed teaching machines that broke a subject into small steps and rewarded each one, the ancestor of every adaptive learning program running now. He wrote a utopian novel, Walden Two, in 1948, and Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971, which argued that autonomous man is a fiction we should be glad to lose. He published 21 books and 180 articles and took the National Medal of Science in 1968.

For his second daughter he built an air crib: three solid walls, a glass front, filtered air, controlled temperature and humidity, a canvas floor with sheets that rolled off when soiled. Then he described it in Ladies' Home Journal under the title Baby in a Box, illustrated with a photograph of Deborah's hands and face pressed against the glass, and used the word experiment. It never sold. When Noam Chomsky demolished Verbal Behavior in the journal Language in 1959 — a review credited with starting the cognitive revolution — Skinner read six pages, found the tone distasteful, and never answered. He admitted the silence showed a lack of character. Temple Grandin has said that at about 18 he tried to touch her legs and she told him no.

Leukemia was diagnosed in 1989. Ten days before he died the American Psychological Association gave him its lifetime achievement award and he stood up and talked about his work. He died on August 18, 1990, in Cambridge and is buried at Mount Auburn. The story that his daughter was raised in a laboratory box, went mad, sued him and killed herself has been circulating for 50 years and is false in every part. Deborah said so herself, in public, in 2004, after a book repeated the claim. A 2002 survey named him the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. In 2024 the pigeon-guided missile earned him a posthumous Ig Nobel Peace Prize.

B. F. Skinner's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Operant conditioning chamber invention
  The Skinner box, built with the cumulative recorder that made rate of response measurable 1930
• Project Pigeon invention
  Pigeons in a nose cone pecking a projected image to steer a glide bomb. Cancelled in October 1944. 1944
• Walden Two book
  The utopian novel that produced the Twin Oaks community in 1967 1948
• Schedules of Reinforcement book
  With Charles Ferster. His most influential experimental work. 1957
• Verbal Behavior book
  His account of language, and the target of Chomsky's 1959 review 1957
• Beyond Freedom and Dignity book
  Put him on the cover of Time and made him the most argued-with psychologist alive 1971

• 1926 aged ~22 Takes an English degree at Hamilton College intending to be a writer
• 1928 aged ~24 Gives up on fiction and enters graduate psychology at Harvard He had read John B. Watson and concluded he had no world experience to write from.
• 1931 aged ~27 Takes the Harvard PhD
• 1936 aged ~32 Marries Yvonne Blue and moves to the University of Minnesota
• 1945 aged ~41 Publishes Baby in a Box in Ladies' Home Journal The air crib was compared to the Skinner box and never found a market.
• 1948 aged ~44 Returns to Harvard for good and publishes Walden Two
• 1959 aged ~55 Chomsky reviews Verbal Behavior in Language and Skinner does not reply The review is credited with launching the cognitive revolution.
• 1968 aged ~64 Awarded the National Medal of Science
• August 18, 1990 aged 86 Dies of leukemia in Cambridge, ten days after his last public talk

• Noam Chomsky b. 1928
  Linguist and political activist whose theories revolutionized the study of language and cognitive science. refuted by
• Benjamin Spock 1903–1998
  Pediatrician whose 1946 baby-care manual reshaped postwar American child-rearing advice. rival authority on raising children
• Carl Rogers 1902–1987
  Created client-centered therapy and shaped modern counseling practice and training. argued against
• Abraham Maslow 1908–1970
  Proposed the hierarchy of needs and helped found humanistic psychology. displaced in psychology
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. contradicted on the mind
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. opposed in the theory of teaching