Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by B. F. Skinner
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American psychologist B. F. Skinner.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
The feeling of being interested can act as a kind of neurological signal, directing us to fruitful areas of inquiry.
I believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills.
You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.
I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.
Reinforcement is being right.
We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
I'm very pessimistic.
Even the mundane task of washing dishes by hand is an example of the small tasks and personal activities that once filled people's daily lives with a sense of achievement.
I would be opposed to any kind of totalitarian control.
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
I have to tell people that they are not responsible for their behavior. They're not creating it; they're not initiating anything. It's all found somewhere else. That's an awful lot to relinquish.
I never really expected to be controversial.
The people who control the condition in which we live have no reason to think beyond more than the next five or 10 years.
Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.
Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
If you're old, don't try to change yourself, change your environment.
I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.
I don't think my mother and father ever had any doubts about what I was to be punished for or not. My parents come from a very strictly defined culture.
Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.
The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.
The environment shapes people's actions.
Religions work for their own aggrandizement - strengthen the church and so on - and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.
I remember when I was a freshman in college, I was still somewhat bothered by... worried... about religion. I remember going to this professor of philosophy and telling him that I had lost my faith.
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
Great scientific contributions have been techniques.
The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
I won't say that I'm an agnostic, since agnosticism maintains that one cannot know... but I'm not averse to the idea of some intelligence or some organizing force that set up the initial conditions of the universe in such a way that ultimately generated stars, planets and life.
Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?
What is sought can never produce the seeking.
Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.
I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
If you insist that individual rights are the summum bonum, then the whole structure of society falls down.
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.
The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called 'conditioning'. In operant conditioning we 'strengthen' an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.
Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out.
An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.
We are only just beginning to understand the power of love because we are just beginning to understand the weakness of force and aggression.
It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It's a question of what's to be done from now on.
Behavior is determined by its consequences.
It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
To say that... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience.
Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences
That's all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
I've often said that my rats have taught me much more than I've taught them.
A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
Related Authors
Abraham Maslow Quotes
American
Psychologist
Carl Jung Quotes
Swiss
Psychologist
Daniel Kahneman Quotes
Israeli
Psychologist
Edward de Bono Quotes
English
Psychologist
Erich Fromm Quotes
American
Psychologist
James Hillman Quotes
American
Psychologist
M. Scott Peck Quotes
American
Psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes
Hungarian
Psychologist
Nathaniel Branden Quotes
American
Psychologist
Ram Dass Quotes
American
Psychologist
Rollo May Quotes
American
Psychologist
Sigmund Freud Quotes
Austrian
Psychologist
Tara Brach Quotes
American
Psychologist
Viktor E. Frankl Quotes
Austrian
Psychologist
Wayne Dyer Quotes
American
Psychologist