Psychologists' stories: Skinner's theory of childhood and operant conditioning

Psychology, as a very young discipline, has also enthusiastically produced many scientists on the way to explore the laws of human behavior, emotion, and consciousness, and they have created different schools of psychology, respectively analyzing the human psyche from different perspectives, so that today we can piece together the whole picture of the fuzzy human psyche through these fragments.

The doctrinal theories of the pioneers are an important foundation for our study of psychology and one of the effective ways to understand our cognitive processes, and in the books written by these psychologists, we also perceive some of the psychology behind our behavior.

And understanding the past of psychologists can give us more insight and appreciation that these theories also come from certain life experiences of psychologists. For example, Skinner and his theory of operant conditioning.

2 Skinner's childhood: full of punishment and "control"

Born on March 20, 1904, in a small town called Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, USA, the founder of neo-behaviorist learning theory, Burrhus Frederick Skinner, was born into a strict, punitive family, where his father was a lawyer and his mother would be strict about the sound of the siren at the station. His father was a lawyer and his mother would strictly organize the family's life according to the morning, noon, and evening sirens, and the children would be severely punished if they broke the rules.

Skinner once mentioned in his autobiography that when his father caught him as a child taking a coin from his grandmother's purse, he took him on a tour of the prison and gave young Skinner a graphic account of the hardships of prison life.

His mother also brushed his mouth with a soapy towel for speaking a swear word, and his grandmother took him to the fireplace to warn him that those who lie will be tortured by fire in hell after death.

Suffering from the pain of punishment, Skinner later emphasized that punishment did not have any effect on shaping behavior and could even backfire, as evidenced by Skinner's theory of learning.

At the same time, Skinner's family believed in viewing emotional outbursts as a sign of weakness and incompetence, and his parents consistently used the homesickness he wrote about when he first went to college as a handle for ridicule and mockery.

Such a family culture also had a great impact on Skinner's psychology later on, as an ordinary student he learned to restrain and suppress his emotions long ago, and even internalized this pattern into his subconscious, losing his feelings in all emotional experiences in his life. As a psychologist, Skinner rejected emotions in his psychological research and did not believe that emotions should be the object of psychological research; he often used various behaviors to explain emotions, but avoided studying how emotions arise.

However, Skinner's encounter with a senior bully in college also provided the original inspiration for Skinner's theory. When Skinner was tied to a chair by two upperclassmen, Skinner completely gave up any resistance, a response that can be found in the operant conditioning theory later proposed by Skinner.

3 Skinner's Metamorphosis: From Writer to New Behaviorist Founding Father

Skinner's original dream was not to become a psychologist, but a writer.

During his college years, Skinner had already achieved some success in poetry and fiction, winning a special prize in Greek, and his literary works were once featured in the Milton College Journal and even recognized by the literary magnate Robert.

The twist of fate came when he hoped to complete a novel at home within a year, but he found that most writers, including himself, had only a superficial understanding of human behavior and turned to studying psychology at Harvard University to better his literary work.

After a careful study of Watson's Behaviorism, Skinner was thoroughly attracted to behaviorist psychology and soon devoted himself to its study.

Based on Watson's work, Skinner extended Pavlov's theory of operant conditioning and invented the famous "Skinner Box", which is often used by psychologists to study animal behavior to this day.

Skinner believed that human behavior is not a simple response to a stimulus, but behavior that acts on the environment to produce a result, and is different from Pavlov's theory of conditioned reflexes in that Skinner believed that operant conditioning is a direct correlation between reinforcement and response, while learned behavior occurs with the reinforcing stimulus, and reinforcement does not occur after or before the behavior, but with it. The categories are positive and negative reinforcement.

As a simple example, we can get the corresponding reward after working, this reward can make us strengthen the state of continuous work as positive reinforcement; and late work boss will deduct the bonus, to ensure the bonus we will reduce the late behavior, deducting the bonus is negative reinforcement. The Aronson effect is the application of negative reinforcement, which differs from punishment in that negative reinforcement shapes behavior by removing a good stimulus, while punishment gives a bad stimulus.

4 Application of Skinner's reinforcement theory in education

Skinner caused a wave of "procedural teaching" in the United States, based on his extension of the theory of operant conditioning - reinforcement theory.

Skinner believed that reinforcement played an important role in the learning behavior of animals, from animals to humans, and he developed a program of "procedural instruction" in which he divided the content of student learning into small parts. If the answer is correct, the next part will be corrected with the normal answer, and the current screen will show the answer of the previous screen.

This device not only provides immediate feedback to students who do not fully grasp the questions but also reinforces the correct answers. The progressive learning approach and the reinforcement cascade (discriminative stimulus-behavior/response stimulus) make students more receptive and provide new ideas for teachers to plan their teaching.

However, because this model also has certain shortcomings, it can only be used as a supplementary teaching method.

On a personal level, Skinner's reinforcement theory can also provide us with a psychological basis for optimizing our approach to learning.

Skinner's theory has some self-contradictions and overly absolute assertions, but as the founder of a new system, Skinner's achievements are enough for everyone to admire, including Skinner's perseverance and persistence in studying psychology and physiology for fifteen hours a day, which is also worthy of our admiration and study.