Preview

Bf Skinner Research Paper

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
268 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Bf Skinner Research Paper
B.F. Skinner and Sigmund Freud are often viewed as polar opposites; upon comparison, however, Skinner and Freud both believed that a system of rewards and punishments was necessary to increase desirable behavior.
Freud believed that the superego, the component of the personality that was moral and unselfish, was created through the rewards and punishments that a child was given by their parents and society. Freud felt that our impulses, the id, were controlled by the externally derived superego.
Skinner, similar to Freud, believed that desirable behavior was increased through the system of providing rewards, positive reinforcement, and punishments. Skinner's experimental method, operant conditioning, was based off the principles of reward,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Assessment Cypop30

    • 4413 Words
    • 18 Pages

    B.F. Skinner, born on March 20th 1904, was an American behavioural psychologist who carried who carried out many experiments based on how behaviour is shaped and that all humans will regurgitate the things they enjoy doing and avoid those they dislike. He understood that creative people will be rewarded positively in order for that person to take an interest in that particular activity and develop further. He based his theories on self-observation, causing him to support behaviourism, believing that people should be controlled through systematic rewards. Skinner discovered and advanced the “Rate of response” as a dependant variable psychological research. He was criticised as many scientists are, but was called both “evil and hateful” yet also “warm and enthusiastic.”…

    • 4413 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Skinner pursued the foundation of behaviourism (also referred to as stimulus-response psychology), which suggested that psychology should only study observable, measurable behaviour. Skinner investigated the observable processes of learning. Learning is said to occur as a result of associations being made between stimulus and responses that didn’t exist before learning takes…

    • 1454 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This essay will cover a wide range of material to identify, compare and contrast the work of Harry Harlow and Burrhus Frederick Skinner. Harlow and Skinner did research and investigated the influences on behaviour; this essay will draw upon both investigations. Further into the essay it will identify some similarities and differences into both researches with a supported argument about the importance and implications of both studies. The essay will then conclude with a conclusion on the findings.…

    • 1537 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Skinner thought classical conditioning was too simple to explain something like the human mind. Skinner went to work to expand on the finding of Thorndike and Watson. Skinner worked to expand Thorndike’s Law of Effect. Skinner eventually coined the word “operant conditioning”. Skinner built a device called “Skinner’s box”. The device consists of a lever connected to a food dispenser, only dispensing when the lever is pressed. He found that the rat will reduce “error” between attempts and goes directly to the lever. The device has reinforced the rat’s behavior. From this experiment, Skinner discovered positive and negative reinforcement. A positive reinforcement means giving a stimuli and a negative reinforcement is taking away a stimuli, along with punishment. Punishment weakens the behavior rather than reinforcement which strengthen the behavior. Positive and negative reinforcement works on punishment too. The Skinner Box also showed that the reinforcement had to be scheduled or else the rats will start giving…

    • 457 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    counselling theory essay

    • 1682 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Dr Sidmud Freud saw human behaviour as a result of give and take between three parts of the psyche (personality). The three parts are the id which is pleasure, too much of everything and instance gratification. The ego is the sensible side of us and try’s to find ways of satisfying the id in a way that the super ego will agree with, and that is also in line with reality. The super ego is the moral part of the psyche; its punitive comes from our parents, teachers and society. It uses anxiety and guilt to prevent us from acting on the id’s impulses.…

    • 1682 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    B.F. Skinner, who favored the behaviorist approach to psychology, criticized the psychoanalytical theory by suggesting that psychology should be the study of behavior and not just the mind. However, Skinner's approach was radical, in that he did consider our inner thoughts and feelings, but denied that they had anything to do with behavior. His study of behavior involved close contact with the experimental laboratory, where he experimented with small animals such as rats and pigeons. As the experimenter, he was able to study the use of stimuli and reinforcement of behavior.…

    • 821 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The structural model, which was later conceived by Freud, further divided personality into the id, the ego and superego. Freud maintained that at birth there is but one personality structure, the id. This is the selfish part one’s self that is concerned with satisfying personal desires and is buried entirely in the unconscious. The ego part is based on the reality principal and based on satisfying id impulses while taking into consideration the realities of the situation. The ego’s job is to keep the id impulses in the unconscious, since id impulses tend to be socially unacceptable and may pose a threat to one’s self. Freud maintained that this was aimed at reducing tension for needs that go unmet. The superego helps in ones decisions based on what is acceptable so as to not violate society’s moral code like lying, cheating and stealing; thus the superego concept can be called ones conscience.…

    • 1145 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner, or B.F. Skinner, was a strong critic of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical approach to psychology. Skinner believed that studying the unconscious mind was a waste of time to finding out why a person acted a certain way and that only what a person actually did mattered. Greatly influenced by behaviorists John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, Skinner also concentrated on observable behaviors that could be explained scientifically.…

    • 572 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Positive Reinforcement

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The best way to understand the full importance of the applications of B. F. Skinner's (1953, 1971) thinking and his research results is to read his novel, Walden Two (1948). The book is about a utopian…

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Skinner's most well known and respected contribution to behaviorism and psychology in general was his findings to do with behavior and the effect of reinforcement on responses and the role of operant conditioning in learning.…

    • 1571 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Freud id, ego, superego

    • 954 Words
    • 4 Pages

    To become a healthy adult socially, mentally and physically Freud believed that children must develop a reasonable balance between id and superego. Id is the natural, unsocialized, biological portion of self, including hunger and sexual urges. Superego is composed of internalized social ideas about right and wrong.…

    • 954 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The philosophy of science is the study of how science goes about its own business, that is, how science obtains knowledge. Knowledge must be obtained gradually. How knowledge is obtained, and even what knowledge really is, remains controversial. One aspect of scientific activity that all philosophers of science seem to agree on is the dialectical nature of scientific knowledge. In other words, it seems clear that scientists are in a constant swing between adherence to rules of proper scientific conduct such as methodologies, theories, hypothesis, and the rejection of these same rules to adopt new ideas. The philosophy of psychology also closely monitors contemporary work conducted in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and artificial…

    • 2418 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Citing Someone's Work

    • 302 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Skinner's system is based on operant conditioning. The organism, while going about it's everyday activities, is in the process of “operating” on the environment. In the course of its activities, the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforcer. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the the behavior occurring just before the reinforcer.…

    • 302 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Operant Conditioning

    • 319 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Operant conditioning was discovered in 1937 by Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904-1990). Although Skinner’s theory was based both on reinforcement and punishment, his research focused almost entirely on reinforcement. Skinner considered punishment a relatively ineffective technique with many negative side effects. He believed that practical applications of operant conditioning should be avoided whenever possible. His primary method for studying operant conditioning was the well known piece of apparatus that he invented, which was referred to by others as the Skinner box. The purpose of the Skinner box was to study operant conditioning in rats. For instance, every time the rat pressed down on a brass lever, a food pellet dropped down…

    • 319 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Skinner discovered what is now called operant conditioning with the Skinner box (Kowalski & Western, 2009). Skinner used pigeons and feed as a reward system. If the pigeon pushed one colored button it would get a small but immediate serving of food, but if the pigeon pushed another button it would get a much larger reward but have to wait a brief period before the food delivered. Through the work with the pigeons, Skinner concluded that people operate under a system of rewards and punishments. Operant behavior focuses on the environment and is maintained by its consequences, while classical conditioning deals with the conditioning of reflexive behaviors that are elicited by neutral stimuli. Behaviors conditioned through classical conditioning are not maintained by…

    • 1242 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays