How Did B. F. Skinner Influence Psychology

B.F. Skinner was an American behaviorist and psychologist. His major

influence on psychology was the introduction of behaviorism. Behaviorism is the

theory that behaviors and actions can be conditioned without any second

thoughts. Behaviorist theories also believe that psychological disorders can be

treated through the conditioning of appropriate behaviors. There are two

kinds of conditioning, classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning

is changing of a behavior through the pairing of two stimuli. Classical

conditioning is well known as being research by Ivan Pavlov, one of the

behaviorists who influenced Skinner. Operant conditioning is changing and

conditioning a behavior through reinforcement, whether the reinforcement is

positive,
After graduating, his writing career had little success and he enrolled at

Harvard University for his graduate degree, with a new desire to study

psychology.

During his psychology career, Watson heavily influenced him, as well as

Pavlov and Edward Thorndike, and their work and experiments with behaviorism.

Skinner was interested in how stimulus had control over behavior - consequence.

During his development of operant conditioning, he came up with what was

known as the Skinner Box. Operant conditioning is the conditioning of human

and/or animals behaviors with the promise of either reward or punishment. The

Skinner Box allowed Skinner to observe animals interacting within their

environment. Some of these animals he observed were rats, and pigeons. While

observing the rats, he saw that the rats learned to use the lever to dispense

amounts of food. While observing the pigeons, he came across similar results.

The only difference being that the pigeons learned to peck at a disc in order to

dispel food. These experiments with the Skinner Box allowed Skinner to discover

that when learning behavior, a form of reinforcement is key to enhancing