Walden Two Research Paper

Social Sciences Directory
Vol. 2, No. 4, 2-8, October 2013 th Proceedings of the 11 conference of the International Communal Studies Association

Revisiting Walden Two: sustainability from a natural science perspective
Deborah Altus *
Washburn University, USA 1
Video of conference presentation: Not available
Abstract
In his 1948 novel, Walden Two, B F Skinner proposed using principles and methods of natural science as a means to design a healthy society that was not only satisfying and meaningful to its residents but also socially and environmentally sustainable. A number of intentional communities were inspired by Skinner’s ideas, perhaps the most well-known of which is Twin Oaks, located near Louisa, Viginia, USA. Few Walden Two-inspired
communities, however, maintained a focus on behavioural science for long, possibly because they misinterpreted Walden Two as a blueprint for a community rather than a call to use natural-science methods. Comunidad Los Horcones, near Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, is one group that has maintained its focus on natural science methods since its inception in 1973.
Another group that used a science-based focus for several decades is Sunflower House, a
Walden-Two inspired student housing cooperative in Lawrence, KS, USA.
This paper will review the results of research conducted by the experimental living project at Sunflower
House to see what lessons can be gleaned about designing sustainable social systems.
B. F. Skinner was one of the most eminent psychologists, if not one of the most eminent th scientists, of the 20 century (Haggbloom, et al., 2002; Rutherford, 2009). Through his laboratory research, he established a science of behavior – the experimental analysis of behavior – and its corresponding philosophy, radical behaviorism (see Morris, Smith & Altus,
2005), although he was perhaps best known for, and also vilified for, his popular writings, including Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).
Skinner originally wrote his utopian novel, Walden Two, in 1945, as The Sun is But a Morning
Star – the title taken from the conclusion of Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In his 1979 autobiography, he indicated that the inspiration for writing the book came from a dinner party where he discussed what soldiers would do when they returned home from serving
in
World War II: He worried “…that they would abandon their crusading spirit and come back only to fall into the old lockstep American life – getting a job, marrying, renting an apartment, making a down payment on a car, having a child or two” (Skinner, 1979, p. 292).
1

The author would like to thank Edward K. Morris and L. Keith Miller of the University of Kansas, and Tom Welsh,
Florida State University, for their collaboration on previous projects that inspired and influenced this paper.

* [e-mail]
ISSN 2049-6869 http://dx.doi.org/10.7563/SSD_02_04_01 Revisiting Walden Two 3

Instead, he felt that “they should experiment; they should explore new ways of living, as th people had done in the communities of the 19 century” (p. 292). His dinner companion encouraged him to write down his ideas, and, so, Skinner set out in the same year to record on paper what it might look like to experiment with new ways of living. The subsequent book, Walden Two, was published three years later in 1948.
Skinner was not ignorant of the utopian movements and intentional communities of the past. In his 1979 autobiography (p. 292), he noted that he had grown up near the spot where Joseph Smith had dictated the Book of Mormon, had read about the Shakers and other perfectionist sects, and had gone to college near the site of the Oneida Community.
He thought that most of the communities of the nineteenth century had come to an end for irrelevant reasons and he felt that young people in the post-war era might have better luck.
He believed that “they could build a culture that would come closer to satisfying human needs than the American way of life” (Skinner, 1979, p. 292).
While Skinner and Thoreau are not typically viewed as possessing a common outlook,
Skinner felt that his book shared several premises with Thoreau’s Walden (Skinner, 1979, p.
346):
(1) No way of life is inevitable. Examine your own closely.
(2) If you do not like it, change it.
(3) Do not try to change it through political action. Even if you succeed in gaining power, you will not likely be able to use it any more wisely than your predecessors.
(4) Ask only to be left alone to solve your problems in your own way.
(5) Simplify, your needs. Learn how to be happy with fewer possessions.
To Skinner, however, Walden was a “utopia for one” (Skinner, 1973, p. 2). He was interested in addressing societal problems, not retreating from them. And he was interested in addressing them from a natural-science perspective. Data from his empirical research (e.g.,
Skinner, 1938) convinced him that behavior is a function of natural laws. Skinner felt that we should use what we know about behavioral principles to arrange conditions that promote valued outcomes rather than allow ourselves to be controlled by unknown, and potentially destructive, forces (Altus & Morris, 2008). As he wrote in the preface to Walden Two when it was reissued in 1976: “Either we do nothing and allow a miserable and probably catastrophic future to overtake us, or we use our knowledge about human behavior to create a social environment in which we shall live productive and creative lives and do so without jeopardizing the chances that those who follow us will be able to do the same.
Something like a Walden Two would not be a bad start” (p. xvi).
In Walden Two, Skinner described practices he thought might help to promote health, wealth and wisdom (see Altus & Morris, 2009) – for example, regular physical exercise and nutritious meals to promote physical health; meaningful work and plentiful leisure time to promote mental health; equal distribution of resources and compensation of all forms of work to promote community health; energy-efficient dwellings and reduction of waste to promote environmental health; equitable participation in labor and judicious use of resources to promote wealth; and free and equal education in both academic and interpersonal skills to promote wisdom.

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Yet despite the careful description of these practices in his novel, Skinner did not write
Walden Two as a blueprint (Altus & Morris, 2008; 2009). The practices Skinner described were simply conjectures about methods that might promote the good life at one point in the community’s existence and were based on values that were meaningful to him. Indeed, the main theme that Skinner stressed in his novel and that he communicated through Frazier was that of experimentation. As Frazier tells Castle: “The actual achievement is beside the point. The main thing is, we encourage our people to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement. A constantly experimental attitude toward everything – that’s all we need” (Skinner, 1948, p. 25). And, later, Frazier adds: “I’ve very much misrepresented the whole system if you suppose that any of the practices I’ve described are fixed. We try out many different techniques. Gradually we work toward the best possible set” (p. 106).
Many people, however, seemed to miss this point, and have viewed Walden Two as a blueprint rather than a call to applying scientific principles to daily life. During the late 1960s and early 70s when interest in Walden Two took off (sales jumped from only about 750 per year for the first dozen or so years to sales of 100,000 per year in the early 1970s; see Bjork,
1993), a number of groups attempted to form intentional communities based on the practices described in the book (see Kuhlmann, 2005). Some were more successful than others. Undoubtedly the best known of these communities is Twin Oaks (see Kinkade, 1973,
1994; Kuhlmann, 2005), an intentional community established in 1967 near Louisa, Virginia,
USA. Other Walden Two-inspired communities that still exist include Comunidad Los
Horcones, established in 1973 near Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico (see Comunidad Los
Horcones, 1986; Chance, 1999; Fellowship for Intentional Community, 2012a); Lake Village, established in 1971 near Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA (see Altus, 1998; Fellowship for
Intentional Community, 2012b); and Sunflower House, established in 1969 in Lawrence,
Kansas, USA (see Miller & Feallock, 1976; Fellowship for Intentional Community, 2008).
Twin Oaks began as a Walden Two-inspired community, but members became disillusioned with what Walden Two had to offer in the way of effective practices in relatively short order.
Kat Kinkade, one of the founders of Twin Oaks, wrote in 1999 that, at first, “we accepted the blueprint in Walden Two as if its author knew all about how to found and maintain such a community” (Kinkade, 1999, p. 51). Soon, though, they found numerous faults with practices outlined in Walden Two – for example, mothers’ unwillingness to have their infants raised in a community nursery, the impracticality of rammed earth bricks, the lack of need for air cribs, and the impossibility of the four-hour workday (Kinkade, 1999).
However, as Valerie Renwick, a long-term member of Twin Oaks, wrote in 2009, “We continue to employ both the planner-manager self-government model and the labor-credit work system, both of which were taken directly from Walden Two” (Renwick, 2009, p. 337).
The labor-credit system, as developed by Kat Kinkade at Twin Oaks, has been credited by
Allen Butcher (2013) as “the most significant accomplishment since St. Benedict created
‘Benedict’s Rule,’ which saved and reinvigorated Catholic Monasticism.” Butcher continues that “Kat has done essentially the same for secular communalism.”
What Kinkade did was to take the idea of the labor-credit system from Walden Two and figure out how to make it work in the real word. In other words, she took precisely the experimental attitude that Skinner was championing in Walden Two. Kinkade and

Revisiting Walden Two 5

community members developed the labor-credit system into a workable system that has been emulated by many communities (e.g., see Kuhlmann, 2005) and that is seen as one of the reasons behind the community’s remarkable longevity (Butcher, 2013).
Kat wrote that they “experimented” for five years with the variable credit system described in Walden Two, including “at least four variations on the variable credit system” (Kinkade,
1994, p. 31) but ultimately rejected it for a fixed system of one credit per hour. In her 1994 book, Is It Utopia Yet, Kinkade admitted that the labor-credit system was not perfect and was a work in progress. While she noted that the system helped to promote equality in work-sharing, reduced resentment and guilt, and allowed for flexibility, she conceded that there were problems with the system. For example, she pointed out that some people lie on their labor sheets, others can’t handle the freedom that comes with a flexible work schedule, and the focus on the labor credit detracts from the intrinsic enjoyment of the activity (Kinkade, 1994). But she concluded that she wasn’t bothered by the flaws in the system and even saw them as part of her interest in it. She concluded, as Skinner would have approved, that “problem solving is what we do here” (p. 36).
Roger Ulrich, the founder of Lake Village, a community also inspired by Walden Two, expressed similar sentiments about the difficulty of implementing practices described in the book, such as a point system for work that they abandoned after they discovered that children were getting points for cleaning when all they were doing was “sweeping cat litter under the carpet” (Altus, 1999, p. 54).
Still, like Kinkade, Ulrich seemed grateful to Skinner for the initial inspiration provided by
Walden Two. In a 1998 interview, Ulrich noted that “…what attracted me to Walden Two was its social conscience. That for better or for worse, we should be doing some things with children early, and things like that… And then I got very much taken by the thing that he had
Rogers say to him in the opening pages of the book: ‘It’s a job for research but not the kind you do in a university. You have to experiment with your own life. Teaching is alright to turn people on, but in terms of finding things out, you’ve got to experiment, and experiment with your own life.’ So that was, and still is, very important to me” (Kuhlmann, 2005, p. 219).
Two Walden Two-inspired communities that have focused deliberately on following the science of behavior rather than simply emulating practices in the novel are Comunidad Los
Horcones and Sunflower House. At Comunidad Los Horcones, members not only apply behavioral principles to group practices, but they also experiment on their own behavior in an effort to improve their individual and collective lives (see Chance, 1999). Children start recording their own behavior around age 3 or 4, and all members keep clipboards with their own behavioral self-management records (Comunidad Los Horcones, 2002).
Juan Robinson-Bustamante, son of one of the founders of Comunidad Los Horcones, expressed the community’s philosophy in a 1999 interview: “From our point of view, the fact that a community is inspired by the novel does not make it a ‘Walden Two.’ In our opinion, a
Walden Two community is one in which the members are strongly committed to applying the science of behavior to design a new and better society. We consider Los Horcones a
Walden Two community because we do this to shape a humanistic society based on cooperation, mutual help, nonviolence, and ecological sustainability” (Altus, 1999, p. 56). He adds: “I’m as optimistic as my parents about the advantages of using the science of behavior

6 D. Altus

to design a better culture… To me, living in a Walden Two culture is a lifetime project. I am strongly convinced, as grandfather Skinner was, that only by applying the science of behavior to cultural design, as we do it in Los Horcones, can we live happy and productive lives” (p.
57).
At Sunflower House, a Walden Two-inspired student housing cooperative at the University of
Kansas, the first couple of years were filled with problems. The work was not shared equitably, the building was not adequately cleaned or maintained, meals were not prepared on a predictable schedule, and many of the rooms remained vacant. If equity and well-being are primary constituents of social sustainability as some theorists have suggested (e.g.,
Barron & Gauntlett, 2002; Magis & Shinn, 2009), the co-op did not appear to be socially sustainable. To address this problem, members, with the help of behavioral psychology professor L. Keith
Miller at the University of Kansas, designed a work-sharing system for completing the domestic work that followed behavior-analytic principles. First, they defined each job with a checklist of tasks. Then, they created a labor-credit system where members would earn credits for completing these jobs and the credits would be exchangeable for a reduction in rent. They created a job for an inspector who would check each night to see if work had been completed. This job was rotated regularly among members. Credits were given only if the inspector judged that the work was at least 90% complete. After creating the worksharing system, they ran an experiment to test its efficacy (Feallock & Miller, 1976). They measured the percentage of cleaning that was done each day under different conditions.
First, for several weeks, the work-sharing system was put into place. During this condition, a mean of 96% of the cleaning tasks were completed each day. During the next condition, the labor-credits were removed. The percentage of tasks completed dropped precipitously, hitting a low of 33%. Members were very dissatisfied living under these conditions and labor credits were reinstated “at the demand of members after 18 days” (Feallock & Miller, 1976,
p. 280). After credits were reinstated, the percentage of cleaning tasks completed jumped to 93% over the next five-and-a-half weeks.
Sunflower House has, in the spirit of Walden Two, taken an experimental approach to the design of many of its practices over the years. In addition to empirically analyzing the laborcredit system, studies have been conducted on its management system (Johnson, Welsh,
Miller, & Altus, 1991), meeting system (Welsh, Johnson, Miller, Merrill, & Altus, 1989; Welsh,
Miller, & Altus, 1994), system of educating new members (Altus, Welsh, Miller, &
Merrill,1993), and worker recognition system (Altus, Welsh, & Miller, 1991). In addition, data on member turn-over has been collected and analyzed to try to understand why members leave the co-op (Couch, Miller, Johnson, & Welsh, 1986) and a system was developed for making systematic changes so that the co-op could operate effectively without outside support from Professor Miller and his research team (Merrill, 1984).
But the goal has not been to become wedded to these systems. Rather, the goal has been to teach and maintain an experimental approach to solving problems so that decisions are made based on data rather than emotions or politics. The work-sharing system, for example, has evolved considerably over the years. Members eventually decided that they preferred a self-report system over an inspection system. They were able to maintain

Revisiting Walden Two 7

satisfactory levels of participation in housework with this system. Data collected 37 years after the co-op opened showed that around 90% of cleaning tasks were still being completed each night with the self-inspection system (Miller, Welsh, Altus, & Zwicker, 2006). What mattered about the work-sharing system was not that specific components were being used, but that the members were taking an experimental approach to analyzing the impact of their decisions and that the system was meeting their needs. Frazier’s words are echoed in their approach: “The actual achievement is beside the point. The main thing is, we encourage our people to view every habit and custom with an eye to possible improvement. A constantly experimental attitude toward everything – that’s all we need” (Skinner, 1948, p.
25).
This is not to say that practices didn’t matter to Skinner. On the contrary, Skinner stressed the importance of regular, systematic evaluation of community practices by residents in
Walden Two to ensure their social acceptability (Altus & Morris, 2008). Sunflower House has done the same (e.g., Feallock & Miller, 1976; Johnson, Welsh, Miller & Altus, 1991). Systems were not studied solely by observing objective behavior. Measurement of member satisfaction was conducted through surveys and votes to determine the social significance of the goals, the social appropriateness of the methods, and the social importance of the results – a practice that has become standard in applied behavior analysis since the late
1970s (Wolf, 1978). Doing so helps to promote democratic participation in the design and evaluation of community practices and helps to increase the chances that these practices promote equity and human well-being – conditions that are primary constituents of social sustainability (Magis & Shinn, 2009).
In conclusion, Skinner’s contribution to the intentional community movement is not any of the specific practices described in Walden Two but, rather, the process for achieving them –
i.e., adopting an experimental approach to design a society that is socially sustainable – in other words, a society that is equitable, democratic, and promotes the well-being of its members (see Altus & Morris, 2009). While a community’s practices will always be situated in a specific historical context, a naturalistic study of behavior suggests principles that are enduring (Altus & Morris, 2008). Skinner expresses this theme succinctly in his 1979 autobiography: ‘‘Regard no practice as immutable. Change and be ready to change again.
Accept no eternal verity. Experiment’’ (Skinner, 1979, p. 346).
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