B F Skinner Foundation: 7 books

On Parent's Day, in 1952, B. F. Skinner visited his daughter's fourth grade math class. As he watched the lesson, he became increasingly uncomfortable. Almost every principle of effective teaching that he had studied for more than 20 years was being violated in that classroom. Yet it was a typical...

As the title suggests, this book contains articles that Skinner first published elsewhere. The articles range widely in content, from the famous “A Case History in Scientific Method” to “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret.” The book is divided into the following sections: PART I: The Implications...

The contingent relationship between actions and their consequences lies at the heart of Skinner’s experimental analysis of behavior. Particular patterns of behavior emerge depending upon the contingencies established. Ferster and Skinner examined the effects of different schedules of reinforcement...

With the publication of his first book, The Behavior of Organisms (1938), B. F. Skinner launched a new science based on selection by consequences as the mechanism through which behavior changes during the lifetime of the individual. The book summarizes nearly ten years of research, spanning the years...

In 1934, at the age of 30, B. F. Skinner found himself at a dinner sitting next to Professor Alfred North Whitehead. Never one to lose an opportunity to promote behaviorism, Skinner expounded its main tenets to the distinguished philosopher.  Whitehead acknowledged that science might account...

B. F. Skinner titled this book, Contingencies of Reinforcement, after the heart of his science of behavior. Contingencies relate classes of actions to postcedent events and to the contexts in which those action-postcedent relations occur. The basic processes seem straightforward, but many people do...

Keller and Shoenfeld’s Principles of Psychology, published in 1950, was written as an introductory text to be used in the two-semester Psychology 1-2 course at Columbia University. It is a systematic approach in that a small number of functional relations described in B. F. Skinner’s The Behavior...