B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, born in 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, grew up with a younger brother who died at sixteen from a cerebral hemorrhage. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was Grace. After a Christian teacher tried to calm his fear of hell—a fear his grandmother had instilled—Skinner became an atheist. As a boy, his closest friend was Raphael Miller, nicknamed Doc because his father was a doctor. The two shared an interest in gadgets and built a telegraph line between their houses, though the messages were so confusing they often had to phone each other. One summer, they started an elderberry business; to separate ripe berries from unripe ones, they devised a simple trough made from bent metal, using water to sort them by density.

Skinner attended Hamilton College in New York, intending to become a writer. He felt socially out of place due to his intellectual bent and wrote for the school paper, but as an atheist, he criticized the college’s traditional values. After earning a Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1926, he went to Harvard. There, fellow student Fred S. Keller convinced him that behavior could be studied experimentally, leading Skinner to build a prototype for what became the Skinner box and to develop other small-experiment tools with Keller. After graduating, he tried writing a novel while living with his parents—a period he later called the “Dark Years.” Discouraged by his literary skills despite encouragement from poet Robert Frost, he concluded he lacked world experience and a strong personal perspective. Reading John B. Watson’s behaviorism pushed him into graduate psychology, where he developed his own version of behaviorism.

Skinner earned his PhD from Harvard in 1931 and stayed as a researcher. In 1936, he began teaching at the University of Minnesota, then moved to Indiana University in 1945, where he chaired the psychology department from 1946 to 1947. He returned to Harvard in 1948 as a tenured professor, remaining there until his retirement in 1974. He held the Edgar Pierce Professorship of Psychology. In 1973, he signed the Humanist Manifesto II.

In 1936, he married Yvonne “Eve” Blue. They had two daughters, Julie and Deborah. Yvonne died in 1997 and is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Skinner’s public profile grew in the 1970s, and he stayed active after retiring. In 1989, he was diagnosed with leukemia and died on August 18, 1990, in Cambridge. Ten days before his death, the American Psychological Association gave him a lifetime achievement award, and he delivered a talk about his work.

Skinner’s approach, radical behaviorism, emerged in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms that often struggled with testable predictions. He believed behavior results from environmental histories of reinforcement. He used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering response rate the best measure of strength. To study this, he invented the operant conditioning chamber—the Skinner box—and the cumulative recorder to measure rates. With Charles Ferster, he produced his most influential experimental work, *Schedules of Reinforcement* (1957). He imagined applying his ideas to human communities in his 1948 utopian novel *Walden Two*, and his analysis of human behavior culminated in *Verbal Behavior* (1958). A prolific author, he published 21 books and 180 articles. Alongside John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, he is considered a pioneer of modern behaviorism, and a 2002 survey ranked him the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.