Sublime

B. F. Skinner believed environment determines behavior, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviorism, mainly on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a cage with a food dispenser controlled by a sensor or button.

l’Américain Burrhus Skinner (1904-1990). Éminent représentant du comportementalisme avec son principe de conditionnement opérant, Skinner a inventé l’enseignement programmé.

We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has

We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment.

Skinner was one of the major intellectual forces behind the behaviorist movement in psychology—the idea that biological systems always respond a certain way to certain stimuli. Control the stimuli, and you can control the behavior. “Condition” the organism with rewards and punishments, and the organism will learn exactly how to behave. Over the dec

La escuela de pensamiento dominante se había llamado behaviorismo o conductismo. Su gran figura, B. F. Skinner, la había empezado a desarrollar durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuando las Fuerzas Aéreas estadounidenses lo contrataron para entrenar palomas que guiaran las bombas.

B. F. Skinner, the great experimental psychologist, advised, “When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study

Skinner’s goal was to make his pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred wh