B F Skinner Radical Behaviorism Analysis

Thoughts and emotions can play just as big a role in behavioral outcomes as conditioned learning does. The greatest flaw in B.F. Skinner’s concept of radical behaviorism is his thinking that internal mental processes are irrelevant to behavioral outcomes. Skinner’s concept of behaviorism has the concept of tabula rasa, that a newborn baby’s brain is a blank slate, that the child has no organized behavior. He believed that all brains worked in the same way, that performing psychological experiments on a mouse’s brain would have the same effects as a human brain would. There are huge differences between the environments Skinner performed his experiments in and the environment of the everyday life of human, differences that Skinner did not take …show more content…
Skinner claimed that internal mental processes, such as thoughts and feelings, were complete irrelevant to behavioral outcomes, which is one of the greatest flaws of his concept of radical behaviorism. Humans are social animals, so they have very strong procedural memory and conscious attention, both of which include emotion. A human is more likely to remember how to do something well if doing it makes them happy; if they enjoy doing it. This does not meant that they are being conditioned to enjoy it, a child may enjoy playing piano even if they are not getting a reward after they practice. A child is less likely to perform an action more than once if it made them sad, even something that did not make them feel physical pain. A young child may accidentally step on their dog, and seeing the dog’s pain and/or fear, become sad that they hurt something they loved. The child is less likely to step on the dog again, even though the dog did not bite them. The child feels empathy for the dog, and guilt for what they had done. By Skinner’s concept, the child would not be concerned about the dog’s emotional reaction, and would only fully remember to avoid stepping on the dog if the dog bit or frightened them. When a pigeon is completely alone in a box with two levers to push, the only outcome seen will be the ones made by conditioned learning. Humans are much more complex than pigeons, and it is impossible to base human development off of a non-social animal alone in a box with only a few options of actions to