Bf Skinner Radical Behaviorism Summary

B.F. Skinner was a radical behaviorist who is most known for his self-titled Skinner Box and operant conditioning. Radical behaviorism assumes that behavior should be viewed as a consequence resulting from environmental histories of reinforcement. Behaviorism as a whole also does not take internal events, such as thinking, perceiving and unobservable emotions as an appropriate cause of an organism’s behaviors. However, B.F. Skinner was an exception to this traditional definition of behaviorism. Skinner accepted the value of thoughts, emotions and other internal events as they relate to actions, but did not believe that they were the sole driving force. He based his research off of the idea that behavior is something that is shaped and …show more content…
The students will likely stop talking and being disruptive to stop the beeping from continuing. The beeping in this case is considered to be an aversive stimulus. Using the beeping to get the class to refocus and quiet down is likely to keep them from getting rowdy and disruptive in the future. This is similar to the principles at play in the seatbelt example described earlier. The students would rather the beeping to be removed than to continue their current behavior with the beeping in …show more content…
This type of conditioning is aimed at decreasing the undesired behavior by removing something that is pleasurable to the organism. A common example of this in parenting is to send a child to their room after they did not listen to their parent. The point of this is to make it so that the child is away from what they enjoy and that this removal will make it so that they listen in the future. This can often make children defiant and does not really show them what they need to do to correct their behavior. It is similar to positive punishment in the way that as soon as they are not sent to their room for refusing to listen, they will never listen in the future. There is less follow through with this type of conditioning. An example of negative punishment in the classroom would be sending a child to to the office for not listening to a teacher in class. This does not mean that the child will always listen in the future as a result, it can mean that the opposite becomes true. This could actually make the child more defiant as a result, thinking that there is no other way for them to act because they will always get sent to the office. Instead, it might be helpful to use positive reinforcement and praise them when they follow instructions and