Hannah Kratzke
PSY 260
Information research essay

B.F. SKINNER

- Bio and basic info on the theorist Burrhas Fredric Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in a small town of Susquehanna Pennsylvania. When Skinner was a freshman in college his brother passed away from a cerebral aneurism. Skinner was really involved in his religion during his early life, He attended bible classes and embraced a number of traditional religious beliefs but in his adolescent years he chose to abandon his religious beliefs and never returned to them. Skinner parents raised him to very high strict standards and only ever physically punished once by his mother who washed his mouth out with soap for stating a bad word. In high school Skinner earned money by playing the saxophone in jazz band and also with an orchestra. Skinner graduated college in 1926 from Hamilton College with a degree in English literature. For his postgraduate year he immediately tried to become a writer, it was a time of failure and frustration he soon realized that he had nothing of significance to say. He left college with a large desire to be a writer; He later on earned his MA within two years, earned his PhD in three years and then continued to go to school at Harvard for the next five years as a postdoctoral student. He chose to then teach at the university of Minnesota for 10 years and during that time he established himself as a nationally prominent experimental psychologist and published his now famous book (The Behavior of Organisms). Something about Russell and Watson’s books really impacted B.F. Skinner in his late adolescents perspective. In his world of operant, respondent’s, reinforcer and discrimitive stimuli were discovered and effective. It seems that Skinner’s personal experience had more to do with his selection than with his acknowledged professional experience.
- His ideas and beliefs