SHAPING OF A BEHAVIORIST Part Two of an Autobiography

B. F. Skinner

ISBN 10: 0394505816 / ISBN 13: 9780394505817

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1979

About this Item

Very Good+ in a Very Good dust jacket. Closed tears throughout top of front and rear panel and spine crown. ; 9.4 X 6.1 X 1.5 inches.

Seller Inventory # 304143

Bibliographic Details

• Title: SHAPING OF A BEHAVIORIST Part Two of an Autobiography
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394505816
• ISBN 13: 9780394505817
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Seller catalogs:
  • Psychology
  • misc sale
  • Other

About this title

Synopsis

Continues Skinner's life story through the crucial years that saw the development of his controversial behaviorist philosophy, his famous experiments with rats and pigeons, the invention of the Skinner Box, and the writing of Walden Two

About the Author

B. F. Skinner, an American behavioral psychologist, is known for his many contributions to learning theory. His Behavior of Organisms (1938) reports his experiments with the study of reflexes. Walden Two (1949), a utopian novel, describes a planned community in which positive rather than negative reinforcers serve to maintain appropriate behavior; the novel stimulated the founding of some experimental communities. In Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Skinner attempted to show that only what he called a technology of behavior could save democracy from the many individual and social problems that plague it. (An early example of this technology is the so-called Skinner box for conditioning a human child.) A teacher at Harvard University from 1948 until his retirement, Skinner was for some the model of the objective scientist, for others the epitome of the heartless behaviorist who would turn people into automatons.