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Notebooks B.F. Skinner
Book by Skinner, B. F.
- GenresPsychology
386 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
3 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
B.F. Skinner
69 books496 followersBurrhus Frederic Skinner was a highly influential American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. He invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in interest experimentally and in applied settings. He discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement. In a recent survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. He was a prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles.
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October 5, 2025
A LARGE SELECTION OF BRIEF NOTES BY SKINNER ON A GREAT MANY TOPICS
Editor Robert Epstein wrote in the Introduction to this 1980 book, “I first met B.F. Skinner … [as] I began graduate work in psychology, in … 1976. When he asked me, shortly after, to spend a few weeks editing some notebooks, I readily agreed… Every time I finished editing a stack of notes, Skinner discovered another untapped shelf or file drawer… [It took] about two years in assembling this collection…” (Pg. vii)
“Because of the … many circumstances under which the notes were written, this is as much a book ABOUT Skinner as it is BY him… The notes give us a glimpse of what it means to be a behaviorist in private as well as in public. Skinner the behaviorist emerges through the notebooks as the behavioristic man---and behaviorism, as a way of life...” (Pg. viii) “Skinner’s notebooks are not mere repositories for new ideas; they are, rather, a workplace for those ideas. Hence the notes have been constantly revised and updated over the years… Because of the revisions, the historical value of many of the notes is doubtful. They should stand here as the best possible versions---from Skinner’s current perspective---of items he wrote over a period of 25 years.” (Pg. x-xi)
Skinner acknowledged, “‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ was a misleading title. It suggested that I was against freedom and personal worth. I did not advocate imposing control; control existed and should be corrected. Only the complete anarchist refuses to recognize that the individual must be restrained for the good of the group and… the species. But restraint is a threat to freedom only if it is aversive. If acting for the good of the group is positively reinforced, people will feel as free and worthy as possible. I am in favor of that. It is the best way to promote government by the people for the people.” (Pg. 5)
He recounts, “I sat beside a priest on a flight from Boston to Chicago. He began to work on a manuscript before takeoff and paid no attention as we accelerated… and were lifted into the air. As we came in… he was reading a cheap detective story and paid no attention as we touched down. I was aware of a certain resentment. Did I feel cheated because I had wanted to laugh at him when I saw signs of prayer? Or was I angry because he was neglecting to help us get the plane up and down again? If he believed in prayer, here was a chance to be of service.” (Pg. 21)
He explains, “I may seem to imply that feelings are epiphenomenal when I call them "by-products’ of behavior. A better expression is ‘collateral products.’ The feelings and the behavior are both caused by genetic and environmental histories together with the present situation.” (Pg. 25)
He argues, “If students do not learn, is it their fault? No, their teachers have not arranged effective instructional contingencies. Is it then the teachers’ fault? No, the culture has not arranged effective contingencies for them. Is it then the fault of the culture? By the time we reach this question, the notion of fault is at fault. How shall we punish a culture?... A culture could be said to be punished if it does not survive… but we change it, if at all, through other means…. Similarly, we can look for other ways of improving the behavior of teachers and students---as by designing contingencies under which productive behaviors are reinforced.” (Pg. 27)
He reports “Someone at the London School of Economics asked me, ‘If mentalism is really so powerless, why has it held the field so long.’ I said that was a question for the historian of ideas… but I [also] pointed to evolution. My questioner might have asked Darwin, ‘If natural selection is so powerful, why have people believed so long in the creation of species according to Genesis?’ The myths that explain the origin of the universe and the existence of living things, especially man, have been extremely powerful and are not yet displaced by a scientific view. Mind is a myth, with all the power of myths.” (Pg. 34)
He recalls, “At a seminar yesterday a Jesuit brought up the question of natural aversive events which would persist as a problem even if aversive control would be eliminated. What would I do about pain? I went over techniques of teaching people to ‘take’ aversive stimuli… He then got on to death and the loss of loved ones. I mentioned cultures in which death is accepted calmly… [such as] a recent Irish Catholic funeral in my neighborhood… I had already brought up the matter of personal survival after death as foreshadowing the notion of survival as a value and had pointed out that the Jews got along without the idea of immortality.” (Pg. 56-57)
He states, “I do accept metaphor as possibly the only good way of ‘describing’ feelings. One has only to say ‘I felt as if I were…’ and then describe a situation more likely to arouse a particular response in a listener or reader.. But I am usually saying other things…” (Pg. 71)
He notes [probably thinking of Noam Chomsky], “Cognitive psychologists, particularly … linguists, like to point to the extraordinary scope and subtlety of human behavior. The child soon becomes able to respond to ‘a potentially infinite number of sentences.’ … There is no question of the extraordinary complexity of human behavior, but we should not conclude that any formulation which now appears to dispose of the complexity is likely to be spurious and that the best criterion at the present time is the adequacy of an analysis in dealing with some part of the field." (Pg. 89-90)
He states, “Reasoning as an activity can be defined… It is the analysis of contingencies of reinforcement, by the help of which the reasoner may satisfy the contingencies without being directly affected by them. instead of throwing dice with a likelihood arising from the frequencies encountered in a long history of throwing one ‘examines the sample space’ and acts ‘rationally’ with respect to a given setting.” (Pg. 136)
He observes, “I find myself avoiding or canceling [using the word] ‘verbalize’ as not only vague but vague-for-purposes-of-escape. If it means ‘name’ or ‘describe,’ then why not say ‘name’ or ‘describe’? ‘Can he verbalize his anxiety?’ What does that mean? … ‘Verbalize’ masks the distinction.” (Pg. 159)
He argues, “The defender of free will says, ‘Here I am. There are many different things I can do. I am free to choose among them.’ To say this is really to confess that one’s current state inadequately represents one’s past history… If we had information about our current state that were adequate … we should know at any given time what we were going to do and hence we should know that we were not free to choose. It is our ignorance of our past history and of our current state that misleads us into thinking we have many possible futures.” (Pg. 180-181)
He explains, “A basic principle of behaviorism which has guided me throughout my professional life but which I have neglected to emphasize in my writings (it is neglected in ‘About Behaviorism’) is the importance of converting mentalistic terms to alternatives which refer to things having physical dimensions. ‘Verbal Behavior’ was my most serious work in that vein…” (Pg. 197)
He states, “There is a special difficulty in talking about intellectual behavior because the people who know are famous as knowers. Mathematicians are likely to describe how mathematicians think… Granted that such people are favorably placed to see intellect at work, it does not follow that they understand human behavior well enough to spot the relevant facts and formulate a general account of ‘thinking.’ The distinction between knowing HOW to behave and knowing ABOUT behaving is hard to make.” (Pg. 211-212)
He admits, “I find myself using mentalistic, purposive terms, and I defend myself by arguing that easy communication demands them. But finding an alternative is almost always reinforced. Just now I wrote ‘Cultures have permitted individuals to emerge in possession of great power.’ … I changed it to, ‘In some cultures individuals have emerged because the necessary contingencies have prevailed…’ A great improvement… It is not more difficult. I must keep looking.” (Pg. 216)
He explains, “In ‘About Behaviorism’ … [I did] not mean that private events cannot control behavior… I meant the causal role traditionally assigned to felt states in such expressions as ‘I struck because I was angry’ [is incorrect]. The point of my statements… was that there was no initiating action inside.” (Pg. 227)
He recounts, “When a … student asked me ‘What is love?’ I replied, ‘mutual reinforcement.’ But I was uneasy … because when one does something nice to a person one loves, it is not done to reinforce. Now, however, it seems to me that a superstitious contingency may prevail… An emotional disposition to be nice to those who are nice to us is presumably part of a genetic endowment.” (Pg. 249)
He asserts, “People don’t get up early because of what they FEEL. They may feel something AS they get up, and from it they, or we, may infer something about the causes of early rising. But feeling is not among the causes.” (Pg. 333-334)
This book will be of keen interest to those wanting to know more about Skinner the man, and how he worked.
Editor Robert Epstein wrote in the Introduction to this 1980 book, “I first met B.F. Skinner … [as] I began graduate work in psychology, in … 1976. When he asked me, shortly after, to spend a few weeks editing some notebooks, I readily agreed… Every time I finished editing a stack of notes, Skinner discovered another untapped shelf or file drawer… [It took] about two years in assembling this collection…” (Pg. vii)
“Because of the … many circumstances under which the notes were written, this is as much a book ABOUT Skinner as it is BY him… The notes give us a glimpse of what it means to be a behaviorist in private as well as in public. Skinner the behaviorist emerges through the notebooks as the behavioristic man---and behaviorism, as a way of life...” (Pg. viii) “Skinner’s notebooks are not mere repositories for new ideas; they are, rather, a workplace for those ideas. Hence the notes have been constantly revised and updated over the years… Because of the revisions, the historical value of many of the notes is doubtful. They should stand here as the best possible versions---from Skinner’s current perspective---of items he wrote over a period of 25 years.” (Pg. x-xi)
Skinner acknowledged, “‘Beyond Freedom and Dignity’ was a misleading title. It suggested that I was against freedom and personal worth. I did not advocate imposing control; control existed and should be corrected. Only the complete anarchist refuses to recognize that the individual must be restrained for the good of the group and… the species. But restraint is a threat to freedom only if it is aversive. If acting for the good of the group is positively reinforced, people will feel as free and worthy as possible. I am in favor of that. It is the best way to promote government by the people for the people.” (Pg. 5)
He recounts, “I sat beside a priest on a flight from Boston to Chicago. He began to work on a manuscript before takeoff and paid no attention as we accelerated… and were lifted into the air. As we came in… he was reading a cheap detective story and paid no attention as we touched down. I was aware of a certain resentment. Did I feel cheated because I had wanted to laugh at him when I saw signs of prayer? Or was I angry because he was neglecting to help us get the plane up and down again? If he believed in prayer, here was a chance to be of service.” (Pg. 21)
He explains, “I may seem to imply that feelings are epiphenomenal when I call them "by-products’ of behavior. A better expression is ‘collateral products.’ The feelings and the behavior are both caused by genetic and environmental histories together with the present situation.” (Pg. 25)
He argues, “If students do not learn, is it their fault? No, their teachers have not arranged effective instructional contingencies. Is it then the teachers’ fault? No, the culture has not arranged effective contingencies for them. Is it then the fault of the culture? By the time we reach this question, the notion of fault is at fault. How shall we punish a culture?... A culture could be said to be punished if it does not survive… but we change it, if at all, through other means…. Similarly, we can look for other ways of improving the behavior of teachers and students---as by designing contingencies under which productive behaviors are reinforced.” (Pg. 27)
He reports “Someone at the London School of Economics asked me, ‘If mentalism is really so powerless, why has it held the field so long.’ I said that was a question for the historian of ideas… but I [also] pointed to evolution. My questioner might have asked Darwin, ‘If natural selection is so powerful, why have people believed so long in the creation of species according to Genesis?’ The myths that explain the origin of the universe and the existence of living things, especially man, have been extremely powerful and are not yet displaced by a scientific view. Mind is a myth, with all the power of myths.” (Pg. 34)
He recalls, “At a seminar yesterday a Jesuit brought up the question of natural aversive events which would persist as a problem even if aversive control would be eliminated. What would I do about pain? I went over techniques of teaching people to ‘take’ aversive stimuli… He then got on to death and the loss of loved ones. I mentioned cultures in which death is accepted calmly… [such as] a recent Irish Catholic funeral in my neighborhood… I had already brought up the matter of personal survival after death as foreshadowing the notion of survival as a value and had pointed out that the Jews got along without the idea of immortality.” (Pg. 56-57)
He states, “I do accept metaphor as possibly the only good way of ‘describing’ feelings. One has only to say ‘I felt as if I were…’ and then describe a situation more likely to arouse a particular response in a listener or reader.. But I am usually saying other things…” (Pg. 71)
He notes [probably thinking of Noam Chomsky], “Cognitive psychologists, particularly … linguists, like to point to the extraordinary scope and subtlety of human behavior. The child soon becomes able to respond to ‘a potentially infinite number of sentences.’ … There is no question of the extraordinary complexity of human behavior, but we should not conclude that any formulation which now appears to dispose of the complexity is likely to be spurious and that the best criterion at the present time is the adequacy of an analysis in dealing with some part of the field." (Pg. 89-90)
He states, “Reasoning as an activity can be defined… It is the analysis of contingencies of reinforcement, by the help of which the reasoner may satisfy the contingencies without being directly affected by them. instead of throwing dice with a likelihood arising from the frequencies encountered in a long history of throwing one ‘examines the sample space’ and acts ‘rationally’ with respect to a given setting.” (Pg. 136)
He observes, “I find myself avoiding or canceling [using the word] ‘verbalize’ as not only vague but vague-for-purposes-of-escape. If it means ‘name’ or ‘describe,’ then why not say ‘name’ or ‘describe’? ‘Can he verbalize his anxiety?’ What does that mean? … ‘Verbalize’ masks the distinction.” (Pg. 159)
He argues, “The defender of free will says, ‘Here I am. There are many different things I can do. I am free to choose among them.’ To say this is really to confess that one’s current state inadequately represents one’s past history… If we had information about our current state that were adequate … we should know at any given time what we were going to do and hence we should know that we were not free to choose. It is our ignorance of our past history and of our current state that misleads us into thinking we have many possible futures.” (Pg. 180-181)
He explains, “A basic principle of behaviorism which has guided me throughout my professional life but which I have neglected to emphasize in my writings (it is neglected in ‘About Behaviorism’) is the importance of converting mentalistic terms to alternatives which refer to things having physical dimensions. ‘Verbal Behavior’ was my most serious work in that vein…” (Pg. 197)
He states, “There is a special difficulty in talking about intellectual behavior because the people who know are famous as knowers. Mathematicians are likely to describe how mathematicians think… Granted that such people are favorably placed to see intellect at work, it does not follow that they understand human behavior well enough to spot the relevant facts and formulate a general account of ‘thinking.’ The distinction between knowing HOW to behave and knowing ABOUT behaving is hard to make.” (Pg. 211-212)
He admits, “I find myself using mentalistic, purposive terms, and I defend myself by arguing that easy communication demands them. But finding an alternative is almost always reinforced. Just now I wrote ‘Cultures have permitted individuals to emerge in possession of great power.’ … I changed it to, ‘In some cultures individuals have emerged because the necessary contingencies have prevailed…’ A great improvement… It is not more difficult. I must keep looking.” (Pg. 216)
He explains, “In ‘About Behaviorism’ … [I did] not mean that private events cannot control behavior… I meant the causal role traditionally assigned to felt states in such expressions as ‘I struck because I was angry’ [is incorrect]. The point of my statements… was that there was no initiating action inside.” (Pg. 227)
He recounts, “When a … student asked me ‘What is love?’ I replied, ‘mutual reinforcement.’ But I was uneasy … because when one does something nice to a person one loves, it is not done to reinforce. Now, however, it seems to me that a superstitious contingency may prevail… An emotional disposition to be nice to those who are nice to us is presumably part of a genetic endowment.” (Pg. 249)
He asserts, “People don’t get up early because of what they FEEL. They may feel something AS they get up, and from it they, or we, may infer something about the causes of early rising. But feeling is not among the causes.” (Pg. 333-334)
This book will be of keen interest to those wanting to know more about Skinner the man, and how he worked.
June 6, 2014
Everyone who is doing behavioral psychology should read this master piece! It is B.F.Skinner's notes - his thoughts, ideas & observations. As a reader, I was able to understand the making of his philosophy. As a fan, I was smitten with everything he wrote - even if it meant reading it twice (something three times). So inspirational were his notes that I have decided to follow his lead and write notes; try to explain my observations in behavioral terms. A caveat to those who have not studied behavioral psychology in depth: you will be flabbergasted by his explanations! Most of his notes were on verbal behavior and he referred to his book "Verbal Behavior" numerous times. Next stop: Verbal Behavior!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews