Verbal Behavior: Extended Edition

by B.F. Skinner

Skinner called Verbal Behavior his most important book. It took him over twenty years to complete it. The book extends his laboratory-based research on selection-by-consequences to the behavior of talking, writing, gesturing, and even thinking. These verbal actions differ from other behavior, he explains, because they do not operate on the environment directly, but rather through the behavior of a verbal community. Skinner illustrates his analysis with examples from literature, the arts, and the sciences, as well as from his own verbal behavior and that of his colleagues and children. Today, teachers and parents who work with children or adults lacking verbal skills will find Skinner’s analysis key to teaching others to communicate effectively.

This Extended Edition includes three of Skinner’s articles published after his 1957 original book: “A Lecture on Having a Poem” (1971), “The Evolution of Verbal Behavior” (1986), and “The Behavior of the Listener” (1988). They address creativity, how verbal behavior arose, and the role that listeners play in his analysis.

Now comes with a copy of the Study Guide (PDF download).

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Burrhus 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.