The most influential psychologist of the century first wanted to be a novelist
B. F. Skinner graduated in English literature and spent a miserable stretch trying to write fiction, despite encouragement from Robert Frost. He gave up, discovered John B. Watson's behaviourism, and went on to invent the Skinner box. A 2002 survey ranked him the most influential psychologist of the twentieth century.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, in 1904, the son of a lawyer. The tinkering started early. With his boyhood friend Raphael Miller, nicknamed Doc, he rigged a telegraph line between their houses and, while selling elderberries door to door, built a water trough that let ripe berries sink into a bucket while unripe ones washed over the edge. A teacher's attempt to calm his fear of the hell his grandmother described turned him into an atheist.
At Hamilton College he felt socially out of place and wrote for the student paper, finishing a degree in English in 1926. What followed he called the Dark Years: living with his parents, failing to produce a novel and deciding he lacked the experience and viewpoint a writer needs. Watson's work pulled him toward psychology, and at Harvard a fellow student, Fred S. Keller, persuaded him that behaviour could be studied experimentally. Skinner built a prototype of his famous chamber there and earned a PhD in 1931.
His research centred on operant conditioning, the strengthening of behaviour through its consequences, with response rate as his preferred gauge of strength. The operant conditioning chamber, nicknamed the Skinner box, and the cumulative recorder made that measurable. With Charles Ferster he published Schedules of Reinforcement in 1957, his most influential experimental work. He called his broader philosophy radical behaviourism, and he is counted with Watson and Ivan Pavlov among the founders of modern behaviourism.
Skinner taught at Minnesota from 1936 and Indiana from 1945, chairing its psychology department, before returning to Harvard in 1948 as Edgar Pierce Professor, a post he held until retiring in 1974. He produced 21 books and 180 articles, including the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two, which imagined a community run on his principles, and Verbal Behavior, dated 1958. He signed the Humanist Manifesto II in 1973 and died in 1990.
Source: B. F. Skinner
