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Essay on Behavioral Analysis
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born March 20, 1904, in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna. His father was a lawyer, and his mother a strong and intelligent housewife. His upbringing was old-fashioned and hard working. B.F. Skinner is a behavioral psychologist who became famous for his work with rats using his Skinner box. He took the extreme liberty of transferring his experience and theories of rats directly to human beings. It should be kept in mind that rats and people are tremendously different creatures, yet Skinner had no problem with easily assuming what was true for rats, on a very simple scale, would be applicable to human beings in very different and complex situations.
The theory of B.F. Skinner is based upon the idea that learning is a function of change in overt behavior. Changes in behavior are the result of an individual's response to events (stimuli) that occur in the environment. A response produces a consequence such as defining a word, hitting a ball, or solving a math problem. When a particular Stimulus-Response (S-R) pattern is reinforced (rewarded), the individual is conditioned to respond. The distinctive characteristic of operant conditioning relative to previous forms of behaviorism is that the organism can emit responses instead of only eliciting response due to an external stimulus.
B. F. Skinner’s entire system is based on operant conditioning. The organism is in the process of operating on the environment, which in ordinary terms means it is bouncing around it world, doing what it does. During this operating, the organism encounters a special kind of stimulus, called a reinforcing stimulus, or simply a reinforce. This special stimulus has the effect of increasing the operant that is, the behavior occurring just before the reinforce. This is operant conditioning: "the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organisms’ tendency to repeat the behavior in the future." (Skinner, 1950) ...............
