Review of B. F. Skinner's The Behavior of Organisms.
Skinner’s 1938 book is still the cleanest blueprint for talking about behavior without mentalism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hilgard (1988) wrote a short reflective essay. It looks back at Skinner’s 1938 book The Behavior of Organisms. The paper calls the book “original and foundational.”
No new data were collected. The goal was to remind readers why the 1938 text still matters.
What they found
The review found that Skinner’s book was seen as groundbreaking the day it appeared. The core idea: behavior can be predicted and controlled by its consequences.
R urges modern behavior analysts to reread the book. Doing so “reconnects” them with the roots of the field.
How this fits with other research
Coleman (1987) tells the back-story. Skinner built gadget after gadget until the lever box gave clean, orderly curves. That history shows why the 1938 book could even exist.
Michael (2003) shifts the spotlight to Skinner’s 1953 book Science and Human Behavior. Jack says keep that later book “within arm’s reach.” The two papers seem to push different Skinner texts. They don’t contradict; they cover separate stages. The 1938 volume gives lab basics; the 1953 volume gives interpretation tools.
Emerson (2003) and Abbott (2013) both praise Skinner’s trick of replacing mental words with environmental ones. Hilgard (1988) makes the same plea: go back to the 1938 source to see the strategy in its first pure form.
Why it matters
If you feel stuck using mentalistic words with staff or parents, open Skinner 1938. Watch how he describes rate of response, reinforcement, and extinction without “mind” talk. Copy that style in your next meeting. You’ll give clearer explanations and stay true to the science.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
As I reread my review nearly 50 years later, I think of the circumstances. I had heard a paper by Fred at the Ithaca meeting of the APA in 1932, and recall the praise by Edna Heidbreder, who was sitting next to me, whose remark was that "He has a clean mind." The year before his book appeared, I had already cited eight of his published papers in a review of the conditioned response in relation to conventional learning experiments that appeared in the Psychological Bulletin (1937, 34, 61-102). It may be because of that the editor sent me Fred's book to review.When I received the copy of his new book to review, I read it carefully, and soon reported on it orally before Lewis Terman's weekly seminar to get comments and questions before revising my review. I was pleased by Terman's excitement over the originality of Fred's approach.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1988 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1988.50-283