Walden two: The morality of anarchy.
Skinner’s Walden Two is a contingency-managed anarchist society, not a dictatorship—use it to spark discussion on decentralized behavioral governance.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The author re-read Skinner’s novel Walden Two. He asked: Is this place a dictatorship or something else?
He treated the book as data. He mapped every rule, reward, and punishment. He looked for who gives orders.
What they found
No boss runs the town. Instead, daily life is stitched together with small, natural consequences.
People garden, cook, or teach because the work itself pays off. The community keeps going without top-down force.
How this fits with other research
Michael (2003) gives the same message on a smaller scale. Keep Skinner’s 1953 book open on your desk. Use its rules-of-thumb to interpret any behavior you see.
Scibak (2025) stretches the lens the other way. He says voting is just operant behavior. Both papers show Skinnerian thinking scales from one person to whole nations.
Hake (1982) set the stage. He urged us to study human social behavior in the lab first. The 1987 paper takes that data and shows what a fully-built society could look like.
Why it matters
You can run a classroom, group home, or clinic the Walden Two way. Replace bossy rules with built-in pay-offs. Post the daily schedule, let clients choose tasks, and tie privileges to safe, helpful behavior. The system keeps itself running while you focus on teaching new skills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The utopian label is often pinned on calls for comprehensive change as a means of dismissing them from serious consideration.... [S]ocial orders come and go, and those who indulge in utopian thinking may be more prepared for... the inevitability of widespread societal transformation.... Keeping utopia in mind can prevent our settling for minor reforms when more significant change might be possible. (Fox, 1985, p. 55)When... I called myself a benign anarchist... someone said that that was not like the dictatorship of Walden Two. But Walden Two was anarchistic.... The functions delegated to [authority figures] in the world at large were performed by the people themselves through face-to-face commendation and censure. (Skinner, 1983, p. 426, emphasis his)The issue for anarchists is not whether there should be structure or order, but what kind there should be and what its sources ought to be. The individual or group which has sufficient liberty to be self-regulating will have the highest degree of order; the imposition of order from above and outside induces resentment and rebellion where it does not encourage childlike dependence and impotence, and so becomes a force for disorder. (Barclay, 1982, p. 17).
The Behavior analyst, 1987 · doi:10.1007/BF03392425