ABSTRACT
These words were included in a citation given to Burrhus Frederic Skinner by the American Psychological Association to celebrate his ‘outstanding lifetime contribution to psychology’. This special award was given at a ceremony during the association’s annual convention on 10 August 1990. Eight days later Fred Skinner was dead. Three days after that, an obituarist in the Guardian (Sutherland 1990) asked ‘Why is it…that Skinner is currently the psychologist who is best known to the general public and why was he so eminent in learned circles?’. The questions appear benign: the answers offered are not. First, ‘he was a fanatic’ and ‘fanatics come to be believed, particularly if they…are completely convinced of their righteousness’. Second, ‘early in life he made one important discovery’ (namely that an animal’s conditioned behaviour will survive the withdrawal of reward longer after intermittent rather than continuous reward). Third, ‘he invented an ingenious automatic’ experimental procedure which allowed an experimenter to ‘scarper off to drink cups of coffee or play noughts and crosses with his colleagues’. This so-called Skinner Box, we are told, not for the first time, by this obituarist (and sadly, it has transpired not for the last), ‘has been described as a bloodless method of decerebrating the animal’, which ‘some think…could be said of the effects of Skinnerian theory on his adherents’. Fourth, Skinner ‘persisted’ with his ‘message’ ‘that it was possible to control everybody’s behaviour by applying rewards and punishments in the right way’. It is conceded that ‘some of [Skinner’s] early work was important’, but it is concluded ‘that once he became the guru of psychology he severely held up progress in the subject’. Fortunately, it seems, ‘his disciples are a dwindling band’ in contemporary psychology.
