While attending Harvard, a fellow student, Fred S. Keller, convinced Skinner that he could make an experimental science of the study of behavior.

[17] He became disillusioned with his literary skills despite encouragement from the poet Robert Frost, concluding that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write.

Ten days before his death, he was given the lifetime achievement award by the American Psychological Association and gave a talk concerning his work.

For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment.

Skinner summarized this relationship by saying that a discriminative stimulus (e.g. light or sound) sets the occasion for the reinforcement (food) of the operant (lever-press).

[29] Complex behavior often appears suddenly in its final form, as when a person first finds his way to the elevator by following instructions given at the front desk.

First, relatively simple behaviors come under the control of verbal stimuli: the child learns to "jump," "open the book," and so on.

Though, as he said, natural selection has now "made its case," he regretted that essentially the same process, "reinforcement", was less widely accepted as underlying human behavior.

When participants behave in desirable ways, their behavior is reinforced with tokens that can be changed for such items as candy, cigarettes, coffee, or the exclusive use of a radio or television set.

Skinner designed it for use with the operant chamber as a convenient way to record and view the rate of responses such as a lever press or a key peck.

The cumulative recorder was a key tool used by Skinner in his analysis of behavior, and it was very widely adopted by other experimenters, gradually falling out of use with the advent of the laboratory computer and use of line graphs.

[40] Skinner's major experimental exploration of response rates, presented in his book with Charles Ferster, Schedules of Reinforcement, is full of cumulative records produced by this device.

[41] Though this was the main goal, it also was designed to reduce laundry, diaper rash, and cradle cap, while still allowing the baby to be more mobile and comfortable.

Skinner's article in Ladies Home Journal, titled "Baby in a Box", caught the eye of many and contributed to skepticism about the device (Bjork, 1997).

Skinner advocated the use of teaching machines for a broad range of students (e.g., preschool aged to adult) and instructional purposes (e.g., reading and music).

Today computers run software that performs similar teaching tasks, and there has been a resurgence of interest in the topic related to the development of adaptive learning systems.

[49] During World War II, the US Navy required a weapon effective against surface ships, such as the German Bismarck class battleships.

Skinner worked closely with the US Naval Research Laboratory continuously testing the pigeon's tracking capacity for guiding missiles to their intended targets.

Skinner argued that education has two major purposes: He recommended bringing students' behavior under appropriate control by providing reinforcement only in the presence of stimuli relevant to the learning task.

Because he believed that human behavior can be affected by small consequences, something as simple as "the opportunity to move forward after completing one stage of an activity" can be an effective reinforcer.

Without knowing the science underpinning teaching, teachers fall back on procedures that work poorly or not at all, such as: Skinner suggests that any age-appropriate skill can be taught.

The productivity and happiness of citizens in this community is far greater than in the outside world because the residents practice scientific social planning and use operant conditioning in raising their children.

"[3] Skinner's book, Walden Two, presents a vision of a decentralized, localized society, which applies a practical, scientific approach and behavioral expertise to deal peacefully with social problems.

(For example, his views led him to oppose corporal punishment in schools, and he wrote a letter to the California Senate that helped lead it to a ban on spanking.

The book's answer is a life of friendship, health, art, a healthy balance between work and leisure, a minimum of unpleasantness, and a feeling that one has made worthwhile contributions to a society in which resources are ensured, in part, by minimizing consumption.

The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point.

Terminal responses seem to reflect classical (as opposed to operant) conditioning, rather than adventitious reinforcement, guided by a process like that observed in 1968 by Brown and Jenkins in their "autoshaping" procedures.

The causation of interim activities (such as the schedule-induced polydipsia seen in a similar situation with rats) also cannot be traced to adventitious reinforcement and its details are still obscure (Staddon, 1977).

Some have argued, however, that Skinner shared several of Freud's assumptions, and that he was influenced by Freudian points of view in more than one field, among them the analysis of defense mechanisms, such as repression.

J. E. R. Staddon has argued the compatibilist position;[72] Skinner's determinism is not in any way contradictory to traditional notions of reward and punishment, as he believed.