Ain't Misbehavin'

Ain’t Misbehavin’
An Interview with B.F. Skinner 

—Deborah Weiss 

The New Journal v. 13, no. 1, 11/1/1979

B.F. Skinner is a professor of psychology at Harvard. A pioneer in the field of behavioral psychology, his first popular work was the utopian novel Walden Two (1948). During the ’sixties, popular interest in his work increased. In 1971, after the publication of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Time published a cover story on Skinner which concluded that ‘'Skinner’s utopian projection is less likely to be a blueprint for the Golden Age than for the theory and practice of hell. ” The second volume of Skinner’s autobiography The Shaping of a Behaviorist was published by Knopf this summer. 

DW Why did you write an autobiography? 

BFS My work has been very much misunderstood. And I have been misunderstood. When I lecture at a university someone is bound to say afterwards, “You should do this more often. People think of you with two heads or something like that. You’re really a human being.” I’ve tried to show the different sides of my life and particularly the development of my scientific work, which was a series of accidents very largely. Lucky accidents certainly. It gives a better picture of a scientist at work than the philosophers of science who reconstruct what goes on in a scientific discovery. One principle is to tell the story as it happened. I’m writing as you’d write a novel. I’ve avoided reading autobiography since I started. I don’t want to imitate anyone on this. I’ve just been following some principles of what I think a story should be rather than giving it any artistic structure too . . .I’m not dressing it up. I’m not putting in irrelevant but teasing tension. 

DW Were you hoping to correct popular or scholarly misunderstanding? 

BFS There’s a great deal of very strange misunderstanding: At a conference in Washington, a man came from India and said to me that if I would go to India he would give me a hundred human babies to study . . . the whole business about the daughter we raised in the so-called air crib, that she killed herself or became psychotic. I’ve somehow or other been confused with John B. Watson. At one time Watson published a book in which he claimed that affection is a very dangerous thing and a parent shouldn’t show affection. He later on regretted that he ever published that. I’ve spent all my life finding alternatives to punishment and yet because I talk about control, they think I mean the whip. I think people are controlled and I want to make sure that that control works for the betterment of the individual and of the species as well. All my work in education and elsewhere has been to get rid of not only the paddle and the birch rod but all of the subtle ways in which teachers punish students. Although I may have coined the word “behavior modification” (I’m not sure of that) I don’t mean implanted electrodes or vomit therapy. When Clockwork Orange came out, I was in London and some underground magazine there had an issue blaming the whole thing on me. Both Kubrick and Burgess have said that it was an attack on my position. They’re miles off the target because I have never suggested that type of control at all, though I do raise these questions. Burgess said that he and Kubrick wanted to demonstrate that violence, if done with a free will, was better than being good due to conditioning. The violence in Clockwork Orange wasn’t due to free will. They were high on a drug and were as much conditioned as they could possibly be. 

DW How do you view the controversy between you and Noam Chomsky? 

BFS I am so perfectly confident that my book Verbal Behavior is the right way to go about this and that Chomsky has kept the linguists from discovering it that I don’t worry about this issue. The curious thing is that Chomsky has tied this all into political and philosophical and ethical issues. He now has quote ‘figured out’ that Locke, with the idea that you can learn from experience, was really the figure behind the whole Industrial Revolution and capitalism. But that’s absurd because that is an environmentalist approach and it is the Descartes kind of inborn intelligence which is the belief that people are as they are—they’re bright or not bright—because they are born that way. He’s really on the wrong side of the fence because according to Locke anyone can become a genius if he just has enough experience whereas according to Descartes you’re licked at the start. You have inborn rules according to Chomsky, but you have only what you got with your genes. He should be on Jensen's side completely. I don’t understand this at all. I am, naturally, as John B. Watson was, an environmentalist. Watson exaggerated, he said, “Give me a dozen infants and I can make them into a doctor, lawyer and so on.” He couldn’t do that, of course. He said right away, “I am exaggerating and I know it.” I don't think very well about the so-called ‘genetic endowment’ of the human organism. My specialty, and I don’t want to try and talk outside my specialty, is to discover what can be done with an organism. It might be a human being, it might be a pigeon, it might be a raccoon. We have in the last thirty or forty years, made extraordinary progress in shaping new types of behavior, and in maintaining behavior in strength (what’s usually called ‘motivation’). 

DW Do you still believe, as you suggested in Walden Two, that the family is becoming obsolete? 

BFS As society has evolved, you have families, and it has been extremely important for the protection of children and later for the conservation of property, to respect family relationships. But we’ve now reached the point where about half the families are only one parent families. It presumably is possible to raise children more effectively if you know something about it. The textbook doesn’t come with the baby. An ordinary small apartment with two parents and two kids is a very difficult sort of situation. With a different organization to society as a whole, the old style family would not any longer be needed. 

DW Do you think that parental instincts are too weak to determine much behavior, or that some instinctive tendencies are strong but should be replaced by learned behavior? 

BFS We have got rid of most of our instinctive behavior because we have intelligence to take its place. Personal relationships however, are things which remain constant for thousands and thousands of generations. The only feature of the human environment today that resembles that of twenty thousand years ago is other people. That is constant, so that instinctive behavior which deals with other people has a chance to survive. Love relationships, caring relationships, could well have a measure of phylogenetic character in them. That would apply only where the environment is stable from generation to generation and would involve mostly other people. Care of a child, mother embracing a child at her breast, could be quite strong for merely phylogenetic reasons and yet would not necessarily be strong enough to keep the mother nursing unless the culture were doing a great deal more, showing her how and criticizing her if she didn’t. It would be true of lovemaking, different ways of making love. All the taboos would probably be cultural and would then modify the way the thing was carried on. 

DW Do you have any general views about the importance or unimportance of genetic factors in determining human differences? 

BFS I differ with my friend E.O. Wilson and the sociobiologists. I don’t think that the notion of biological restraints is anything like as powerful as he thinks. It is true that one cannot learn to play the piano without the genetic ability to move the fingers but that doesn’t mean that there is anything fundamentally genetic about learning to play the piano. People have invented and produced pianos because certain kinds of noises are reinforcing. Now that is genetic, I am sure, in a very obscure way. Without a body we wouldn’t have behavior. If you’re going to teach a roomful of children you must be sure that they have eyes and ears, you must be sure that they have fingers but aside from that, what they’re taught and how well they learn and how fast they learn are pretty much a matter of the environment. There are limitations: There are retarded children who do not learn at the same speed. You accept these and deal with them as you can. Even so they can do much more than most people think they can. I think there are important differences among people. I think it’s absurd to suppose that everyone can profit from a Yale education, and it’s absurd to suppose that everyone could be a concert pianist. I couldn’t be. I can’t memorize music. My eyes have gone bad and I can’t read music. Since I can’t memorize, I can’t play and it’s a great tragedy to me. There’s no way in which I could ever have, no matter how I had been trained as a child. I don’t feel inferior. I don’t feel I should be bussed to another school. I don’t resent being unequal. I wish I could do it, but I do other things. Any prejudice against any group—blacks, Asians, homosexuals—is very unfortunate. You judge people in terms of their ability and what they can contribute. But to do the other thing around—to say you ought to give them an exceptional chance—is the same principle. You are again showing some kind of prejudice. This is the Bakke case [reference]. I haven’t made up my mind on that. The only strong issue that I do anything about—and it’s just a question of where I put my United Fund money instead of the United Fund—is population. I think the great problem in the world today is overpopulation. These Boat People: that’s a population problem. I see no alternative to a lifeboat ethic on this. You cannot sink the boat because you felt unhappy about cracking someone’s knuckles when he grabs onto the edge. My book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, came at the watershed between the huge individualism of the sixties and the tapering of that in the seventies. We must look to the future of the species and meanwhile the future ways of life which we think are promising ways of life with respect to preserving the species. That’s the point of the work ‘beyond’ in my title. I wasn’t saying “down with freedom and down with dignity.’’ I want people to feel freer than ever before, to have a sense of dignity and a sense of achievement. 

DW Was it intended as a provocative title? 

BFS Yes. It may have been a mistake, I don’t know. It sold a lot of books. Actually I was calling it “Freedom and Dignity” right up until I sent it off to the publishers, and my editor then said, “Look, when you get through with this, it isn’t really freedom and dignity we’re talking about,” and I said, “Let’s call it Beyond Freedom and Dignity. ” I was thinking of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. So ‘beyond’ got in there and it did cause trouble, but it also pulled people up short so they started to think about this issue. I am really very unhappy about the extension of the notion of individual right at the present time. You aren’t born with rights. You’re born with the power to get what you can and defend yourself. When you use “rights” you’re talking about really what you can do. You organize and strengthen the workers against management and capital and you create rights. There is no such thing as a “right,” it doesn’t exist, it has no physical dimensions at all. It has to do with the way people control each other and particularly the countercontrols of people who are controlling in undesirable ways. People talk about the rights of animals now; the next thing is going to be the rights of plants. Someone’s going to say that we shouldn’t eat carrots. I’ve thought of writing an article, “Libertas Nervosa.” We’ve gotten rid of lots of the infringements on our freedom that we really object to, but we’re going on and on. We resent every kind of control including those that will keep us alive, just as the anorexia nervosa case goes right on down through the normal weight, dying a matchstick figure. In my own field there has been some work, some good and some bad, in hospitals for the psychotic and retarded, and in prisons, to use positive reinforcement rather than the usual breakfast. Now, someone’s going to say, “Ah, but these people have a right to food, to clothing, to privacy, to entertainment. You can’t take those rights away to use them as reinforcers.” The American Civil Liberties Union is after this. They’re trying to establish the principle that anything that a retarded or a psychotic person or a prisoner has had the right to cannot be taken away from him to use as a reinforcer. Now what does that right mean? Why does a prisoner have any rights? You can work up a lot of rhetoric for this. You must help the helpless but if any person can help themself, he or she must be required to do so. A home for retarded people which was entirely self-supporting would be ideal. 

DW Is it compatible with your analysis in Verbal Behavior to suppose that some grammatical structures are innate? 

BFS No. You can’t plead genetic sources unless you can give some potent reason how they could have arisen. People have been speaking languages only for, let us say twenty thousand years. Now, how important to the survival of the individual to breeding age is speaking grammatically? In a few generations you can develop resistance to a disease—that’s crucial. But there is nothing very crucial about speaking either broken English or good English. I think Chomsky backed down on this and said, “Well, grammar isn’t exactly verbal. It’s other intellectual things which have had a chance to develop before we’re talking about the actual linguistic environment.” The argument that all languages have some common features and that, therefore, there must be some structural principle due to the genetics of the individual, is wrong. The innate grammatical rules are due to the fact that all languages serve similar functions. In every language people call the other person by name: “Ah, vocatives.” They name objects: “Ah, nouns.” They talk about action: “Ah, verbs.” They ask questions: “Ah, the interrogative.” They express wishes: “Ah, the optative.” All languages are used for certain practical purposes and hence they all have certain common features. Not because they are part of the genetic endowment but because they are part of the verbal environment. 

DW There are certain transformations, common to all languages, that seem to defy explanations of this kind, for instance, the rule that 'which’ clause cannot be moved to some positions where they seem to make sense. How do you deal with these? 

BFS Chomsky is of course a structuralist. This all goes back to Roman Jakobson, Levi-Strauss and linguistics and anthropology. Jakobson himself has done the most absurd thing in analyzing structure. He’s taken a Shakespeare sonnet and he talks about the ‘centripedal flow’ when you get to the middle and the ‘centrifugal flow’ when you get to the end. Of course, every sonnet is centripedal and centrifugal. But it’s all done (by Jakobson) in terms of that particular sonnet. The Gestalt Psychologists did this many years ago. You discover some structural principles, then you name the principles and turn around and explain the behavior. If, for example, you glimpse a circle and it’s broken, but you see it as a whole circle, that’s called ‘closure’ or ‘pregnance’ or something. Then you say, “Why do you see it that way?” “Oh; because of pregnance!” This is just double talk. You can do the same thing with language. You can extract grammatical principles, as the Greeks did when they first discovered grammar, and you say, “Well, why do people speak grammatically? Because they know these principles.” That’s not true. If I have a dog I can teach the dog to catch a ball or a frisbee. Now this does not mean that the dog has deduced the laws of trajectories. Yet he acts as if he knew the rules. People speak grammatically who don’t know the rules. The ordinary Frenchman doesn’t even know how to break the thing up into words. After you extract the rules then you can speak according to the rules. 

DW So how do you explain the universality of those difficult transformations? 

BFS I don’t know this transformation business at all. I would have to take them one by one, I suppose, and make a guess as to the common features of the verbal environment that would make this possible. 

DW Have you revised your views on physiology? 

BFS I am not anti-physiological. Many people misunderstood me on this. I think it’s a fine field and an important field. What I was objecting to was the physiology which is merely inferences from behavior, as if you could turn around and use this to explain the behavior. It throws light on relationship between physiology and behavior, yes. 

DW Does physiology provide hypotheses about behavior, as in Garcia’s experiments? (Garcia showed that rats will refuse to eat food of certain color if they are irradiated 4-6 hours after eating that food.)  [reference]

BFS That is not reinforcement, it is punishment. It works precisely as I analyzed punishment. It doesn’t suppress it, it gives you reasons to get away from it.  

DW Haven’t we used physiology to produce an hypothesis? 

BFS But you see, we don’t know anything about the physiology. All we know is the facts. “Something to do with avoiding poison” is an appeal to genetics rather than to physiology. I would like to see more and more physiology done. When someone tells me what’s going on inside my pigeon I’ll be delighted to hear about it. But at the moment I don’t know and moreover it’s going to be harder to find out than it is about the behavior. I don’t know of any features of behavior that I now understand more clearly because someone has told me about the physiology. 

DW Are there logical problems in explaining behavior by events at another level of description, like physiology?

BFS It would be very awkward to do it that way. Even though we now know a good deal about genetics, you don’t really breed a racehorse by examining the DNA. you would take the records

at the track, if that’s the horse you pay to have service your mare. This is a pure breeding experiment. We now know a lot about why they work but that doesn’t give us a practice. If, eventually, they start finding a couple of genes in the chromosomes of a horse that have something to do with speed, and they start fiddling around with those genes, then you’ve got something. We haven’t got there even in genetics, let alone behavior. 

DW Would it be incorrect to speak of a causal relationship between a gene and a behavior even if there were known correlation between them? 

BFS If you have a mare and you say: “I want this mated to a Spectacular Bid and I want to pay $50,000 for it,” and someone says, ‘‘Why are you doing that?”, and you say, “Well, there’s a little gene somewhere ...” 

DW So your objection isn’t a philosophical objection about mixing ontological levels? 

BFS No. What I object to is a phony physiology, like “Your nerves are on edge.” People still say things like that. 

DW You mention that Bertrand Russell influenced your work. 

BFS He was a popularizer. Principia Mathematica, I think is still accepted, though it should be by now. He did that over seventy years ago. It should have been changed by now. Wittgenstein, Russell, the logical positivists, all of those people: I never went very far with them really. Russell was a prestigious person. I read his review of Ogden Richard’s The Meaning of Meaning, and he ended it by saying, “The reader will see that I have been enormously influenced by Dr. Watson, whose recent book Behaviourism I regard as massively impressive.” Well, that was all I needed. I never knew very much about Russell. I admire Russell a good deal. He had some very interesting ideas about marital questions. He was against the Vietnam business, and sat in Trafalgar Square in protest when he was ninety years old, carefully having an inflatable pillow in his pants before he went there. For example, I don’t go very far with people like Gilbert Ryle, or Ayer, and all of those people. They didn’t have the science of behavior needed. Wittgenstein towards the end groped for it. He said, “We will have to study the behavior of animals to get this thing clear.” This was in the Blue and Brown Books and in Philosophical Investigations also. The Tractatus he himself abandoned. I started to look at the Blue and Brown Books. Every sentence started me off on something else. I cannot accept that kind of wordplay. I’d say it’s true of Ayer and Ryle and the whole gang. They’re not getting back to fundamentals. That goes for Chomsky too. They don’t get back to the actual behavior involved. 

DW You have said that you do not like contemporary philosophy of science. Were you thinking of the Vienna Circle, or of Thomas Kuhn and his critics? 

BFS I don’t know Kuhn’s stuff well. Paradigms and so on. I don’t know what he’s saying. I have never had any desire to look into it. I say something myself a bit about scientific method. I think we can analyze how scientists work. As a matter of fact, one point of the autobiography is to give as honest an account as I can of how I have been working as a scientist. No nonsense about testing hypotheses and so on. I don’t do that at all. 

DW You mentioned, in one interview, that you like Francis Bacon. 

BFS Well, Bacon had some right ideas. It isn’t just a question of classification though. He did believe that knowledge is power, and that’s what I believe: to know is to be able to do something—not to be contemplative and understand passively. 

DW In Verbal Behavior you seem to quote with approval a passage from Russell where he says that words don’t refer to things. 

BFS I don’t think I quote him with approval. I didn’t like what he said. His book, Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, was a very, very sloppy thing and I didn’t like any of that. He used a rather crude conditioned reflex idea of meaning, and it just doesn’t make any sense at all. I’ve forgotten exactly how I put it, but it’s in Verbal Behavior. [Skinner goes to the bookshelf and returns with Verbal Behavior] 

DW When you say of this quote, “In one sense this is a fair shot,” in what sense do you mean? 

BFS (quoting himself from Verbal Behavior) “In one sense this is a fair shot. The hardy determinist will recognize a tendency to believe that what he is saying is, for the moment at least, removed from the field of determined action. But the student of behavior is not the only one to face this dilemma. Behaving about behaving raises the same difficulties as knowing about knowing.” 

DW So that’s the sense in which he is correct. You don’t believe that words don’t refer to things. 

BFS Oh yes. He had given the William James lectures the year before, and so I was probably being kind to him. But I was thinking of something else of his. There’s another reference here [in Verbal Behavior]. There are a whole lot of references; two four, six eight, ten. That’s an awful lot for one book. But there was one in there about how, when we see a fox, we say ‘fox’, and so on. Actually, what he said was not correct. I’m sure of that. On the whole question of reference, Watson made the same mistake. He was trying to get the whole thing in terms of conditioned reflexes. That’s one of the cases where I’ve been misunderstood. I am not a stimulus response psychologist. 

DW When interviewed by Evans, you said, “The study of perception suffers from the idea that one is somehow relating experience to reality.” How does it suffer from this? 

BFS There is no difference between experience and reality. It’s the same thing. This is the old copy theory. Those flowers: I can’t see them out there on the counter, so I must have a copy of them back here that I’m seeing. This is Plato. He couldn’t understand how you could see something at a distance. I don’t know how he figured you got the copy in there either. There is no copy. That’s even out of focus on my retina. The idea that, somehow, I can reconstruct those flowers out of neural events in the back of my head is absurd. When I shut my eyes I can still see them. I don’t see them very well, but I can still do with my eyes shut what I do with my eyes open. There is not a world of experience. There is a world, and there’s behavior with respect to that world. The idea that I only have a psychological world inside me and that’s what everything is—that’s nothing unless it means something to me. Such meaning is in my behavior and in my history. 

DW How do you feel about the treatment of perception by the classical empiricists? 

BFS Classical empiricists—the British Empiricists—were associationists and they had you doing things to the world. Even though it was much better than what had been done before, there was a mind which was picking up these impressions. It was a tabula rasa which was getting these things written on it. I don’t think associationism will do anything at all. The rat doesn’t press the lever because he associates pressing with food. He presses because food follows when he presses. That’s a very different thing. 

DW What do you think is the correct use of the word ‘causality’? 

BFS Well, I think I’ve said somewhere that operant behavior is the field of purpose. It’s the effect of the future on the present. What appears to be the ‘future directedness’ of behavior is due to the past consequences and not, of course, to the actual future consequences, which can never act at all. There’s no First Cause. The future can’t act. But we are directed towards the future because we are reacting in ways which have had consequences in the past. I have a manuscript I should get around to publishing called Selection by Consequences [reference] in which I compare natural selection, operant conditioning, and the evolution of cultures. They all raise the same questions. Who creates? Darwin had a creation problem and I have a creation problem. Cultures arise from the social contract. What is the goal and what is the purpose? The hand is not to grasp things but is the way it is because it has grasped things in the past successfully. These same issues come on all three levels, all due to the fact that this is a causal principle which only exists in living things, selection by consequences. It emerged from the world with the emergence of life. 

DW Is this causal principle different than a fully reduced mechanistic principle? 

BFS This full kind of causality? Oh, yes. That is why it is quite wrong to say that I treat animals like machines. They can’t be machines. No machine can do what an animal does. You can program a computer to be modified by consequences only because a human being designed it. No machine is affected by consequences. Darwin was the one who really finally enumerated the ideas of natural selection. Hence, you don’t have to have design or purpose to begin it. I think human behavior is precisely the same thing. You don’t will, you don’t plan, you don’t initiate action. You are affected by the consequences of past action. You can design at all three levels. That’s a later step that only happens when a culture emerges which puts the individual in possession of everything needed for design. Then you can design genetically. In the old days, they used breeding; now they can do it by fiddling around with the variations. You can design behavior by consequences and arrange reinforcement, contingencies, behavior modification. You also get new behaviors by sort of modeling behavior: giving instructions to get something done, then you reinforce. Cultures almost always just fiddle with the variations—new ways of teaching and so on—but you can, if you want to, change the contingencies of selection of the culture. You say, “Let’s keep the Samoan culture intact.” 

DW Would that be a good idea? 

BFS No, I don’t think . . . What do you mean, ‘good idea’? But it could be done. You could select a cultural practice by making sure that it works. But it isn’t done. Ordinarily with cultures we only fiddle with the variation, not the selection. It isn’t that anyone is going to step in from outside the causal stream and say, “We want people to be happy and productive.” Nobody can do that. That would imply that there was somebody who wasn’t determined. But cultures advance by discovering better ways of teaching, better ways of getting people to work, better ways of organizing the family structure and getting along with people. Different cultures do it in different ways and the culture which makes the most of the people in the group is going to be the most likely to solve its problems and survive. So you have a competition. There’s an evolution of effective cultural practices which is the answer to “Who is to decide?” It’s like asking a fish, “Why do you want to get out of the water and walk on land?” No decision is ever made.