Skinner's Own Behavioral Self-Help Book

Enjoy old age: a program of self-management
B.F. Skinner & Dr. Margaret Vaughan

Skinner co-wrote this slender 157-page volume with Dr. Margaret Vaughan, with whom he was originally working on a book-length treatment of his Why We Are Not Acting to Save the World. But when he presented, around the same time, Intellectual Self-Management in Old Age, there was significantly more media interest around the latter. 

And so to partially answer the question of why we are not acting to save the world: media interest?

In any case, Skinner and Vaughan took on a book-length treatment of gerontology. 

The initial tips for management all have to do with adjusting to decrements in biofeedback (vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance). These are organized by the aforementioned categories, but within the categories there is not particularly any organization; the paragraphs are written conversationally and with anecdotes. 

For our purposes, there are themes to the recommendations:

• Environmental manipulations: add lights to a reading area, get good glasses, get a hearing aid

• MO manipulations: behave differently to avoid habituation/satiation

• Antecedent manipulations: speak louder (people often match volume), move slowly

• Replacement behaviors: make a joke of misunderstandings, speak more (if hearing is compromised)

• Consequence manipulations: walk away from people who don’t consider your hearing loss, tell people your needs

Some suggestions will be immediately familiar to those well-versed in Skinnerian philosophy. For example, Skinner’s trick to help remember is to create a situation that resembles the original learning environment – this is his contention that a memory is better understood as an environmental relation rather than something “stored” in the brain.

He recommends precurrent behavior (though he doesn’t call it that). This is behavior that alters the future probability of other behavior; for example, hanging an umbrella on the door handle at night will make a person more likely to take it to work in the morning.

He recommends inserting desired behaviors into existing behavior chains. For example, if you want to remember to take a pill, attach the pill box to your toothbrush, and you will remember whenever you brush.

He recommends taking data either by hand (filling in boxes) or in automated ways (pedometer).

He recommends habitual use of a calendar for events, and habitual use of a timer for day-to-day tasks.

The weird stuff

Skinner admits that gambling can be fun. However he tries to gently convince readers not to gamble, or to gamble less, by engaging in other exciting activities – namely, watching sports and soap operas. If you don’t like these activities, he says, you should try them, because their fans are so rabid. 

He addresses sex, since an obvious challenge of old age is a reduced sex drive, or a lack of sexual partners. He doesn’t exactly recommend pornography, but:

He recommends that if you are worried about death, you…stop thinking about it. He seems to be sympathetic to those who favor euthanasia, but essentially abandons it as a possibility due to its legal status.

A very short (~2 page) appendix where Skinner pulls back the curtain:

In all, it’s a short, conversationally-written book that appears careful to suggest without preaching. It’s hard to imagine reading it as a mass-market paperback – people in the 70s were reading romance novels on Monday and Skinner’s book on aging on Tuesday? – but it reportedly sold well.