Skinner's Radical Behaviorism

In this paper, I have chosen to explain "Skinner's Radical Behaviorism" among the different schools of behaviorism.

The reason for choosing Skinner's school of behaviorism is that Skinner has given such arguments that provide solution to the very prevailing conditions of today. Skinner is known to be the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He has casted irremovable impacts upon the human civilizations as is illustrated by Herrnstein's (1997) report:

"In an outcome of a popular magazine's survey to determine the 100 most important people who ever lived: Jesus Christ was the first, and Skinner was about 40th, no far from Luther or Calvin as I recall”. (Kanekar, Suresh.)

        Another reason why I choose Skinner's school of behavior is that I wanted to know the reason as to why Skinner is criticized by other philosophers and thinkers. This could only be achieved by deep meditation of his theories, the result of which I am presenting in this paper. Nevertheless, I staunchly believe that in some cases Skinner's theories and concepts do give adequate explanation of human behaviors.

In his theory of Radical Behaviorism, Skinner has proposed that actions are the authoritative factors that cause different behavior in different people. According to Skinner, human behavior is controllable in many situations and this controlled behavior leads to better cultural values. In his viewpoint, a person's beliefs are totally determined by his learning histories. People are said to have distinct religious beliefs because it is what they receive from their ancestors in the form of legacy. They are bound to follow that specific religion. They do not have a broad perspective of religious issues and their thinking abilities are limited to an enclosure.

Skinner's Radical Behaviorism emphasizes that like animal behavior, human behavior is also conditioned. This is not the case however, since human subjects react to different stimuli in different situations thereby giving a unique response every time. Let's take an example of a pedestrian, when suddenly he comes up two or three robbers who force him to subdue to them. In response to such a situation, the victim might argue with the robbers or he might let them rob him away. So this cannot be a controlled response, it all depends on the decision that the particular victim makes at the scene of the tragedy. If taken an example, merely that of an animal, this is not the case. The experiments of the Russian biologist, Pavlov explains it all. Pavlov had a pet dog, to which he used to feed with the ring of a bell. He found that the dog's mouth began to water the moment the bell was about to be rang. This was what he named a "conditional reflex."

        Many philosophers believe that Skinner is a determinist. A determinist is a person who propounds that human behavior is influenced by their environment. Throughout his entire life, he resorted to scientific learning to explain human behavior. He believed that environment imposes a serious influence upon human life and the humans react accordingly.

As far as the upbringing of a child is concerned, Skinner instructed parents to adopt reinforcement in their behavior towards their children. In our context, the term reinforcement means to give liberty to a child (when he make mistakes), so that he can learn from them. Skinner opposes coercion and punishment because in his opinion, they might lead to a more violent and ferocious behavior amongst the children. However, the modern trends to control a child when he misbehaves in a place like a departmental store or somewhere else for that matter, is to slap him right away so that he knows his behavior at the spot. If the same scenario, were to be placed to Skinner, he would teach that it would be unwise to treat the child harshly in front of the people present at the departmental store. That is to say the parents should not have slapped their child in front of the other people. There is a big flaw in it. Had the parents dealt the way Skinner's theory instructed, they would have caused reinforcement to develop in the attitude of their child. It is due to these reasons that Skinner's theory is considered ineffective when it comes to resolving social, religious and other humanitarian issues.

I would like to give an example from my life experiences. There was a class fellow of mine who did not use to submit his homework to the concerned teacher. The teacher always used to ignore his negligence and this led to that particular student becoming a problem for himself. He could not succeed in his exams and ended up in destroying his whole educational career. Therefore, these are the cases where Skinner's Radical Behaviorism theory fails to improve human behavior.

Conclusively, I would say that in most of the cases, Skinner's behaviorism is not a wise decision to adopt. However, it can be fruitful when a certain desired response is needed again and again.

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