To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
B. F. SKINNERA disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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Except when physically restrained, a person is least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment, and unfortunately most people often are.
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled.
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A person’s genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.
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Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
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A first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: when you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.
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We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
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I don’t believe in God, so I’m not afraid of dying.
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I’ve often said that my rats have taught me much more than I’ve taught them.
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The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.
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The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations.
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It is not a question of starting. The start has been made. It’s a question of what’s to be done from now on.
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To require a citizen to sign a loyalty oath is to destroy some of the loyalty he could otherwise claim, since any subsequent loyal behavior may then be attributed to the oath.
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I may say that the only differences I expect to see revealed between the behavior of the rat and man (aside from enormous differences of complexity) lie in the field of verbal behavior.
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Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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A permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.
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We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
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Something doing every minute’ may be a gesture of despair-or the height of a battle against boredom.
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The alphabet was a great invention, which enabled men to store and to learn with little effort what others had learned the hard way-that is, to learn from books rather than from direct, possibly painful, contact with the real world.
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