Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.
B. F. SKINNERWe 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.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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What is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
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Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
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Men build society and society builds men.
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When we say that a man controls himself, we must specify who is controlling whom.
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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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The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion.
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Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.
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The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all.
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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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We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
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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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Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value.
B. F. SKINNER