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.
B. F. SKINNERWhat is love except another name for the use of positive reinforcement? Or vice versa.
More B. F. Skinner Quotes
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Problem-solving typically involves the construction of discriminative stimuli
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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 permissive government is a government that leaves control to other sources.
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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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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 speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.
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A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
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Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
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That’s all teaching is; arranging contingencies which bring changes in behavior.
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To say that behaviors have different ‘meanings’ is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables.
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Those who have had anything useful to say have said it far too often, and those who have had nothing to say have been no more reticent.
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Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
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Do not intervene between a person and the consequences of their own behavior.
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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 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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