Behaviorism Quotes

• 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. Skinner

  Education, Perseverance, Giving Up

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• Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Children, Giving

  297 Copy quote

• The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

  B. F. Skinner

  Reality, Important, Way

  "Meditations for Parents Who Do Too Much". Book by Jonathon Lazear and Wendy Lazear, p. 5, 1993.

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• Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

  John B. Watson

  Artist, Years, Doctors

  "Behaviorism". Book by John B. Watson (p.82), 1930.

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• The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that.

  Alfie Kohn

  Legacy

  61 Copy quote

• 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.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Views, Mysterious

  67 Copy quote

• If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so.

  Richard Rosen

  Dog, Acting, Behaviour

  72 Copy quote

• I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Reality, Design

  "The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology Vol. 4". Book edited by Joe L. Kincheloe and Raymond A. Horn, Ch. 99, p. 872 ("Unpacking the Skinner Box : Revisiting B. F. Skinner through a Postformal Lens" by Dana Salter), 2008.

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• Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Understanding, Way

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.99, Hackett Publishing

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• Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

  B. F. Skinner

  Graduation, Education, Teacher

  New Scientist 21 May 1964

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• Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Philosophy, Animal, Psychology

  49 Copy quote

• We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

  B. F. Skinner

  Inspiring, Education, Book

  "B. F. Skinner: The Man and His Ideas". Book by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73, 1968.

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• Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

  W. H. Auden

  Funny, Science, Simple

  A CertainWorld "Behaviorism" (1970)

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• The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Men, Genius

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.116, Hackett Publishing

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• No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Baby, Curiosity

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.114, Hackett Publishing

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• An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Important, Skins

  B. F. Skinner (2014). “Verbal Behavior”, p.145, B. F. Skinner Foundation

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• A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Doe, May

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.109, Hackett Publishing

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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.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Honesty, Intellectual

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• The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, Achievement, Sound

  23 Copy quote

• Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about.

  B. F. Skinner

  Men, Genius, Chaos

  B. F. Skinner (1974). “Walden Two”, p.116, Hackett Publishing

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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.

  B. F. Skinner

  Education, World, Impossible

  33 Copy quote

• Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Choices, Psychology, May

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Douglas B. Quine (2008). “Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist: And Other Essays”, p.341, Harvard University Press

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• Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain.

  Michio Kaku

  Thinking, Psychology, Brain

  "'It's all because of physics': an interview with Michio Kaku". Interview with Matt Fulkerson, www.theshorthorn.com. February 20, 2015.

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• Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

  John B

  Learning, Science, Men

  10 Copy quote

• ... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour).

  Hilary Putnam

  Pain, Behaviour, Causes

  28 Copy quote