B.F. Skinner and his legacy – Pearl D’souza, Latymer Upper School

 He is widely recognised not only for his scientific contributions, but also the idiosyncratic experiments he would conduct including teaching pigeons to play ping-pong and cats to play piano. Skinner was primarily interested in behaviourism and proposed that behaviour is induced solely by external factors rather than thoughts or feelings. He was a proponent of the theory that our actions are determined by reward and punishment – an idea he termed ‘operant conditioning’.

Operant conditioning rewards the subject for any miniscule action they perform which brings them closer to achieving the desired outcome. For example, if you wanted to teach a dog to spin clockwise, you would give it a treat every time they make a move in that direction. Eventually, the dog will realise this and make greater turns clockwise to receive more treats until they make a full turn. Skinner also established the idea of ‘reinforcement’ to encourage a desired response; positive reinforcement would be like giving a dog a treat as mentioned in the example and negative reinforcement would be perhaps taking away their toy. 

Two examples of specific contributions that Skinner made are the Skinner box and the teaching box. Skinner originally placed a rat inside the Skinner box which contained a lever. The rat would move around the box erratically and unintentionally press the lever which would cause rat food to drop into the box. After the same event recurred a few times, the rat recognised the pattern and learnt to press the lever on purpose to release food. The teaching box was a teaching machine that worked using the same fundamental principles. The machine was intended to act as a private tutor to students and present them with rewards whenever they answered questions based on teaching material correctly; the machine would also provide hints for when the pupil appeared to be stuck. The device would not continue the lesson until the pupil had mastered the content already taught and would give them positive feedback whenever they came close to the correct answer. Although the device was not instituted in schools, many modern online self-instruction programs operate using a similar approach. 

Perhaps as we enter into exam season, students may be able to use some positive reinforcement during their revision to help them ace their assessments!