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B. F. Skinner: Mistaken – or Misunderstood?
Abstract
The chief offense of “political correctness” is its unreflective certainty – about
which causes to hail or demonize and about the necessity to take sides on every issue.
Science has no room for such dogmatism, of course. Yet, human nature being what it
is, in the softer sciences, at least, demonization of “outs” and automatic acceptance
of “ins” is the rule rather than the exception. For many years in experimental psychology,
the “ins” have been the “cognitive” psychologists and the “outs” the behaviorists,
especially the radical behaviorist followers of B. F. Skinner, whose life and work
are the topics of these two books...
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/7558Collections
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John E. R. Staddon
James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience
Until my retirement in 2007, my laboratory did experimental research on learning and
adaptive behavior, mostly with animals: pigeons, rats, fish, parakeets. We were particularly
interested in timing and memory, feeding regulation, habituation and the ways in which
pigeons and rats adapt to reward schedules. The aim is to arrive at simple models
for learning that can help to identify the underlying neural mechanisms. I continue
to do theoretical and historical work on the power law in
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