B.F. Skinner at the APA Annual Convention (8\10\1990)

[Music] [Music] on August 10th 1990 in Boston Massachusetts BF Skinner received the American Psychological association's special presidential Citation for Lifetime contributions to psychology on this occasion he delivered the keynote address for the 98th annual Convention of the APA this Association has always been very good to me I went to my first meeting in 1932 most of you were not yet born I suppose my paper was on scheduled a reinforcement believe it or not and I it was at the very end of the program and almost everyone had gone home but uh one person who stayed

was Richard M Elliot who four years later gave me my first job at the University of Minnesota later the association provided space for a conference on the experimental analysis of behavior that some of my friends and I had organized and that became of course division 25 somewhere along the line I also received your distinguished scientific contribution award and now this probably the greatest honor in my life I am extremely grateful it has been suggested that I might make a few remarks in return I psychologist following the philosophers have looked inside themselves for explanations of their

behavior they have felt their feelings and observed their states of mind and mental processes through introspection introspection is never been a very satisfactory process philosophers have acknowledged its defs but argued that nevertheless it is the only way to self knowledge the psychologist tried to improve it V and tichner particularly invented brass instruments as William James called them to present stimuli the effects of which were to be intersected and they trained observers a trained Observer for example could see Red without seeing it as a red object that was a stimulus error Watson of course attacked introspection

in his Manifesto of 1913 and I suppose you could say he was successful because at any rate psychologists have stopped introspecting almost entirely cognitive psychologists probably see the representations of reality they talk about in fact they say that's all you possibly can see but I don't think they claim to see themselves processing them storing them in memory retrieving them and so on instead they have resorted to theories theories about what is going on in the head or the mind but theories have to be confirmed and the question is how can you be sure a theory

is right until you can see what is a theory about well as you know most of them have turned for that to brain science the mind is what the brain does and the Brain can be inspected rather than ex introspected like any other organ but does the brain really initiate Behavior as the mind or self was said to do the brain is part of an organism and what it does is simply part of what the organism does it is part of what is to be explained now that explanation I think can only be found by

looking outside the organism the individual rather than within and it is found in three kinds of variation and selection the first of these was natural selection which explains why we have a body in the brain at all but there was a difficulty with that It prepares a species only for a future that resembles the selecting past that fault was corrected by a further evolutionary step the evolution of oper conditioning which enabled the environment of the individual to select Behavior with contingencies that were not stable enough to work through natural selection however one can learn very

little in in a solitary World by Operate conditioning but unless you have a the social envir environment which is a rich set of contingencies of reinforcement and responsible for the elaborate repertoire we all acquire cultures also evolve and that is the third type of variation and selection now if these three external kinds of circumstances explain what the body does then what is this mind or self supposed to be doing does it exist there seems to be no room for it in a scientific account it can you can say it is explained by contingencies of selection

and in turn explains Behavior but that isn't necessary you can skip the thing entirely well let's start again and we'll start a long way off everyone talks about behavior and did so long before there were philosophers or scientists of any kind we all speak it it's a vernacular we call it's a proper word to call it vernacular is not not pejorative it means as the root meant for the Romans the language of the household of daily life we all speak it we it is a language in which newspapers magazines and books are published it's a

language of radio television when they are talking about the individual it is a language used by psychologists sociologists anthropologists political scientists and economists all the behavioral sciences it is the language used by professionals when they deal with their clients for the very simple reason it is the only language the client understands now a very curious thing about that language the vernacular refers very richly to feelings and states of mind so that there is some reason to suspect that we are back with what psychologists have been looking for however if you examine the terms in the

bacular you find that each one has a double meaning I say I'm hungry and I think I'll get something to eat now what am I saying am I mentioning a feeling hunger and am I talking about some cognitive process called thinking or am I conveying to someone something about my personal history to say I am hungry is to say among other things I haven't eaten for some time to say I am hungry among other things says if you give me some food I'll probably eat it the the terms in the vernacular which seem to refer

to feelings and states of Mind are really talking about contingencies of reinforcement about the world and about its effect on people 3 years ago I published a paper in the American psychologist I've had much too much I've had too great a share of that journal I'm I'm afraid but it was called the origins of cognitive thought and in it I considered perhaps 80 70 or 80 words Each of which referred on the one hand to a mental process of some kind but on the other to a purely physical kind of thing either to the kind

kind of situation in which a person finds himself or herself or the contingencies which are operating to select Behavior appropriate to that situation the there are I in my own experience some 1500 words that have that double meaning now what has happened I think is that psychology has spit in two ways one part going in the direction of finding out the essence of the feeling the essence of the cognitive process and the other going in the direction of references to contingencies of reinforcement the psychologist who is a Prof professional who is who is a practitioner

uses the vernacular of his his or her clients to find out more about what has happened to them and what they are probably going to do the psychologist who claims to be a scientist investigating searching for an inner originating creative or originate in initiating self is quite different and it's doing quite different things what has happened I think is that psychology has advanced as a practice as a profession far more rapidly than as a science it began as a science that is it began as an effort to discover what was going on inside the mind

or the self but as the membership of this organization shows it was the people who were interested in that particular topic soon became the minority they were not only replaced by the professionals but by psychologist who didn't care too much about what was going on inside but were interested in Behavior not necessarily as behaviorist in teaching psych Clinical Psychology developmental psychology and so on and those became important Sciences quite apart from an effort to isolate and originating mind or self the the whole notion of selection by consequences seems extremely difficult to understand we've seen what

has happened in evolution it is still true that biology cannot be properly taught in America because those who call themselves creationists or creation scientists oppose it as some kind of threat if I say that psychologists in searching for this inner self or mind have wasted their time you may feel that I am being arrogant if I say that the philosophers who over the centuries have tried to discover themselves in that sense that I am being arrogant but I would call your attention to the fact that equally or even more brilliant men and women over a

much longer period of time have been trying to establish the existence of and the nature of a different Creator in this case spelled with a Capital C now that is a very great problem and you know how difficult it has been for natural selection to be accepted imagine how difficult it is going to be for the individual selection by consequences of oper Behavior or the other evolution of cultures and the other kinds of selection which take over the role of a creative self or mind so far as I'm concerned cognitive science is the creationism of

psychology it is an effort [Applause] to it is an effort to reinstate that inner initiating originating creative self or mind which in a scientific analysis simply does not exist I think this Association has been through a recent trial just because of this difference uh it has as you know suffered a kind of secession by cognitive psychologists who are unhappy by when they associate with so many practitioners and I would regard it not as a sucess as a seccession but as an improvement I think I I think I think it is time for psychology as a

profession and as a science in such Fields as Psychotherapy education developmental psychology and all the rest it is time to realize that the science which will be most helpful is not cognitive science searching for the inner mind or self but selection by consequences represented by Behavior [Applause] Analysis looking back looking back on my life 62 years as a psychologist I would say that what I have tried to do what I've been doing is to make that point clear to show how selection by consequences in the individual can be demonstrated in the laboratory with animals and

with human subjects and to show this the implications of that for the World At Large in not only the profession of psychology but in consideration of what is going to happen to the world unless some very vital changes are made any evidence that I have been successful in that is what I should like to be remembered by oh once again thank you for this award and for your attention on August 18th 1990 8 days after delivering the keynote address at apa's 98th annual convention burus Frederick Skinner died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge Massachusetts e

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