Accidental Discovery
Psychological Science was seen as a contradiction of terms way back when Freud was delving into dreams and the subconscious mind. How do you quantify dreams thoughts and feelings. Science requires facts and figures evidence based research psychologists such as Freud couldn't provide hard facts. Then Ivan Pavlov, a physiologist who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize every year for his work on Medical Physiology in the nervous system, stumbled across classical conditioning. He science of behavior while working with dogs. He discovered a pattern in behavior which was basically; dogs would hear a bell ring and know that it was dinner time they would salivate at the sound of the bell even if there was no food available. Pavlov then went on to extend his research onto human. What humans would sign up to have a tube stuck in the check to have their saliva collected I hear you ask. Disabled children who were in orphanages without parents were signed up for these experiments. Its disturbing to think about and the pictures are horrific so I haven't included them. Back in those days Disabled kids and disabled people were treated very inhumanely and were often used for experiments. Fortunately, those days are over and humanity won out in the end. Those kinds of experiments stopped long ago. It's difficult to imagine that anything good came out those horrible times and horrible experiments something did though. A solution focused kind professor, who raised two daughters, the eldest going on to become a well recognized Behavior analyst herself, took this very basic understanding of classical conditioning and developed Operant Conditioning.
Burrhus Fredrick Skinner.
B.F. Skinner took our understanding of behavior to a completely new level. His in depth examination of behavior is second nature to even lay people who don't know much about psychology at at all. It was Skinner who found that all our behaviors can be manipulated, that we learn our behavior through learned operations and called this operant conditioning. We can modify our own behavior and that of others. We can do this through reinforcement. He discovered that we can learn through observation. What Skinner's experiments really offered was scientific explanations that could be proved the riggers of science his experiments produced data that was observable, repeatable and measurable. This scientific method boosted the legitimacy of psychology out of sight. Skinner cleverly demonstrated how behavior could be modified by teaching pigeons to do a variety of activities which were not natural for them. Where as classical conditioning revolved around what is natural dogs eat and produce saliva before they eat that's natural. Pigeons don't generally play table tennis in the wild. Skinner believed that intelligence was not a prerequisite to learning. He proved that a pigeon could perform acts of intelligence through learning a variety of behaviors through reinforcement. He did this by using "the Skinner Box" and food rewards for reinforcement. He then discovered that not only could the pigeons learn a variety of task that they could extend this knowledge and generalize it to other tasks. He noted that pigeons would learn by observing other pigeons. Skinner's work changed our understanding of raising children. Today it is well known that if we reinforce the good behavior of children they learn to repeat this behavior. We all know that children learn by watching and imitating other children and adults. It is through this work that we have advanced from the dark ages of children being seen and not heard.
If you are interested in finding out more about Skinner and the experiments he ran. Including some fun experiments he used on getting his own daughters to sleep. There is a a link to a two part series on Skinner and a link to the Skinner foundation Facebook page as well as an interview with Julie Vargas, Skinner's eldest daughter.
Julie Vargas Skinner's eldest daughter.
