Portrait of B.F.Skinner

The Boston Globe (ARCHIVE)

'WHY DO WE NOT ACT TO SAVE OUR WORLD,' HE ASKS

Author:    Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff 

Date: April 30, 1981,  Section: RUN OF PAPER

(This piece was reprinted in The Los Angeles Times)

Ten years ago, psychologist B.F. Skinner was selected in a magazine poll as the most easily recognized scientist in the world, and, because of his radical view of human nature, he was described by one critic as "the man you love to hate."

Now 77, dealing with the effects of radiation therapy for a tumor in his saliva gland and battling failing eyesight, Skinner remains the evangelist of radical behaviorism - although he appears more the wizened and reflective sage than the firebrand of the academic world.

Skinner's view of human behavior is a rigid environmentalism. Persons behave the way they do because of the positive feedback they receive from their environment - including other persons - when they act. If an act is rewarded, it will more likely be repeated; if an act goes unrewarded, it will likely disappear.

The Harvard researcher has suggested a Utopia could be created by applying his laboratory principles to society. His arguments raise the hackles of thinkers who depict humans as possessors of mind, soul and spirit - what Skinner decries as "mentalist" thinking.

His tenth book, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," published in 1971, suggested human freedom and dignity were useless nonscientific concepts and that social evils could be overcome only by scientifically manipulating rewards for human actions. The book thrust the mild but tough-minded psychologist into the center of controversy and into a limelight not usually enjoyed by university professors.

Many readers called his views enlightening and refreshing. The American Humanist Society that year named him "Humanist of the Year." Others reacted in horror to what they saw as the beginning of George Orwell's "1984," a world in which control of human behavior and emotions had run amok.

"That book was a kind of watershed between the '60s and the present," Skinner said in a recent interview. "The '60s were a time when every rule governing good group behavior was broken. We've learned that we can't have that kind of individualism. You have to support a culture.

"I didn't mean down with freedom." 

He said he was attacking what he saw as an early version of "Me Generation" selfishness that ignored the influence of environment on human action.

Skinner, who retired in 1974 and is now professor emeritus of psychology and social relations at Harvard, still maintains an office on the seventh floor of William James Hall on the campus, to which he goes from his Cambridge home every day to write and conduct a small research project.

He remains active as a convention and symposia speaker, sought by professional philosophers as well as psychologists to espouse his position.

His major project is writing the third volume of his autobiography. He has hired a young assistant to sort through the reams of correspondence and professional papers that will provide the meat of the book, which will cover Skinner's career as a Harvard University professor from 1948 to the present.

"I originally planned to have four volumes and most of the third is finished," he said. "But now I've decided to put the last two together and get it over with."

His two previous autobiographical volumes, "Particulars of My Life," published in 1976, and "The Shaping of a Behaviorist," published in 1979, have met with generally cordial reviews, but neither of them covers the years during which Skinner was embroiled in debate over his radical views.

Actually, everything that Skinner said in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" had been expressed decades earlier in both his research writings and in "Walden Two," his 1948 utopian novel that depicted a society managed by positive rewarding of appropriate behavior. Time magazine, in reviewing "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" in 1971, called it the nonfiction version of "Walden Two."

Although the writing of a novel is somewhat unusual among research psychologists, it seems an appropriate avocation for Skinner. As a young man fresh out of Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college near Utica, N.Y., Skinner moved to Greenwich Village determined to make a career as a writer.

He was a prolific writer in college, attended the Bread Loaf seminar for young writers and found encouragement in some personal criticism of his work by poet Robert Frost. But he forsook writing as a career and enrolled at Harvard when he discovered psychology.

After receiving his doctorate, he taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Indiana before returning to Harvard in 1947, where he would spend the rest of his professional life.

In 1971 he achieved the dream of every writer when "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" reached best-seller status. That same year, his colleagues selected him as the world's outstanding research psychologist, providing him a rare combination of popular and academic acclaim.

The aging psychologist still dabbles with poetry and retains a particular fondness for Hamilton College. Professional obligations will keep him from attending the 55th anniversary gathering of his class there in late May, but he has written a nostalgic rhymed ballad that a former classmate will read during the festivities.

While he read the stanzas recently, a smile crossed his face as his words carried him back to the New York campus.

"My smile still doesn't rise symmetrically at the corners," he said self-consciously, pushing his right cheek up with his index finger and explaining the effect of radiation therapy that sends him to Peter Bent Brigham hospital regularly for treatment.

The therapy makes his mouth dry, so he continuously sips water from a mug; it has also taken away his appetite.

"I can go a whole week without eating, but it keeps my weight down," he explained. "I take food now almost as if it were a drug."

His comfortable office is a bit cluttered with cardboard file cabinets stacked beside the wall. The files were sent by the Library of Congress, which will be the benefactor of his papers when he has finished with them.

Above his desk and on the wall opposite are paintings done by his youngest daughter, Deborah Buzan, the same daughter who became a cause celebre as an infant when Skinner built a device to ease his wife's child-rearing duties. Called an air crib, the device provided the infant a temperature-and-light- controlled environment in a glass-covered chamber with a rolling diaper that could be replaced as needed. The crib is often derisively called a "Skinner Box" and has been the source of many misconceptions regarding Skinner's paternal ethics and his daughter's mental health.

Deborah is a successful artist living with her husband in London; she recently exhibited her work at Royal Hall. Her father chuckles at the memory of his "air-crib baby" and says he visits her every year.

An older daughter, Julie, followed her father into professional psychology. She lives and works in West Virginia and her two children have made Skinner a proud grandfather.

Never one to rest on academic or social laurels, Skinner is presently investigating a behaviorist analysis of the future. He is scheduled to unveil his views at an international symposium in Europe next year.

With the persistent Utopian overtones that have marked his work, his preliminary paper for the symposium begins with the question, "Why do we not act to save our world?"

As with most of his social criticism, the paper calls for the application of a scientific technology of behavior to bring about change through the rewarding (or reinforcing, to use the proper behaviorist term) of actions. Advice is rarely followed, Skinner writes, unless some component of behavior is involved and is rewarded.

Despite his advocacy and defense of Utopian communities, Skinner has never actively participated in one. "I could probably rally a hundred or more willing followers," he said, "but I've always felt I was better off here, advancing the day, as it were."

Skinner remains a cogent and perceptive critic. Discussing the resurgence of the death penalty as punishment in the United States, he said, "I know perfectly well we're not going to get away without punishment in some form. But punishment of people by people has all kinds of unwanted byproducts."

The popularity of punishment, he argues, is a direct outcome of "the failure of permissiveness in schools and in society. We continue to have punishment because we have nothing better to put in its place," he said. "If we make it easier to get what you want by stealing rather than by earning, stealing will continue."

In a Skinnerian Utopia, be it a society or a schoolroom, punishment of inappropriate behavior is replaced by rewards for appropriate behavior.

Despite his own commitment to psychology, Skinner frequently argues against too steep an undergraduate education for students who want to become psychologists and argues instead for a more general liberal arts background.

He would recommend steeping students in his favorite author, William Shakespeare: "He is absolutely fantastic. There is so much richness in his writing. No one even comes close."

On that note, with a friendly handshake and a bent but pleasant smile, "the man you love to hate" said goodbye and went back to work.

ADDENDUM SIDEBAR:

Notebooks, B.F. Skinner

As with many writers, researchers and philosophers, B.F. Skinner has made a lifelong habit of keeping notebooks of his thoughts.

In 1980, psychologist Robert Epstein edited and published these thoughts under the title, "Notebooks, B.F. Skinner."

Skinner's wideranging entries include:

- Some baseball advice:

". . . a plausible technique of breaking up a batting slump. My guess is that a player is told what he is doing wrong or shown movies or videotapes of himself as he strikes out or grounds out easily. I suggested that, instead, he be shown a short film of himself hitting home runs. . . . Why do I think it will work? It could be a kind of imitation, but a more likely effect should be eliminating some of the current aversive effects of the slump. . . ."

- On the context of practical things:

"Toilet paper is useful - to wipe pens, clean eyeglasses, dry fingers, and so on. A roll is a more convenient form than a box-fold of tissues. Yet one resists mounting a roll of toilet paper near one's desk or worktable or even in a machine shop."

His and Hers Brains

STUDIES FIND DIFFERENCES IN MALE, FEMALE BRAINS

Author(s):    Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff

Date: April 22, 1981 Section: RUN OF PAPER

On the towel rack that we call our anatomy, nature appears to have hung his-and-hers brains.

But whether those differences should be regarded as significant remains an open question.

Sensitized by the potential for sexist implications, biologists and psychologists studying sex differences in the brain and in human behavior are cautious and divided on their interpretations of evidence suggesting that the female brain is put together differently than the male brain, and that women use their brains differently than do men.

"I won't make any prounouncements one way or the other," said Dr. Peter Wolff of Children's Hospital Medical Center on the social implications of his research that shows, for example, that growing females are more proficient at tasks requiring the use of small motor muscles.

This proficiency allows girls to carry out sequential movements more quickly and efficiently than boys of the same age, a skill that could be related to any sequential operation from typing to flying a space shuttle.

In tests conducted by Wolff, boys were easily disrupted from keeping time with their fingers when anything interfered with a time-keeping metronome. Girls were not.

While Wolff is cautious, others trace this proficiency to the left half of the brain, which not only controls sequential analysis, but also controls speaking and reading, two skills that girls develop more quickly than boys.

It would be unfortunate, scientists warn, if such experimental knowledge were marshalled to attack or support the women's movement or to suggest that one sex is naturally superior to the other. On the contrary, the evidence suggests a variety of skill-superior ities that cut across the sexes. While girls develop speaking and reading skills faster, boys tend to be more skilled in mechanics and math.

The work of Dr. Deborah Waber at Children's Hospital likewise can be interpreted to show sex differences in brain function, but she, like Wolff, is hesitant to push such a suggestion.

Waber studies "lateralization" in brain function: the amount of sharing of behavioral tasks by the left and right halves of the brain. She has demonstrated that females are less lateralized than males. She has tied this to the well known observation that girls reach puberty sooner than boys. Sexual maturation, it appears, inhibits the brain in sharing functions between the two halves.

Waber's studies have been cited by Dr. Jerre Levy, a neurologist at the University of Chicago, to support Levy's thesis that the sexual hormones - chemicals secreted into the bloodstream by sex glands - make the brains of males and females different.

Levy's theory holds that the right half of the brain is dominant in males while the left half is dominant in females. The sexual hormones appear to be the most important factors in Levy's thesis, but it remains a scientific mystery just where these differences originate.

Levy and other scientists are exploring the possibility that the sex hormones operate in such a way as to "masculinize" or "feminize" a developing brain.

"I think she has gone far beyond what the data reveal," said Waber of Levy's interpretations.

"Hormones and the brain clearly operate in the reproductive function," Waber said. "Everything else is inferential."

Most of the scientific evidence on the role of hormones has been gathered

from experiments on animals, and any conclusions based on studies of humans must remain tentative, warn research endocrinologists Anke Ehrhardt and Heino Meyer-Bahlburg of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York in a recent Science magazine article summarizing these studies.

In fact, Ehrhardt and Meyer-Bahlburg conclude that experiments studying the effects of sex hormones on general intelligence - that is, total intelligence when all subskills are taken together - produce negative results.

Hormones are tricky. The most glaring example of their effect on humans appears at the beginning of adolescence with puberty. Put simply, the hormones secreted by the gonads are preparing youthful bodies to reproduce.

But the gonads do not lie dormant until adolescence. Some evidence suggests that what happens with the sexual hormones in adulthood is linked to what happens with them when the body and brain are being formed in the earliest stages of development, although the exact connection is not fully understood.

"There are undoubtedly passionate and private motives for wanting to see sex differences in the brain," said Wolff. "We've gone through a long history of environmentalism and now we're seeing the antithesis - everyone is looking for prefixed prenatal determinants."

Waber agrees. "It has an astrological quality," she said. "People are saying to psychologists, Tell me how to read my brain,' as if knowing whether they have a male brain or a female brain is going unlock the key to who they are."

"Most of the sex differences we see in our work are really small differences," Waber said. "Occasionally a glich of difference shows up, but we're talking about brains that still function in pretty much the same way.

According to Dr. Richard M. Restak, a Georgetown University neurologist whose 1979 book, "The Brain: The Last Frontier," summarizes most research on the brain, the question raised from these studies is not "Are there brain-sex differences?" but rather, "What is going to be our response to these differences?"

Research on differences in brain function between the sexes is largely statistical, Restak notes. As such, it uncovers trends and should not be

applied to individuals.

Sigmund Freud claimed anatomy is destiny, but he had neither the scientific knowledge nor the technological tools early in this century to suggest that his poetic dictum was embedded in the anatomy of the human brain.

And whatever the dictum, contemporary researchers cautiously warn, there is no evidence to suggest that destiny implies inferiority or superiority of one gender in relation to the other.