The Radical Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner :

Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904–1990) questioned whether theories of learning were necessary in view of what appeared to be fruitless theoretical tests (Skinner, 1950). He argued instead for a purely empirical description of behavior, eschewing any hypothetical or intervening nonobservable variable in his description of behavior, a position that he had established in his first major publication (Skinner, 1938). His manipulation of the contingency between an operant (emitted) behavior and a reinforcer constituted his program of research, carried out in the operant-conditioning chamber more popularly known as a “Skinner Box.” With rats and later pigeons as his experimental subjects, Skinner measured cumulative responses over elapsed time as a function of reinforcement schedules (Ferster & Skinner, 1957). Intervening variables, such as drive or motivation, were defined operationally in terms of number of hours of deprivation or percent of free-feeding body weight. The reports of experiments by Skinner and his followers, with few animals but a large number of responses, met with rejection from editors whose definition of an experiment required a research design comparing experimental and control groups with a statistical test of the significance of the difference between them. The result was the establishment of the Journal for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior in 1958 (Krantz, 1972). Skinner’s approach to behavior extended to the development and use of language (Skinner, 1957) and to the technology of teaching (Skinner, 1968).