1. Biography of B.F Skinner
Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, a small town in the hills of Pennsylvania. He grew up in what he called a "warm and stable" family environment along with a younger brother. He had an affinity for building various contraptions, like a cart with inverted steering, which was a mistake, believe it or not. .
Skinner attended Hamilton college where he decided he would go on to become a writer. Following his years at Hamilton, was what he dubbed his "dark year," where he produced a mere handful of short newspaper articles, and a few models of ships. He found himself a job working as a bookstore clerk, where he came upon books that would inspire his lifelong career in psychology, and these books were of Pavlov and Watson.
Now 24 years old, Skinner enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University. Still aching in his heart was the passion for designing and building various apparatuses. He designed experiments using rats as his test subjects, observing their behavior, and these experiments eventually led to his invention of the cumulative recorder, a device that records every response as an upward moving horizontal line. This led to a startling discovery that ousted Pavlov and Watson's earlier discovery. A rat's response (in this example, pressing a lever) was not accelerated by any preceding stimulus, but rather, what followed the pressing of the lever. This process or arranging contingencies of reinforcement directly responsible for producing certain behavior he named "operant conditioning." Using this theory, people have since been able to train animals to perform many tasks, as they learn to associate certain behavior with "rewards" the behavior is thus reinforced, and reproduced. Mice have been able to perform tricks, such as riding a unicycle, or squirrels operating a hang-glider contraption, this theory has many applications, both practical and impractical.