Who+is+this+Skinner+Guy?

SKINNERS WORK "Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything"."Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless."

When Skinner initiated his research he sought the answer to one particular question: How did disorganized, spontaneous behavior become organized? "Skinner coined the term operant to refer to behavior that acts on the environment to produce specific consequences" (Feist; Rosenberg 303). Skinner coined the term Operant conditioning as the process of manipulating behavior through pleasant and unpleasant consequences of that particular behavior. He used reinforcers to increase desired behavior and divided them into two categories: Primary and secondary reinforcers. Primary reinforcers, Skinner concluded, were biologically driven by innate desires to satisfy basic needs for survival. Contrary to this the other category of reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, could be learned through classical conditioning (Feist; Rosenberg 303-4; Slavin 131). "Skinner maintained that we can study private, internal events-what we call perceptions, emotions, and thoughts-by observing our own sensory responses" (Wade; Tavris 249). The manipulation of secondary reinforcers was the process, according to Skinner, of how we learn.

How did Skinner come to this conclusion?

How do secondary reinforcers lead to learning?

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