who the hell is is a new book series on the world's greatest thinkers presenting their ideas in an accessible engaging and jargon-free way today we're going to be talking about the psychologist b.f skinner's philosophy of radical behaviorism but first we will introduce skinner look at what behaviorism is and explain the practices used by behaviorists to understand learning processes if you'd like to go to any area directly please use the chapters in the timeline who is bf skinner and what is radical behaviourism bf skinner was an american psychologist and behaviorist who invented the philosophy of the science of behavior known as radical behaviorism skinner's philosophy wasn't so different from previous forms of behaviorism as put forward by john b watson and evan pavlov they all agreed that the environment plays a far greater role in moulding human behaviour than has previously been suggested they also agreed that experiments should focus on observable external actions if psychological science is to be truly objective but skinner's radical behaviourism redefined behavior to include everything that an organism does including thinking feeling and speaking this is what skinner meant by the term radical that everything an organism does is a behavior the foundation of behaviorism is the practice of classical conditioning which is a basic learning process what is classical conditioning this was first studied by ivan pavlov after he observed that the instinctive response of dogs prior to being fed is to salivate the dog's reflexive reaction to salivate is called an unconditioned response as it is unlearned the stimulus which causes the salivation is the site of meat and this is referred to as an unconditioned stimulus classical conditioning builds on this by pairing an unconditioned response with a neutral stimulus pavlov designed an experiment to find out if salivation in dogs could be triggered by a specific external stimuli he did this by pairing the unconditioned stimulus eg meat with a neutral stimulus eg a buzzer which he would sound shortly before giving the dogs food he discovered that once the buzzer had been sounded a few times before feeding the sound of the buzzer alone would be enough to cause the dogs to salivate pavlov's key discovery was to show that this process of learning by association once firmly conditioned was sufficient for the once neutral stimulus the buzzer to produce the response salivation even in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus food the neutral stimulus had therefore become a conditioned stimulus producing a now conditioned response the problem with classical conditioning as skinner saw it was that it explained all new behavior as being ultimately based on pre-existing responses or prior learning in this way for skinner this was far too simplistic to be a complete explanation of complex human behavior he believed that much of behavior is in fact spontaneous skinner's answer to the problem skinner began by drawing a comparison between the role that might be played by apparently spontaneous behaviors and that played by genetic mutation in darwin's evolutionary theory of natural selection applying similar ideas to the behavior of a rat within its lifetime skinner proposed that a range of apparently spontaneous behaviors may be performed by the rat unrelated to any prior events in the environment and that those behaviors which have positive consequences such as enabling the rat to eat reproduce or avoid danger will more likely be repeated while those which have negative consequences will diminish in this sense there is a survival of the fittest behaviors within the lifetime of the individual rather than a survival of the fittest genes over generations as darwin's theory concludes skinner called these behaviors which are unrelated to any prior event operants and the process by which these behaviors which lead to desirable consequences are more likely to be repeated as reinforcement so while watson and pavlov saw behavior as being under the control of earlier events skinner believed that behavior is under the control of later events so how did he prove it skinner introduced a process of learning through reinforcement which he called operant conditioning he began by inventing a box with a lever which became known as the skinner box the design was simple if a hungry rat placed inside the box pressed the lever a food pellet would be delivered to the rat via a glass tube however in order to realize this the rat would first need to press the lever which could take a while as the rat explores the new environment once the rat does press the lever then the food pellet delivered would act as a reinforcer a consequence that increases the chances of the rat repeating is lever pressing behaviour in the same way that reinforcing a hungry rat's behavior using food pellets increased the rate of lever pressing skinner also discovered that this process could be reversed by halting the delivery of the food pellets the lever pressing would diminish skinner called this loss of a previously conditioned behavior extinction imagine how this might work with humans how long would people continue to work if their employer stopped paying them their monthly salary how long would they work in the hope that they might be paid before realizing that they were working for no reward skinner went much further than just studying rats he set out to explain the variation and complexity of human behaviour through his concepts of shaping chaining and rule-governed behavior but those are for another video if you can't wait that long then you can read all about skinner and his radical behaviorism in who the hell is bf skinner by tom buxton cope available on amazon or via our website at who the hell is dot co dot uk thanks for watching if you've enjoyed this video then don't forget to like it and to catch all our new videos please subscribe to our youtube channel