Behaviorism quotes:

Send

The Legacy of Behaviorism: Do this and you'll get that. -- Alfie Kohn
Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way. -- B. F. Skinner
Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything. -- B. F. Skinner
... causes (pains) are not logical constructions out of their effects (behaviour). -- Hilary Putnam
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. -- B. F. Skinner
An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin. -- B. F. Skinner
If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so. -- Richard Rosen
Evolution is the root of atheism, of communism, nazism, behaviorism, racism, economic imperialism, militarism, libertinism, anarchism, and all manner of anti-Christian systems of belief and practice. -- Henry M. Morris
A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. -- B. F. Skinner
I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is. -- B. F. Skinner
The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it. Chaos breeds geniuses. It offers a man something to be a genius about. -- B. F. Skinner
Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement. -- B. F. Skinner
No one asks how to motivate a baby. A baby naturally explores everything it can get at, unless restraining forces have already been at work. And this tendency doesn't die out, it's wiped out. -- B. F. Skinner
The problem of far greater importance remains to be solved. Rather than build a world in which we shall all live well, we must stop building one in which it will be impossible to live at all. -- B. F. Skinner
The simplest and most satisfactory view is that thought is simply behavior - verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt. It is not some mysterious process responsible for behavior but the very behavior itself in all the complexity of its controlling relations. -- B. F. Skinner
The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change. -- B. F. Skinner
Think of all the nonsense you had to learn in psychology courses. None of which was testable. None of which was measurable. We had behaviorism, Freudian psychology, all of these theories that you learn in psychology. Totally untestable. Now, we can test it, because physics allows us to calculate energy flows in the brain. -- Michio Kaku
Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone. -- B. F. Skinner

Send