Chapter 16 Skinner: Behavioral Analysis 461Warning his son of the necessity of making a living, William Skinner reluctantly
agreed to support him for 1 year on the condition that he would get a job if his writ-
ing career was not successful. This unenthusiastic reply was followed by a more
encouraging letter from Robert Frost, who had read some of Skinner’s writings.
Skinner returned to his parents’ home in Scranton, built a study in the attic,
and every morning went to work at writing. But nothing happened. His efforts
were unproductive because he had nothing to say and no firm position on any
current issue. This “Dark Year” exemplified a powerful identity confusion in
Skinner’s life, but as we discuss later in this biographical sketch, this was not his
last identity crisis.
At the end of this unsuccessful Dark Year (actually 18 months), Skinner was
faced with the task of looking for a new career. Psychology beckoned. After read-
ing some of the works of Watson and Pavlov, he became determined to be a behav-
iorist. He never wavered from that decision and threw himself wholeheartedly
behind radical behaviorism. Elms (1981, 1994) contended that such total dedication
to an extreme ideology is quite typical of people faced with an identity crisis.
Although Skinner had never taken an undergraduate psychology course,
Harvard accepted him as a graduate student in psychology. After he completed his
PhD in 1931, Skinner received a fellowship from the National Research Council
to continue his laboratory research at Harvard. Now confident of his identity as a
behaviorist, he drew up a plan for himself, outlining his goals for the next 30 years.
The plan also reminded him to adhere closely to behavioristic methodology and
not to “surrender to the physiology of the central nervous system” (Skinner, 1979,
p. 115). By 1960, Skinner had reached the most important phases of the plan.
When his fellowship ended in 1933, Skinner was faced for the first time with
the chore of hunting for a permanent job. Positions were scarce during this depression
year and prospects looked dim. But soon his worries were alleviated. In the spring of
1933, Harvard created the Society of Fellows, a program designed to promote creative
thinking among young intellectually gifted men at the university. Skinner was selected
as a Junior Fellow and spent the next 3 years doing more laboratory research.
At the end of his 3-year term as a Junior Fellow, he was again in the position
of looking for a job. Curiously, he knew almost nothing of traditional academic
psychology and was not interested in learning about it. He had a PhD in psychol-
ogy, 5^1 / 2 years of additional laboratory research, but he was ill prepared to teach
within the mainstream of psychology, having “never even read a text in psychology
as a whole” (Skinner, 1979, p. 179).
In 1936, Skinner began a teaching and research position at the University of
Minnesota, where he remained for 9 years. Soon after moving to Minneapolis and
following a short and erratic courtship, he married Yvonne Blue. The Skinners had
two daughters—Julie, born in 1938, and Deborah (Debbie), born in 1944. During
his Minnesota years, Skinner published his first book, The Behavior of Organisms
(1938), but beyond that, he was involved with two of his most interesting ventures—
the pigeon-guided missile and the baby-tender built for his second daughter,
Debbie. Both projects brought frustration and disappointment, emotions that may
have led to a second identity crisis.
Skinner’s Project Pigeon was a clever attempt to condition pigeons to make
appropriate pecks on keys that would maneuver an explosive missile into an enemy