Theories_of_Personality 7th Ed Feist

Feist−Feist: Theories of

Personality, Seventh

Edition

V. Learning Theories 15. Skinner: Behavioral

Analysis

© The McGraw−Hill^447

Companies, 2009

E

rik Erikson (see Chapter 9) believed that people go through a series of identity
crises, or turning points, that leave them vulnerable to major changes in how
they see themselves. One such person was Fred, a man who experienced at least two
such crises, and each led to significant turns in his life’s course. His first identity cri-
sis occurred during young adulthood, when, armed with an undergraduate degree in
English, Fred returned to his parents’ home hoping to shape his identity in the world
of literature. His father reluctantly agreed to allow Fred 1 year to carve out a niche
for himself as a writer. He warned his son of the necessity of finding a job, but he al-
lowed Fred to convert the third-floor attic into a study.
Every morning, Fred climbed the two flights of steps and began his job as a
writer. But nothing happened. After only 3 months of trying to become a creative
writer, Fred realized that the quality of his work was poor. He blamed his parents,
their home town, and literature itself for his failure to produce any worthwhile writ-
ing (Elms, 1981). He wasted time with nonproductive activities, sitting in the family
library for long periods of time, remaining “absolutely motionless in a kind of cata-
tonic stupor” (Skinner, 1976a, p. 287). Nevertheless, he felt obligated to continue
the charade of pursuing a literary career for the one full year he and his father had
agreed on. Fred eventually lost hope that he could make any contribution to litera-
ture. In later years, he referred to this nonproductive time as his “Dark Year.” Erik
Erikson would have called it a time of identity confusion—a time for trying to dis-
cover who he was, where he was going, and how he was going to get there. The
young man experiencing this “Dark Year” was B. F. Skinner, who later became one
of the most influential psychologists in the world but not until he experienced a sec-
ond identity crisis, as we discuss in our biography of Skinner.

Overview of Behavioral Analysis

During the early years of the 20th century while Freud, Jung, and Adler were relying
on clinical practice and before Eysenck and Costa and McCrae were using psycho-
metrics to build theories of human personality, an approach called behaviorism
emerged from laboratory studies of animals and humans. Two of the early pioneers
of behaviorism were E. L. Thorndike and John Watson, but the person most often as-
sociated with the behaviorist position is B. F. Skinner, whose behavioral analysisis
a clear departure from the highly speculative psychodynamic theories discussed in
Chapters 2 through 9. Skinner minimized speculation and focused almost entirely on
observable behavior. However, he did not claim that observable behavior is limited
to external events. Such private behaviors as thinking, remembering, and anticipat-
ing are all observable—by the person experiencing them. Skinner’s strict adherence
to observable behavior earned his approach the label radical behaviorism,a doc-
trine that avoids all hypothetical constructs, such as ego, traits, drives, needs, hunger,
and so forth.
In addition to being a radical behaviorist, Skinner can rightfully be regarded
as a determinist and an environmentalist. As a determinist,he rejected the notion
of volition or free will. Human behavior does not stem from an act of the will,
but like any observable phenomenon, it is lawfully determined and can be studied
scientifically.

Chapter 15 Skinner: Behavioral Analysis 441