Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 15. Skinner: Behavioral
Analysis© The McGraw−Hill^449
Companies, 2009his writing 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 un-
productive 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 reading
some of the works of Watson and Pavlov, he became determined to be a behaviorist.
He never wavered from that decision and threw himself wholeheartedly behind rad-
ical behaviorism. Elms (1981, 1994) contended that such total dedication to an ex-
treme ideology is quite typical of people faced with an identity crisis.
Although Skinner had never taken an undergraduate psychology course, Har-
vard 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 con-
tinue his laboratory research at Harvard. Now confident of his identity as a behav-
iorist, 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 depres-
sion 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 pro-
mote creative thinking among young intellectually gifted men at the university. Skin-
ner 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 psy-
chology and was not interested in learning about it. He had a PhD in psychology, 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 ap-
propriate pecks on keys that would maneuver an explosive missile into an enemy tar-
get. Almost 2 years before the United States entered the war, Skinner purchased a
flock of pigeons for the purpose of training them to guide missiles. To work full-time
on Project Pigeon, Skinner obtained a grant from the University of Minnesota and
Chapter 15 Skinner: Behavioral Analysis 443