Chapter 57: Freedom Through Control: B. F. Skinner and Classroom Management Theory

In his rise to prominence in the latter half of the twentieth century, the American research psychologist Burrhus Frederic (B. F.) Skinner achieved great fame that simultaneously depended upon and complicated his scientific contributions. Skinner helped inspire pioneering human behavioral theories and is often viewed as a pivotal figure in the study of human psychology. The fact, however, that Skinner derived his ideas from research studies intended to induce and record the modification of voluntary behavior in animals gained him sustained notoriety and, in some quarters, enduring criticism and derision. Today, he is perhaps as wellknown for the device dubbed the “Skinner box” (a confined, lever-based, food-reward system for inducing changes in a subject’s behavior) used in his animal experiments as any theories he produced (Bjork, 1993; Rutherford, 2009).