Excerpt from Essay:
Dialogue Between B. Farreneheit. Skinner and Abraham Maslow
Maslow: So , Skinner, what are your views on habit modification, to start out this discussion?
Skinner: I do believe that operant conditioning has a lot to offer the world regarding behavior modification. Behavior may be reduced to a simple research of stimuli and response. After all, individual learning is simply result of someone’s response to a stimulus. From this sense, adhering to the principles of operant fitness can easily achieve behavior modification.
Maslow: Discussing make sure that We have got this kind of right, Skinner. You’re fighting that mental illness can be treated through a basic application of your principles of operant conditioning. I have to don’t agree that operant conditioning in behavior adjustment can be and so universally effective. It’s important to be aware that your style of first push psychology has some important and effective uses, specifically in treating some particular behavioral concerns. Even second force psychology, or psychoanalysis, has had several success. Nevertheless , both techniques have severe limitations.
Skinner: So if you’re saying that you like your individual approach. Discussing see if I understand. Knowing you, you first target to operant conditioning since treatment on an ethical level. As a humanist psychologist, you feel in the inherent worth and value of human beings, to see reducing human being behavior to stimuli and response as both awkward and extremely simplistic.
Maslow: You have to understand that I have superb respect pertaining to the work of behaviorist individuals, but I realize a different way of behavioral adjustment. In humanist psychology, a much broader range of treatment designed to treat the “whole person” offers replaced habit modification. Today, our focus includes psychosomatic, cognitive, spiritual, social approaches, in addition to the use of infrequent behavior customization techniques, yet only if essential. Ultimately, the idea of behavior adjustment is to some degree opposed to the principles of humanistic psychology.
B. F. Skinner’s novel “Walden Two” displays some of the rules of learning theory. Inside the novel, the principles of operant conditioning and behavior modification are used substantially to help to make a utopian contemporary society that is peacefully based on medical methodologies. Inside the novel, one of the main characters, Frazier, notes that society “already possesses the psychological tactics needed to get hold of universal observation of a code… A code which could guarantee the accomplishment of a community or express. ” Therefore, Skinner’s powerfulk Walden Two is simply a credit application of these scientific principles of operant fitness to the governance of an complete society.
This “utopian” society within Skinner’s Walden Two is created by using operant conditioning by the Plank of Organizers of the world, and especially through the organized incorporation of rewards intended for inhabitants with the society. For example inhabitants of Walden Two are rewarded for their labor by acquiring labor credits. Less pleasurable work receives more labor credits, hence increasing the reward intended for such function. For example , employed in sewers features so many credits
