Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does Experience Change Behavior?
Distinguish selection within a lifetime from the essay’s extensions to evolution and culture.
Why you’re reading it. Give the behavior-analytic account a substantive place in explaining learning through consequences.
A question to consider. The volunteer cleans a workbench more often after others thank them. What comparison would justify calling the thanks a reinforcer?
Why this reading
Skinner presents a compact argument about how consequences can shape behavior over time. The article gives a behavior-analytic explanation its own terms and lets readers assess the reach of that explanation.
Before you read
Operant behavior changes in relation to its consequences. Reinforcement increases a behavior’s future likelihood; punishment decreases it. Positive and negative refer to adding and removing events, not to good and bad. Thus, removing an unpleasant event can reinforce an action. These terms describe effects, not the provider’s intentions.
Read for
- Distinguish selection across generations, selection of behavior within a lifetime, and Skinner’s account of cultural practices.
- Identify how past consequences enter the explanation of present behavior.
- Separate claims supported by experimental learning research from broader analogies about biological and cultural change.
Consider afterwards
- A person repeats an action after receiving praise. What comparison would establish that praise reinforced it, and what competing account could explain the same observation?
Editorial context
This theoretical essay advances a particular account of causation and challenges explanations in terms of stored information and purpose. It is not a new experiment, and its extensions to cultural evolution are arguments to evaluate. A behavior’s persistence does not establish its desirability or benefit to the person performing it.