B.F. Skinner and Jean Piaget

Paper Summary:

"B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), an American psychologist, and Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist, were two of the most influential human development theorists of the twentieth century. The two men approached the question of development from very different angles.

From the Paper:

"B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), an American psychologist, and Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist, were two of the most influential human development theorists of the twentieth century. The two men approached the question of development from very different angles. Skinner, a behaviorist, worked from a learning perspective and saw human development as a continuous process in which changes in behavior were responses to experience and adaptation to the environment. Piaget, on the other hand, took a cognitive approach and was concerned with the evolution of mental structures. Where Skinner saw development in quantitative terms (i.e., changes in the amount learned), Piaget held that development occurred in stages in which qualitative changes (i.e., changes in how the person thinks) enabled the individual to construct her/his world through progressively more complicated ..."

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