B.F. Skinner's "What Is Man"

Paper Summary:

This paper provides a retrospective of the ideas about behaviorism and the environment contained in B.F. Skinner's 1971 book "What Is Man". The paper first summarizes Skinner's belief that man is shaped by his environment and experiences, and provides several examples from the text. Then the author critiques those theories, finding that Skinner is "heavy on conjecture, but light on proof."

From the Paper:

"Man, Skinner claimed, was shaped and is maintained by his environment. He agrees with Gilbert Seldes rather remarkable claim that environment changes people, that it "thirty little Hottentots" and thirty aristocratic English children had their environments switched, the English children would become Hottentots and the Hottentots conservative Englishmen. Skinner says that environmentalists actually tended to believe that if a Mongol on horseback were switched at birth with an Astronaut, they would accomplish the same things. The environmentalists may be literally saying that, if you put a rabbit along with lion cubs and is nursed along with those cubs, the rabbit will react like a lion when he gets older. There is something to be said about environment, especially when it comes to the lower order of animals, since, surely, as Darwin discovered, survival depended on adaptation to climate, environment, and other elements of nature."

More papers on B.F. Skinner's "What Is Man":

• Book Review # 44977 : "What is Man?"
• Essay # 87129 : "The Accomplishments of B.F. Skinner"
• Research Paper # 6779 : "B. F. Skinner and his Operant Conditioning Theory"

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