ABSTRACT
B.F. Skinner’s radical behaviorist program has always been bold, distinctive, significant, and far-reaching. It has also been controversial, for it has involved commitments to the following views.
All human behavior is lawful. It is explicable in terms of principles (laws, regularities, generalizations) that can be discovered and confirmed in experimental studies in the laboratory.
For the bulk of human behavior, including verbal and purposive behavior, these generalizations involve only current relations between behaviors and environmental factors, together with a person’s past history of such relations. Other variables, whether from physiology or from cognitive psychology, are not needed to express these generalizations (see Skinner, 1945, for qualifications of this view).
In the light of these generalizations significant controls may be exerted over human behavior, controls that, as they are progressively implemented, promise to resolve major social problems.
The achievement of widespread control, both experimental and technological, is a crucial factor, alongside prediction, in evaluating the explanatory claims of a research program.
