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Walden Two

Page history last edited by lhollo@... 15 years, 5 months ago

B.F. Skinner

 

 

                    

 

John Stuart Mill                      Harriet Taylor

 

Who was B.F. Skinner?

In his young age, he enjoyed going to school and learn new things. He also loved the outdoors and building things by himself. He went to college in New York receiving his BA in English from Hamilton College. While attending Harvard University, he also got his MA and PhD in psychology. He tried to be a writer but it was just not working for him very well. Since he likes to build things he became an inventor. The first thing he invented was an air crib. An air crib is a box to put baby in it, but unlike a normal crib, it had temperature and humidity controller inside the box (his second daughter, Deborah, was raised in the baby box for 2.5 years). Then in 1948, Walden Two was published. Essentially it became an avenue for self-therapy book. During his 60-year career, he discovered important principles of operant conditioning. It was a type of learning that involves rewarding and punishment for correct and wrong reply. To experiment his theory, he invented a box called the “Skinner Box” and has worked with a lot of pigeons and white rats. His theory is referred to radical behaviorism. He broke down behaviors into small steps and analyzed it. This all happened because he was influenced by the work of John B. Watson as well as early behaviorist pioneers Ivan Pavlov and Edward Thomas.  People say, “He was a kind of man developing new ways to do everyday things in ways of more comfortable more efficient.”  He was one of the most important psychologists in America who died August 18, 1990 in Cambridge, MA because of Cancer-Leukemia.

 

Who is John Stuart Mill?

 

 

     John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806 in London.  He was home-schooled and was not allowed to be social.  At a young age, John had read many books such as Plato and Aristotle in Greek.  He continued to study different works of art and followed in the footsteps of his father.  Mill became a philosopher and started to write about his ideas, which are called Utilitarianism.  At the age of 45, he married Harriet Taylor; however, she died 7 years later due to severe lung congestion.  In 1865, he became a teacher at the University of St. Andrews; also he became a Member of Parliament for Westminster.  Mill was very involved in woman’s rights and tried to do as much as he could for women during his time in Parliament.  He was the first person to allow women to have the right to vote.  In 1873, at the age of 67, John Stuart Mill passed away.

 

What else does the web offer?

 

     The web mainly offered the pictures of Mill and his wife.  It made it easier and faster in order to bring these pictures into the Wiki; otherwise, the pictures would have had to been scanned in from a book and imported into the Wiki.  The web simplified this task.

 

B.F. Skinner's Behavorial Engineering

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm5FGrQEyBY  --> Link to YouTube video (Embedding disabled)

 

What has happened to the ideas Skinner proposed in Walden Two?

 

Since Skinner's book was published, the ideas he put forth have been greatly debated and have been at the center of much controversy as to whether this is an acceptable form of society.  In the case of The Twin Oaks Intentional Community, a society established in 1967, Skinner's ideas regarding a utopia based on behavioral modification were the basis of the established order.  While the society no longer utilizes these behaviorist ideals, it is still makes up the fabric of the community.

 

Walden Two created the same type of Utopia that Walden by Thoreau did: a contemplative place where people worked because they wanted to, in the jobs they enjoyed; a place where people developed and maintained strong social relationships, and government and war were not a factor. Walden Two is not an unknown fictional land in the mind of B.F. Skinner: it is no remote island or tropical forest it is merely an escape from present day society and is just outside the city.  Utopia allows people to be in control of their own lives.  It is doing what you want because you want to and working hard at your job because it is what you have a passion for.  Walden Two depicts a life with strong relationships and instead of being mainly focused on the government and war people are focused on each other and maintaining and building off of these relationships.  Outside this utopia the government controls people when it is actually the people who know what is right for them and can live a successful life without the help of outside people.  Walden Two concocts a life that is simplistic and does not measure a person by the things they own and the power that they have but by the content of their character.

 Works Cited

 

"B.F. Skinner." Wikipedia. 11 Sept. 2008. 12 Sept. 2008 <http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/b.f._skinner#radical_behaviorism>.

"Walden Two." Wikipedia. 17 Aug. 2008. 12 Sept. 2008 <http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/walden_two>.

 

B.F. Skinner, aka Burrhus Fredric Skinner, was born March 20,1904 in Susquehanna, PA between his dad, lawyer, and his mom, an intelligent housewife.  "B.F. Skinner." NWLINK. 11 Sep. 2008. 2 March 2008. <http://www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/hrd/history/skinner.html>

“B.F. Skinner.” NNDB. 11 Sep. 2008.

< http://www.nndb.com/people/297/000022231/ >

“B.F. Skinner.” Webspace. 11 Sep. 2008. 2006. <http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html>

Skinner, B.F. About Behaviorism. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1974.

 

 

 

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