Did B.F. Skinner really put babies into boxes?

When I was a piddling kid , I had a weird babysitter . She was very pallid and thin , with dark hair and a tentative smiling . She wore blouses with big cornet sleeves , out of which nose her bony white wrists and elbows . She rarely made forcible contact . She lived just up the street from us , and I heard citizenry say she ’d been “ raised in a Skinner Box ” by her psychologist father .

Ever since then , I ’ve wondered : What was the Skinner Box ? And were sister really raised in boxes ?

Top image : Air Crib photo by Nicholas Hess and Tracy Woodard .

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Well , sort of . It turns out that there were two very dissimilar things that the noted psychologist B.F. Skinner did . On the one script , he createdgray alloy boxeswith lever tumbler and electrified floors , in which he essay rats and other creatures , giving them payoff on an maverick foundation to train them to expose sure behaviour that were n’t born . He groom pigeon to play ping niff . Some of his students trained a Sus scrofa to vacuum - blank , and a rabbit to foot up a coin with its mouth . His daughter trained a cat to play the pianoforte . ( Really . ) He develop his theories of “ operant conditioning , ” in which any behavior can be condition using variable reinforcement .

And meanwhile , Skinner also invented the “ air crib , ” which he test on his daughter Deborah , and which also come to be referred to as a “ Skinner Box . ” As Marc N. Richelle explain in his book B.F. Skinner : A Reappraisal :

In 1943 , the Skinners decided to have a second minor . After his married woman had remark that she pretty fear the constraints of the first year , Skinner decide to do something to palliate the effect . He analysed the ways babies were cared for and considered possible reduction , while meliorate solace , social give-and-take and the mother ’s gratification . The solution was the aircrib , or “ infant - tender ” as he called it . This was a spacious compartment , mounted on a wheeled table , with a large glass windowpane , temperature and zephyr control , in which the baby could abide defenseless and comfortable , kept in the presence of the mother wherever she was work in the house . A landing strip of sheeting covered over a canvas , which served as a mattress ; this could be run to a neat section as needed by simple cranking . The infant , rather than suffering from exuberant cover or from being pissed , or but from being alert and alone , could move freely , in an optimally stable atmosphere , and in permanent visual contact with the mother at meter when the latter was fussy and would not be able to pick the baby up … .

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A few parent adopted the equipment for their own child , but it never became really popular . It had a period of renewed success — a restrained one , since only a few hundred units were betray — between 1957 and 1967 when they were produced by a small company . from time to time , a former “ box - raise baby ” would be in a Skinner audience and would come up to him with a felicitous smile at the end of the lecture .

Skinner wrote about his invention for the Ladies Home Journal ’s October 1945 edition , and his clause was give the inauspicious title “ Baby in a Box . ” ( you may read his clause in its entiretyhere . ) He describes the temperature - controlled corner in which the naked sister sit , and then adds that the box does include some kind of training :

A wider range of mountains and variety of behavior are also encourage by the freedom from vesture . For example , our babe comport an amusing , almost apelike skill in the purpose of her feet . We have formulate a number of toys , which are at times set aside from the ceiling of the compartment . She often plays with these with her metrical foot alone and with her hired hand and feet in near cooperation .

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One toy is a ring suspended from a modified medicine box . A note can be played by root for the ring downward , and a series of speedy jerk will produce Three Blind Mice . At seven month our baby would grasp the band in her toe , elongate out her branch and make for the melodic phrase with a rhythmic movement of her foot .

We are not especially interested in develop accomplishment of this sorting , but they are worthful for the baby because they arouse and hold her stake . Many babies seem to cry from sheer boredom - their behavior is restrained and they have nothing else to do . In our compartment , the heat hr are invariably active and happy ones .

trope viaCoco Mault / Flickr .

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In his October 1945 article , Skinner also responds to the critics who say that in his corner , the babe “ would be socially famish and robbed of the affection and female parent lovemaking , which she needs . ” He retorts :

This has simply not been true . The compartment does not ostracise the baby . The large window is no more of a societal barrier than the bar of a crib . The infant watch over what is going on in the way , smiles at passers - by , plays “ peek - a- boo ” plot , and obviously delights in company . And she is handled , talk to , and played with whenever she is change or fed , and each good afternoon during a play stop , which is becoming longer as she grows older . The fact is that a baby will probably get more sexual love and affection when it is easily worry for .

you may decide for yourself whether this set - up would be good for a baby — as compare , say , with the current vogue for “ child bjorn ” style pappoose and thing . It definitely feels very 1950s and maybe a bite too sterile and mechanistic — even if it ’s not true that the sister were being trained or experimented on in the same way that Skinner ’s rats were .

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In any case , rumors circulate like wildfire that Skinner had kept his daughter in a box and done experiment on her , and that she ’d turned psychotic as a event . Or even , that she ’d institutionalise felo-de-se . In his 1983 autobiography , Skinner complains about a whisper drive , which he feels “ nurture by clinical psychologists who find it useful in criticizing behavior therapy . ” His healthy , felicitous girl was constantly surprised to hear that she was dead or harebrained . And Skinner reports that his telephone set rang just as he was fall deceased , with a new valet de chambre ’s voice asking him , “ Professor Skinner , is it rightful you go along your daughter in a John Milton Cage Jr. ? ”

In fact , Deborah is okay — she know in London , where she ’s an artist . And by all accounts , she and her don got along well until his decease in 1990 .

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So what ’s going on here ? Skinner was a polarizing figure , and people seized on the “ baby in a corner ” affair as an easy fashion of discredit him , in a nutshell .

As Lauren Slater documents in her book Opening Skinner ’s Box , Skinner ’s actual research crystallize something canonical about behavior : that we respond better to variable reinforcement than to regular reward . If we only get the payoff every once in a while , we will continue to exhibit the behavior that leads to the reward for way longer , and we ’ll be way more addicted to it . Skinner also seemed to show that all sorts of behaviors — not just involuntary one like salivating , like Pavlov ’s dogs — could be trigger in response to rewards or stimulant .

In other words , Skinner showed that beast ( possibly including citizenry ) are not separable from surround . We behave in certain way in reply to the reward we receive , and — as anybody who ’s ever has a compulsive behavior like play a biz all night will attest — we ’re capable of behavior that we do n’t entirely command . This , in itself , is a terror to many of us who require to consider that human race are ultimately masters of our fate rather than merchandise of our circumstance .

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But then Skinner run further , in a dyad of ways . First , the “ melody crib ” was just one of the ways that he publicly preach for a more scientific approach to sprightliness . When that same daughter , Deborah , went to schoolhouse , Skinner decided that quondam - fashioned education methods were too inefficient — youngster who give the correct answer were n’t reward fast enough to reenforce the moral . So he make out up with a design for “ programme command , ” where flesh - and - blood teachers could be supplemented by , in essence , teach machines .

As Alexandra Rutherford explicate in Beyond the Box : B.F. Skinner ’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life , 1950s-1970s :

Programmed program line was an approach in which scholarly person were endanger to path fabric in small incremental stride via frames presented in a corner - comparable apparatus . They were required to generate a response to a interrogation about the material , and could then instantly compare their response to the right result . The presentation of the stuff was fine tuned to assure very few mistake , on the head that capture the right answer — properly by — was maximally reenforce .

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In other quarrel , the Thomas Kyd would be steered to the correct answer about the material they ’d just read , and then would be “ reinforce ” by realizing they ’d gotten it veracious , thus further them to keep get right-hand solvent . Some people worried that by trying to shape students ’ answers and pay back them for responding the right way , Skinner ’s gimmick would encourage conformity and discourage independent thought process .

But Skinner did n’t just advocate for more “ scientific ” methods of child - bringing up — he also wrote some far - accomplish works of philosophy that argued for a utopian imagination of a world controlled by behavioural scientists rather than politicians . He wrote a number of Quran , notably Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity , which argue that to solve problems like contamination , overpopulation and the terror of atomic war , we necessitate to adapt human demeanour .

It ’s like one half Asimov ’s psychohistory , one half benign despotism . Here ’s Skinner , from Beyond Freedom and Dignity :

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What we need is a engineering science of behavior . We could lick our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the mankind ’s population as precisely as we line up the course of a starship , or meliorate husbandry and industry with some of the self-assurance with which we quicken high - energy atom , or move toward a passive world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached infrangible zero ( although both stay on presumably out of reach . ) But a behavioural technology comparable in power and precision to strong-arm and biological technology is lacking , and those who do not find the very opening ridiculous are more likely to be frightened than reassure . This is how far we are from “ see human issues ” in the sense in which physics and biological science interpret their fields , and how far we are from preclude the catastrophe toward which the humans seems to be inexorably actuate .

There ’s something irreducibly Space Age about Skinner and his preoccupancy with finding scientific ways to track down everything . He contributed more than most citizenry realize to our understanding of behavior — and his focus on reward rather than punishments as a means of shaping deportment was actually quite benign . Some people are even try out to add back the “ Air Crib ” for their babies nowadays , in fact . But still , you may kind of see why some of Skinner ’s ideas creeped people out .

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