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B. F. Skinner

American behaviorist (1904–1990)

  • Fame66.7
  • Momentum10.0
  • Academics rank#234
Source-basedStable
  • Fame66.7
  • Momentum10.0
  • Academics rank#234
  • Wikipedia32.8K
Lived 1904–1990, aged 86United States
United States flagUnited StatesAcademicsAcademic
  • Wikipedia
    72 languages
    Cross-language footprint
  • Era
    1904–1990
    Aged 86
  • Awards
    13
    recognised works
Summary
Updated 2026-06-21

He built a box to prove that free will might be an illusion. B. F. Skinner believed behavior was shaped entirely by consequences — reward and punishment, nothing mystical — and spent decades running experiments that made the idea impossible to ignore.

Biography

About

Born in 1904, Skinner started as a would-be novelist before pivoting to psychology and landing at Harvard, where he spent most of his career. He invented the operant conditioning chamber and the cumulative recorder to track how rats and pigeons responded to reinforcement, then codified the findings with Charles Ferster in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement. His 1948 novel Walden Two imagined a society engineered on behaviorist principles, and his 1958 work Verbal Behavior extended the framework to language itself. He published 21 books and 180 articles before retiring in 1974. A 2002 s…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner
said
In trying to solve the terrifying problems that face us in the world today, we naturally turn to the things we do best.
— Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Chapter 1: "A Technology of Behaviour".
B. F. Skinner
said
We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at.
— Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
B. F. Skinner
said
A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.
— Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
B. F. Skinner
said
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
— Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (1969)
B. F. Skinner
said
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement.
— As quoted in B. F. Skinner : The Man and His Ideas (1968) by Richard Isadore Evans, p. 73
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
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By the numbers

Score breakdown

The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.

Fame
Stable
66.7
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Momentum10.0
Historical25.2
Now attention30.8
Source confidence60.0
Completeness70.0
Global rank
—
Country rank
—
Category rank
#234
Receipts

Sources

  • Wikipedia
    wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
    High confidence
  • Wikidata
    wikidata · wikidata.org
    High confidence
  • Pantheon 2.0
    database · pantheon.world
    High confidence