Skinner

This Week’s Citation Classic®
Skinner B F. The behavior of organisms: an experimental analysis.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1938. 457 p. [Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota.Minneapolis. MN] In a number of chapters, including ‘A System of Behavior,” “Conditioning and Extinction,” “Periodic Reconditioning,” “Some Functions of Stimuli,” “The Differentiation of a Response,”“Drive,” and “Behavior and the Nervous System,” I report research on laboratory white rats, covering a wide range of experimental conditions, differing from the work of l.P. Pavlov and 1.8. Watson in twoways: (1) behavior is shown to be shaped and maintained by its “reinforcing” consequences rather than elicited asaconditioned or unconditioned response to stimuli, and (2) it is explained withoutreference to either mental or neurological events, Behaviorism is the philosophy 5 5 of such a science, [The SC! and SSCI indicate that this book has been cited in over 2,640 publications,)
pCC/NUMBER 6 FEBRUARY 5, 1990

From Behaviorism to Teaching Machines to Enjoying Old Age B.F. Skinner Department of Psychology Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138
November 9, 1989

This, my firstbook, reports experiments that I began as a graduate student, continued for two years as a National Research Council Fellow and for three years as a junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, andthen with my colleague, W.H. Heron, during my first two years as a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. The chairman of the department, R.M. Elliott, was the editorofthe Century Psychology Series, published by AppletonCentury-Crofts, and he accepted the manuscript. The series had already published Edward Tolman’s Purposive Behavior in Animals andMen and had agreedto publish Clark Hull’s Principles of Behavior. Neither was likely to make much money, and Elliott felt that he was asking the cornpany to take ontoo many books of that kind. He pled with me to...