B. F. Skinner's Theory of Behavior (continued)
Operant and respondent conditioning procedures can treat abnormal
behavior. An example is flooding, which involves encouraging a person with, say, a phobia,
to get into and stay in a situation that arouses fear until the fear drops to a lower level.
The "
Skinner box" has been very useful in pharmacological
research, where the effects on an animal of a particular drug can be closely controlled and monitored
Behavioral techniques have been used with considerable success on mental wards and with the
developmentally disabled and autistic child. In a
token economy, people earn tokens when they
have a good behavior, which they then exchange for desired goods or activities.
Skinner's approach has been applied to a wide variety of practical problems, in education, industry, the helping professions, and animal training. The lawfulness of his findings is unparalleled in psychology, and his schedules of reinforcement are important to both learning theorists and the personality investigators. But because Skinner refuses to infer any observable mechanisms or processes, he has difficulty in using known facts as the starting point from which to draw conclusions in completely new situations. Holistic psychologists feel that Skinner's approach ignores the complexity of human behavior, and other critics point out that the simple situations Skinner studies never occur outside the laboratory. Other critics object to behavioral laws that so not explicitly take species differences into account.
