Walden Three

ESSAY

I recently finished a novel by B. F. Skinner, who is perhaps the most famous behavioral psychologist of all time. If you’ve ever taken so much as a survey course in psychology, you will have heard his name—likely with the term “operant conditioning” following closely behind. Skinner spent over half a century exploring the ways in which, with the right incentive structures, you can turn animals into regular circus performers—manipulating them into conducting the most odd and unexpected acts.

He trained rats to solve puzzles and play a version of rodent basketball. He trained pigeons to make art and to square off against each other in pigeon ping-pong matches. He proved against a shadow of a doubt that with enough patience and knowledge of a creature’s reward systems, you could compel it to do just about anything, regardless of how bizarre and unnatural. You probably know all of this, though.

What you might not know—what your overpriced textbooks and underwhelming professors didn’t teach you—was that Burrhus Frederic Skinner was also an inventor with a penchant for putting living things into boxes as well as a utopian novelist who would (in the book’s preface) place Karl Marx beside Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius in a list of “great men who are said to have made a difference in human affairs.” More importantly, you are almost certainly unaware of the extent to which B. F. Skinner’s work is leveraged against you on a daily basis.