Skinner's Article

B.F. Skinner was known for his research on operant conditioning, negative reinforcement which has made him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th Century (Morris & Maisto, 2010). B.F. Skinner spent his career working towards creating operant behavior, positive and negative reinforcement, and how punishment can help to curb certain behaviors.

Operant conditioning was Skinners main idea along with negative reinforcement. Basically Skinner came up with the idea that a person’s behavior will change after a certain type of response takes place to different situations, which Skinner called operant behavior (Morris & Maisto, 2010). Skinner wanted everyone to know that by reinforcing a behavior, it then will trigger the impact of the response. There are two different types of reinforcements that Skinner reported: continuous and partial reinforcement. Continuous and partial reinforcement are pretty basic concepts. When a person is using continuous reinforcements, it means they will be using it all the time, whereas partial reinforcement means the person will only use it some of the time (Morris & Maisto, 2010).

Skinner did an experiment with a rat and a box, called Skinner Box. It showed that once the rat realized that all he had to do was go into the box and touch the bar and food would drop, he would do this behavior when he wanted food (Morris & Maisto, 2010). This showed Skinner that behavior can be learned, especially with a positive reinforcement. Reinforcement is used to help gain something that is desired, which could be either negative or positive. Negative and positive reinforcements are used to help teach or learn new behaviors or strengthen old behaviors. With negative and positive reinforcements come punishment which can be both positive and negative but unlike reinforcements, negative punishments can turn into something positive (Morris & Maisto, 2010). Punishments are typically used to weaken or eliminate