Main content

B F Skinner and Superstition in the Pigeon

Claudia Hammond explores the research and life of one of the 20th century’s most famous and controversial psychologists – B F Skinner.

Claudia Hammond explores the legacy of BF Skinner and Behaviourism. One of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, he became one of the most controversial, by applying the theory he developed through animal studies to human learning.
Claudia is shown round his study by his daughter, Julie Vargas. Remaining much as it was when he died in 1990, it reveals another side to the man famous for his operant conditioning experiments with rats and pigeons, and infamous for his template for what some have described as a totalitarian state, in his book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity'.

Claudia also meets his younger daughter, Deborah Buzan, and explodes the myth that she was raised in one of Skinner's experimental 'boxes'.
She hears more about the man and his work from Richard McNally at Harvard, and Gordon Bower and Lee Ross of Stanford University.

Producer: Marya Burgess

Available now

27 minutes

Last on

Thu 22 Oct 2015 13:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Wed 21 Oct 2015 18:32GMT
  • Wed 21 Oct 2015 19:32GMT
  • Wed 21 Oct 2015 23:32GMT
  • Thu 22 Oct 2015 02:32GMT
  • Thu 22 Oct 2015 04:32GMT
  • Thu 22 Oct 2015 05:32GMT
  • Thu 22 Oct 2015 06:32GMT
  • Thu 22 Oct 2015 12:32GMT
  • Thu 22 Oct 2015 13:32GMT

Podcast