Behavior: Skinner's Utopia: Panacea, or Path to Hell?

(3 of 10)

virtues. It is to make life less punishing, and in doing so to release for more reinforcing activities the time and energy consumed in the avoidance of punishment." The way to release that time and energy is "to build a world in which people are naturally good," in which they are rewarded for wanting what is good for their culture. But arranging effective rewards, complicated enough in the laboratory, is even more complex in the real world. Why not solve society's problems by using the much simpler physical and biological technologies we already have? Because, Skinner says, that will not work. "Better contraceptives will control population only if people use them. A nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned. We need to make vast changes in human behavior."

Soap Mouthwash

A matter that might interest President Nixon is Skinner's belief that new ways must be found to persuade people that work is worthwhile. "Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions." Moreover, "we can't control inflation if everything we might do is a threat to somebody's freedom. Yet in the long run, we are all going to suffer much more than if we were slightly restricted."

Skinner came rather slowly to his conviction that such changes can be made; his early interests, in fact, were far from psychology. Born in Susquehanna, Pa., in 1904, he was the elder son of Grace Burrhus, an amateur musician who sang at weddings and funerals, and William Skinner, a lawyer who was "a sucker for book salesmen." In his "Sketch for an Autobiography," Skinner describes his early life as "warm and stable." He lived in the same house until he went to college. He was never physically punished by his father and only once by his mother—when she washed out his mouth with soap for using a "bad word." Nevertheless, young Skinner was "taught to fear God, the police and what people will think," and his Grandmother Skinner "made sure that I understood the concept of hell by showing me the glowing bed of coals in the parlor stove." To deter him from a life of crime, Skinner's father conducted him through the county jail and on a summer vacation took him to a lecture with colored slides that depicted life in Sing Sing.

From his childhood years. Skinner was mechanically inclined. He built roller-skate scooters, steerable wagons, rafts, water pistols from lengths of bamboo, and "from a discarded water boiler a steam cannon with which I could shoot plugs of potato and carrot over the houses of our neighbors." He also devised a flotation system to separate green from ripe elderberries, which he used to sell from door to door. Although his attempts to build a glider and a perpetual motion machine ended in failure, his innovative tinkering was to pay off handsomely in the laboratory in later years.

In high school, Skinner earned money by lettering advertising show cards, played