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JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR 2004, 81, 207–213 NUMBER 2 (MARCH)

PSYCHOLOGY IN THE YEAR 2000

B. F. SKINNER

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

It’s tempting to approach this topic in thespirit of science fiction. What new discoverieswill revolutionize the field of psychology? Wecould find some suitable themes in currentspeculation. Will new drugs be discoveredthat will increase intelligence, control ouremotions, heighten awareness, or cure psy-choses? Will geneticists solve these problemsthrough direct manipulation of the germplasm, or will electrophysiologists do it bybrain stimulation? Is it possible that a drugmay be discovered which will have the sameeffect as sleep, so that we can stay awake allour lives and thus add at least a third to oureffective life span? Will a chemical basis ofmemory be unveiled so that the education ofthe future will be a matter of inoculation oringestion?1 Will a knowledge of French ormathematics then be purchasable at your cor-ner drugstore or grocery store?

Interesting as all that may be, we must notforget that 2000 A.D. is only 32 years away. Itlies as near us in the future as 1936 in the

Reprints may be obtained from the editor, LeonardGreen, Department of Psychology, Washington Universi-ty, Campus Box 1125, St. Louis, Missouri 63130.

1 This question was posed in reference to a strange setof studies initiated by J. V. McConnell. These studies pur-ported to show that a history of Pavlovian conditioningin planarians could be transferred to naive planariansthrough ingestion of their more knowledgeable compan-ions. (See, e.g., McConnell, J. V. [1962]. Memory transferthrough cannibalism in planarians. Journal of Neuropsychi-atry, 3, 542–548; McConnell, J. V. [1968]. The modernsearch for the ‘‘engram.’’ In W. C. Corning & M. Balaban[Eds.], The mind: Biological approaches to its functions [pp.49–68]. New York: Interscience. See also, Ungar, G.[Ed.]. [1970]. Molecular mechanisms in memory and learn-ing. New York: Plenum Press.) At the time of Skinner’sspeech, these kinds of studies were hotly debated andwidely publicized; but, unfortunately, they often couldnot be replicated by other researchers (e.g., Byrne, W.L., et al. [1966, August 5]. Memory transfer. Science, 153,658–659.) (For details and history of the memory trans-fer research, see, e.g., Corning, W. C., & Riccio, D.[1970]. The planarian controversy. In W. L. Byrne [Ed.],Molecular approaches to learning and memory [pp. 107–149].New York: Academic Press; Rose, S. [1992]. The makingof memory: From molecules to mind. New York: AnchorBooks; Travis, G. D. L. [1981]. Replicating replication?Aspects of the social construction of learning in planar-ian worms. Social Studies of Science, 11, 11–32.)

past, and many of us remember that very wellindeed. It is quite possible that the final thirdof the 20th century will see greater progressin psychology than the middle third, becausescience is always accelerating, but it’s unlikelythat progress will be of an entirely differentorder of magnitude. It is more likely that cer-tain current trends will continue and that ourbest guess about the year 2000 will come froma rather conservative extrapolation of what isgoing on now.

One of these trends seems to me to be par-ticularly important. Examples are to be foundin both basic and applied psychology but thecase in applied psychology seems somewhatclearer, and I’ll begin with that. Science andtechnology have always been closely interwo-ven. Practical problems usually come first andtheir solutions are then taken over by a basicscience; the craftsman’s rule of thumb is thebeginning of a scientific law, as Ernst Machpointed out long ago. But there are contri-butions in the other direction, as the meth-ods and results of scientific research come tobe applied to practical affairs. Much of thetechnology derived from a basic science mayhave no earlier rule of thumb counterpart. Inthe long run, the distinction between basicand applied science is probably not worthmaintaining. Techniques of mental measure-ment were first invented to solve practicalproblems in education—how to classify stu-dents in the school system of France.2 Theythen came to be used in a basic analysis oftraits, abilities, and so forth. Introspective psy-chology, however, emerged from philosophi-cal considerations of a ‘‘pure’’ nature, and itgave rise to instruments and techniques in-volved in the analysis of the environmentthat, combined with other techniques and in-struments designed to study movement,formed the basis for the design of efficientman–machine interfaces. Studies in learning,training, and teaching have probably alwaysbeen a mixture of basic and applied research.

2 Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1905). Methodes nouvellespour le diagnostic du niveau intellectuel des anormaux.L’Annee Psychologique, 11, 191–244.

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There is one feature of ‘‘pure’’ psychology,however, that has left a deep mark. Psychol-ogy is unique among the sciences in the sensethat no other science has ever had to moveagainst such a weight of folklore, superstition,and error. Under these circumstances, psy-chologists have naturally put a premium onthe factual and objective. They have struggledassiduously to escape from the limitations ofpersonal experience. What does a man actu-ally hear or see? Control the stimulating en-vironment, and you will find out. What doeshe actually do or say? Record his behavior asprecisely as possible, and you will have theanswer. What is he inclined to do or say? Sam-ple his opinions and beliefs, and you will findout. What is he really like? Quantify his be-havior with inventories and questionnairesand tests, and you will know. Guarantee thesignificance of your answers, of course, bycovering many cases and draw your conclu-sions only with the help of accepted logicaland statistical methods.

All the social sciences have taken this firstbasic step. They have triumphed over all ear-lier treatments of their subject matter by em-phasizing objectivity. The social scientist hasbeen called the man with a notebook—ob-serving, sampling, recording what he sees, inorder to advance beyond casual observationand memory. Even historians have enteredupon a phase of this kind, searching for ma-terials that can be analyzed statistically ratherthan relying on the personal reminiscences ofeyewitnesses.

Now objectivity is no doubt valuable. It is agreat step forward to discover the facts ratherthan to trust to personal impressions. But inplaying the role of fact finder, the appliedpsychologist often finds himself in a subor-dinate position. He tends to stop short of de-cision making. He reports his results andleaves their use to others. Clinical psycholo-gists often find themselves in this positionwith respect to psychiatrists. They examinethe patient, gather statistics about him, andthe psychiatrist carries on from that point.The school psychologist often simply reportsto the teacher or the administrator, who takesaction on the basis of his reports. It’s thestatesman or politician who uses the resultsof opinion polls, and boards of directors whoplan the future of companies in the light ofmarket analyses. It is true that a psychologist

sometimes moves into a decision-makingspot, but it is generally felt that he is then nolonger acting as a psychologist, at least in ascientific sense.

This state of affairs reveals something veryfundamental about the current history of psy-chology. The psychologist is credited—just-ly—with special skills in establishing factsabout human behavior, but others are sup-posed to have a different kind of wisdom thatthey use in doing something about thesefacts. This, of course, could be true. It mayvery well be that psychologists are aware ofthe limitations of their science and of theirshortcomings in decision making and arewise to leave decisions to others. But a con-centration on facts in this sense, to the exclu-sion of what is done about them, to the ex-clusion of making any use of them in theprediction or the control of human behavior,is also characteristic of a basic scientific ap-proach to behavior. It isn’t simply a questionof a realistic sense of competence or modesty;if it is a necessity, we have somehow or othersuccessfully made it into a virtue. Let me an-alyze two or three basic fields of research asexamples.

Ethology is the study of what animals do. Itis great fun to get a grant that will permit youto go off and observe animals in the wild andkeep records of their behavior. It’s interestingto read books that tell you how birds buildnests, how seals form harems and hierarchies,and so on. The facts comprise a record of thebehavior of organisms. As to why animals be-have in this way, the ethologist makes some-thing of a virtue of claiming not to know. Thebehavior is due to innate environment—thatmystery of mysteries—and that is all you cansay about it. Ethologists take a good deal ofsatisfaction when learning theorists admitthey cannot explain the ethologists’ facts. Butwhy should they? The behavior comes withthe organism, along with the capacity tochange behavior. The explanation lies in theevolutionary history of the species; the vari-ables are phylogenetic and one really can’tcomplain because the ethologist has notteased them all out. They are remote in timeand inaccessible. But we should not thereforeendow them with glamour and prestige. Weare in the midst of another wave of instinct

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theory. The Naked Ape 3 is said to have sold500,000 copies. Robert Ardrey’s two books,The Territorial Imperative4 and African Genesis 5

have sold very widely. All this goes back, ofcourse, to Lorenz, and particularly to hisbook on aggression. It is interesting to notethat people and animals behave aggressively,but there is no particular reason to supposethat this must all be traced to genetic vari-ables which mark us inevitably as aggressors.Yet, those who write books of that sort seemto be anxious to rule out the possibility thataggressive behavior can be traced to any oth-er source. There is a stubborn refusal to ac-cept the possibility, for example, that someaggression might actually be of environmen-tal origin.

The same is true in the field of develop-mental psychology, where again you are es-sentially concerned with genetic variables. Ifa child begins to behave in a given way at agiven age, and if that fact is independent ofculture, then it is something we must accept.But those who study the emergence of con-cepts, as, for example, in the work of Piagetand others, are likely to underplay environ-mental variables and to take a certain satis-faction in ruling them out, so that the mereemergence of behavior at a certain age canhave greater significance. Here again, I be-lieve, some variables are out of reach, but thepoint I am making is that psychologists whospecialize in developmental theories are dis-inclined to admit the possibility of environ-mental variables and take a certain satisfac-tion when environmental explanations proveunworkable.6

The same thing is found in other social sci-ences. The fields of sociology and anthropol-ogy today are divided among those who takea structuralist position and those who take afunctional. The structuralist position, repre-sented at the moment by Claude Levi-

3 Morris, D. (1967). The naked ape. New York: McGrawHill.

4 Ardrey, R. (1966). The territorial imperative. New York:Antheneum.

5 Ardrey, R. (1961). African genesis. New York: Macmil-lan.

6 For a recent discussion of the nativist–empiricist issuein developmental psychology, see Newcombe, N. S.(2002). The nativist–empiricist controversy in the contextof recent research on spatial and quantitative develop-ment. Psychological Science, 5, 395–401.

Strauss,7 is concerned with what people do,simply as behavior. This is, in a sense, a returnto the days of anthropological inquiry. You gooff on a sailing ship and turn up in some out-of-the-way place and write an account of whatpeople there do. Kinship systems, the waythey make fire, the ways they hunt, and soforth—these are simply behavior, without anyreferences to causes. People were once saidto follow customs because it was customary tofollow them. And in a sense that position ismaintained very stubbornly today by thestructuralist school.

The alternative view, which becomes ex-plicit with Malinowski,8 is that people followcustoms because of what they get out of do-ing so. There are important consequences.These are environmental, and once identi-fied, they account for what people do.

You see a special example today in linguis-tics. The current pattern in structural lin-guistics is simply to emphasize what peopledo—they speak, make certain noises, andthese can be analyzed phonemically, phonet-ically, and phonologically in the greatest de-tail. Grammatical structure can also be ana-lyzed. You look at the topography of thespeaker and satisfy yourself with a physical ac-count of what is going on. No real causal ap-proach is attempted. This is, in part, a reac-tion against old-fashioned psychologizing.(That is true, I think, in all the fields I havementioned.) To argue that an animal doessomething because it finds satisfaction in do-ing this, or because it intends to get some-thing out of this; to argue that people followcustoms because of what they feel or becauseof their attitudes toward each other; to arguethat a kinship system gives us an insight intothe savage mind—these are mentalistic expla-nations which were wisely rejected. In politi-cal science a comparable school called behav-ioralism (a very confusing term) is at best akind of methodological behaviorism, the pro-ponents of which simply record what peopledo and make no effort to tell why they do it.

It is not, therefore, simply a matter ofwhether or not psychologists have the oppor-

7 See, for example, Levi-Strauss, C. (1967). Structuralanthropology. (C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf, Trans.). Gar-den City, NY: Anchor Books.

8 See, for example, Malinowski, B. (1944). A scientifictheory of culture and other essays by Bronislaw Malinowski.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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tunity or the power to assert themselves orwhether they recognize the limits of their sci-ence. Rather, it is an uncertainty as to howbehavior is, indeed, to be explained. The gen-erative grammarians appeal to innate mentalprocesses, thus returning, as one linguist haspointed out, to the Middle Ages. The struc-tural anthropologist goes back to the savagemind. This is not satisfactory—hence a delib-erate, exclusive commitment to descriptivefacts. A change in all this, I think, is comingabout, and it seems to me to be the kind ofthing that, when extrapolated, gives us an in-sight as to what will be happening in the year2000.

In my own fie1d of interest, the experi-menta1 analysis of behavior, subhuman andhuman, there is an emphasis not only upontopography of behavior—on what the organ-ism is doing—but on the relation between be-havior and environmental variables. The anal-ysis remained in the laboratory for a longtime, but it has now come out into the worldat large. Several areas show what seems to meto be a new kind of applied psychology. Thedistinction is between the older emphasis onwhat people do and the newer emphasis onpredicting and controlling their behavior.

Take education for example. For the first50 years or so, educational psychology wasprimarily a matter of measurement. Mentaltests dominated the field. Teaching was gen-erally left to common sense. The experienceof a teacher in the classroom was guided bya few rules of thumb discovered by successfulteachers and communicated to students. Inthe older techniques, teachers fell back onways of controlling behavior borrowed fromdaily life. These were primarily aversive. Thestudent studied because he feared the con-sequences of not studying. Unfortunately, al-though we’ve given up the more violent kindsof aversive consequences, that is still the pat-tern. A great deal of the unrest among stu-dents today can be traced to a slow recogni-tion that somehow or other they are notactually being taught. They are simply heldresponsible for learning. We tell them whatto learn and test them, but we do not actuallyteach.

There is another possibility. Programmedinstruction is an example. A good program(and don’t take the first program you find asa sample) is simply a reorganization of what

is to be learned in such a way that the studentis maximally reinforced for learning it in pos-itive ways rather than as a means of escapefrom undesirable consequences. Pro-grammed instruction is going to be muchmore widely used than many educators real-ize. It represents the application of psycho-logical principles that go beyond merely an-alyzing what happens, or what students aredoing, to an exploration of why they do it.Possibly more exciting at the moment in ed-ucation is the application of the same prin-ciples to classroom management. We hear agreat deal these days about the problem ofdiscipline. If you mean by discipline thatteachers should have weapons which aresomewhat more lethal than those that the stu-dents carry, then we are back in the old pat-tern; but if you mean by discipline arrangingcontingencies in the classroom under whichthe students willingly come to school, willing-ly sit down, keep quiet when they are not sup-posed to talk, study and learn, then that iswithin reach.

Psychotherapy is another example. Thepsychologist has, in the past, played the roleof a psychometrician. (What goes on in clin-ica1 psychology, in counseling, is a differentmatter. I am talking now about the psychiatriccase.) The psychiatrist is not making use of abasic science. Psychiatry, in spite of Freudand others, is still largely a matter of goodpersonal contact between patient and thera-pist, and so on. And institutionalized psy-chotics don’t even get the benefit of much ofthat. The situation is, as everyone recognizes,undesirable. And something is beginning tobe done in redesigning the conditions underwhich psychotics live. This is another exam-ple of moving from the mere recording ofwhat psychotics do, to an analysis of causesthat permit us to do something about it. Anexample that shows how easy it is to misun-derstand what is happening is an experimentby Houghton and Ayllon,9 working with award of some 30 schizophrenic women.When they approached the situation, it wastaking three attendants 30 minutes to shep-herd these patients into the dining room atmealtime. A good deal of pushing, nudging,

9 Ayllon, T., & Haughton, E. (1962). Control of behav-ior of schizophrenic patients by food. Journal of the Exper-imental Analysis of Behavior, 5, 343–352.

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cajoling—and they finally got them in. Thesituation was then changed. At mealtime abell sounded, and anyone who got into thedining room within 30 minutes ate; the oth-ers did not. Not very many got there the firstmeal, but a great many did the second, andalmost all the third. (I think there was oneholdout who went 6 days, but she was over-weight anyway.) Eventually they were all get-ting into the dining room in 30 minutes.Then the time was cut down to 25, 20, 15, 10,and finally to 5 minutes. At the end of theexperiment, when the bell rang, all the pa-tients in the ward filed into the dining roomand sat down within 5 minutes. It seems likesuch a simple thing. It doesn’t seem as ifyou’d need a science of behavior to suggestthe change. But the fact is that that kind ofcondition is very common. Patients in a psy-chiatric ward tend to be bored. Our ownproblem of leisure is nothing compared withthat of the psychotic. One of the interestingthings one can do is to annoy the attendants,but the attendants can usually control that byresponding as little as possible. When the at-tendants are charged with the responsibilityof getting patients into the dining room, how-ever, they are vulnerable. They can’t ignorethe patients. The dinner bell actually givesthe patients extraordinary power. They canreally annoy the attendants by going awayfrom the dining room or by refusing to move.At every mealtime, the patients could get 30minutes of fun by holding out against the at-tendants. The situation changed immediatelywhen the attendants were not required to getthe patients into the dining room, for theycould then continue to ignore efforts to an-noy them. Moreover, a slightly increased dep-rivation made institutional food reinforcing,and it reinforced going into the dining room.

Here, then, we have an example of lookingat a situation, discovering that the ‘‘contin-gencies of reinforcement’’ are wrong, andchanging them. But there are other problemsin the management of psychotics as they tendto be insensitive to the contingencies underwhich they live. Specia1 contingencies areneeded. A former student of mine, OgdenLindsley, speaks of a prosthetic environment.Eyeglasses are prosthetic devices for thosewith poor vision and hearing aids for thosewith poor hearing. A prosthetic environmentis simply one in which a person who is for

some reason simply not sensitive to contin-gencies of reinforcement can adjust becausethe contingencies have been clarified. Tokensor points can be used to make reinforcementconspicuously contingent upon behavior. Agood deal is now being done in state hospitalsand elsewhere in working out reinforcementsystems. This is simply an example of a psy-chological principle being extended to thedesign of special environments.

Economics is another field in which all thisis relevant but in which, at the moment, notmuch is being done. Productive labor is, ofcourse, a very important problem in any cul-ture. We have our incentive conditions, theRussians have theirs, and we tend to comparecultures largely in terms of economic systems,as when we talk about a capitalistic culture. Ispeak now very much aware of my amateurstatus, but there are principles of reinforce-ment in wage systems, and the issues runquite parallel with problems in the laborato-ry. Money is a conditioned reinforcement; itonly works when it has been made so. In aprimitive culture, you may not be able to useit. You can’t use deferred payment without agreat deal of conditioning to make it effec-tive. An engineer who used local labor in anodd corner of the world had to put a pay-master at the end of a ramp to pay each work-er each time he dumped a wheelbarrow fullof earth. It was not possible simply to pay atthe end of the day. It’s said that the Sherpaguides who went up Mount Everest in the firstascent had to be paid every night. Threeguides began by carrying all the local coinsthat eventually came down carried in separateportions by all! 10

The ordinary weekly wage is a very inade-quate example of positive reinforcement. Nosensible organism works on Monday morningfor a payment on Friday afternoon. The sys-tem works only when there is a supervisor orboss who can threaten discharge. The em-

10 Although an intriguing example, we have not beenable to verify the veracity of or source for this comment.For a discussion of the motivation for why the Sherpasclimb, see Ortner, S. B. (1999). Life and death on Mt. Ev-erest: Sherpas and Himalayan mountaineering. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press. Ortner notes (p. 203) that ‘‘inspite of what the sahibs thought, [Sherpas] climbedlargely for reasons of money,’’ but also points out (p. 66)that ‘‘To say that most Sherpas climbed (and still climb)primarily for money is the beginning, not the end, ofunderstanding why they climb.’’

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ployee works during the week not for the payenvelope, but to avoid losing the standard ofliving that the pay envelope guarantees. Var-ious morale problems follow. More effectivewage systems have often been misused, simplybecause they are effective, and they are nowgenerally opposed by those interested in la-bor. I am told that industrial managers don’teven discuss incentive wages anymore, butpiecework or piece-rate pay engenders notonly a very high level of work but a kind ofactivity that the worker reports as enjoyable.The schedule used in gambling devices, theso-called variable ratio schedule, is a particu-larly good one from that point of view. If youhave ever seen a room full of people playingbingo, you’ve seen what it can do. Here arepeople sitting quietly, looking at two or threecards in front of them, listening keenly tonumbers and letters as they are called out,arranging small counters very precisely, andspeaking up instantly when a pattern is com-pleted. What would industry not give to haveworkers who would work with that kind ofconcentration? And what would workers notgive to have as much fun?

Governments use almost completely aver-sive techniques. At one time it was possible todefine the state simply as the power to pun-ish. Now, of course, our governments manip-ulate vast quantities of positive reinforcers,and yet they have failed to achieve very muchas a result. Governments ordinarily don’teven bother to define the behavior they hopeto strengthen or weaken as they administerrewards or punishments. In Vietnam, for ex-ample, we haven’t made it clear what wewould like to have our friends or enemies do,although we send in 2 or 3 billion dollarsworth of positive and negative reinforcers ev-ery month.

Another area is daily life. There is no onefigure, comparable with that of a teacher,therapist, employer, or governor, who caresabout what happens in daily life, even thoughdaily life uses techniques appropriate to allthese areas. We educate each other, we in-duce each other to work, we give each othertherapy, and so on. Nevertheless, the field isin the hands of the amateur at the moment.We feel, somehow or other, that we are notready to move in and do anything more pos-itive about it. Yet, what goes on in daily life iscapable of analysis and design and change.

An interesting example was an experiment atthe National Training School for Boys inWashington, in which the daily life of certainyoung delinquents was completely rede-signed.11 These young men—all minors—were murderers, rapists, and the like. The en-vironmental conditions were changed so thata boy could, if he liked, go ‘‘on relief.’’ Thatis to say, he was guaranteed a nutritious butnot very palatable diet; he had a pad in thedormitory at night; he could sit around on abench all day. If that was what he wanted, hegot it. But he could improve his lot enor-mously by earning points. He could rent aprivate room; he could use billiard tables; hecould watch television; he could have a pri-vate television set; he could buy time off andtake a day out on the town. He earned pointsin part through simple janitorial services orby working in the kitchen, but mainly heearned them by learning something. Teach-ing machines and programmed instructionwere available, as well as other learning ma-terials with tests. A bright boy could quicklybecome a capitalist. I visited this experimentand saw the private room of one of the brightboys, with a typewriter and a television set—all of which he had earned simply by learningthings. An important result is that the boysdiscovered they could learn something. Mostof them had become delinquent in part be-cause their school system had persuadedthem that they were stupid. The only way tobe successful seemed to be delinquent. Manyof them had to start very far back, possibly ingrade or high school reading, writing, andmathematics, but the chances were greatly in-creased that when they left the institutionthey would be better able to fall into a legalway of life and stay out of trouble.

My novel Walden II was an effort to suggestthe design of a community with a norma1cross section of the population. These exper-iments on specific communities are bringingus a little closer to that state of affairs all thetime. There is a good deal of interest on thepart of various groups in starting somethinglike Walden II, and it may even be done even-

11 Cohen, H. L., & Fillipczak, J. (1971). A new learningenvironment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. (We thank MikeZeiler for bringing this reference to our attention.) Ofcurious historical interest, Charles Manson, at the age of17, was incarcerated at the National School for Boys in1951, but was transferred after he raped another inmate.

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tually with government support. People whoare interested in urban design, architecture,and city planning are realizing the impor-tance of the psychological principles involvedand the need to design the space in whichpeople live so that contingencies of reinforce-ment will bring out the best in individualsand give them a satisfactory way of life.

I’m not saying that the science of behaviorhas been a complete innovator in this sense.There have been very wise people from timeto time who have shown a prescientific wis-dom that has often been effective. My pointis that as psychology moves toward an ac-count of behavior as a dependent variableand seeks the independent variables of whichit is a function, it will take over the realm ofdecision making in the design of cultures that

has been left in the past to intuition andguesswork. This doesn’t mean that psycholo-gists are going to run the world anymore thanphysicists run the world when physical knowl-edge is involved, but psychology will supplythe techniques that those who are in the po-sition of educators, governors, therapists, andso forth will need to achieve their respectivegoals. That kind of thing is going to developvery rapidly during the last third of the 20thcentury. By the year 2000 we will have to leavefewer of our problems to personal experi-ence, to historical analogy, or to the kind folkwisdom that at the present time go into theirsolution. Possibly this is science fiction but itmay nevertheless come true—a scientificanalysis of human behavior is generating atechnology that may have extraordinary con-sequences.