B. F. Skinner Quotes

The basic idea that incentives can be used to motivate behavior is a powerful one. It works for employees, and it has a clear place in parenting, as anyone who has tried to potty-train a recalcitrant toddler with sticker rewards knows.

Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.

The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.

It works. People respond to it.

A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

This system of encouragement proves serviceable as a preventive of punishment, the attainment of the tickets being a reward, the forfeiture of them the reverse; and, as such, boys seem often more affected by their loss than by coercion.

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments.

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.

Animals... don't have a sense of time. You just have to do things over and over with animals until they happen to do it right because they don't really know what you want.

All we can do is apply the physical stimuli which we have at our disposal to bring about a change of mind in these recalcitrant persons. Of this you may be sure: we shall continue to operate on the Italian donkey at both ends, with a carrot and a stick.

Of course, Behaviorism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

You've got to change incentives for good behavior as opposed to just disincentivizing bad behavior.

The object of rewards is to encourage; that of punishments, to prevent. If rewards are high, then what the ruler wants will be quickly effected; if punishments are heavy, what he does not want will be swiftly prevented.

I found this deer toy that poops out candy. And so if I say, 'Cree, you have to go to bed right now. You will get a candy.' We've named the pooping deer 'Gus.'... He gets a jelly bean. And it works. Positive reinforcement is the way to go. I'm learning things like that which help me be a better parent.

You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.

What motivates most people to change their behavior is consequences. No consequences? No behavior modification.

Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.

A cat you train with clicker training and what you've got to do is pair the click with a food reward. And he's doing the stuff because you get a food reward. Once you can do it all after a lot training with no food reward.

As when my little son John offendeth: if then I should not whip him, but call him to the table unto me, and give him sugar and plums, thereby, I should make him worse, yea should quite spoil him.

The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called 'conditioning'. In operant conditioning we 'strengthen' an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.

The dog won't bite if you beat Him with a bone