"When we were first married, Fred used to always talk about his work and we'd get into arguments about it. Now, we never talk about his work at all. His ideas haven't changed much. After 38 years, you just don't keep talking about the same thing... When we were first married, he wanted me to act in a way that I couldn't. I thought it was artificial and unnatural although I'm sure he was right. I would get mad at the kids and show it and he didn't want me to"
Unhappy with his teaching experience at the University of Minnesota during the summer of 1945, Skinner wrote Walden Two, "a venture in self-therapy, in which I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior represented by [the two main characters] Burris and Frazier. Now, of course, I'm a convinced Frazerian... Some of it was written with great emotion. The scene in Frazier's room, in which Frazier defends Walden Two while admitting that he himself is not a likeable person or fit for communal life.... I typed out in white heat."
Skinner's most important discovery while writing Walden Two is expressed through Frazier: "I remember the rage I used to feel when a prediction went awry. I could have shouted at the subjects of my experiments, 'Behave, damn you! Behave as you ought!' Eventually I realized that the subjects were always right. They always behaved as they should have behaved. It was I who was wrong. I had made a bad prediction...What a strange discovery for a would-be dictator that the only effective methods of control are positively reinforcing."
Skinner himself has adopted his behavior to his psychological theories. "I've learned a few tricks at self-management" he explains. "I apply my own analysis to my own behavior. I never assumed that I was not like my pigeons. I'm sure I am-- and very much more complicated, I hope. But as I designed an environment to get some behavior 0ut of my experimental organisms, so I work on the environment to get my own behavior out in ways that are reinforcing to me. That's all there is to it."
So he's established some basic rules for himself: Always have one place where you write. Never do anything else there except write. Never do anything else there except write. Write at the same time of the day. "It gets so you can't do anything except think and write in that place," he says. "It has complete control over you." Essentially, Skinner controls himself by living "according to routine. It's easier for me than to be making decisions all the time."
*****
As the elevator doors close behind you on the seventh floor of William James Hall, the stink of pigeon droppings consume the air. To your right is a laboratory filled with behavioral science's elite corps of experimental organisms. There they coo and peek in their numbered lofts, the proud and nameless pigeon menagerie that once controlled and were controlled by B.F. Skinner. At one time, some of these birds played ping pong in Skinner boxes. Some spend time dancing together--also in boxes. Some were conditioned to hobble around in figure eights. Others were lucky enough to get out of the smelly lab and travel in what seemed to be outer space. During World War II, Skinner trained them to guide missles to a target for Project Pigeon, a research project financed by the Navy but never employed.
Across the hall from these unusually accomplished birds, some of whom are older than most Harvard undergraduates, is Skinner's office. What was once the headquarters of behavioristic efficiency, busy with the chatter of graduate students and colleagues, now remains quiet most of the day. The phone doesn't ring as often as it used to. And the incessant clatter of typewriter keys from the adjoining secretary's office has dwindled to ten hours a week. Pictures of smiling grand-children that adorn the filing cabinet are heavy with dust. Even the crusted rug in his office looks old and tired.
B.F. Skinner is officially retired now. The professor emeritus hasn't conducted research for at least ten years, nor does he follow current research. "I don't try to keep up with research now," he admits. "I look at the journals and read the abstracts but don't read the papers. And I can't understand much of it."
His days are scheduled: Up at 5 a.m. Break-fast at 7. Three hours of work on his autobiography. A two-mile walk to the office. Meetings with people and correspondence work. Lunch at noon. Nap. Light reading or mechanical work in his workshop. Cocktail (vodka and tonic). Television. Dinner and sleep by 9:30.
He no longer lectures, nor does he play the piano or harpsichord: his eyes are giving him too much trouble these days. Instead, he listens to the Romantics--Bruckner, Wagner, Beethoven. And he says that he follows the Greek practice of eutrapelia: the productive use of leisure.
At age 71, he's slowed down considerably. He's reached the stage in life that Erik Erikson has termed "the eighth crisis in the life cycle--the crisis of ego integrity." Its basic clash is between despair. "the feeling that time is too short," and the "acceptance of one's one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that by necessity, permitted of no substitutions." Skinner has met this crisis head on and says that he "enjoys life. That's the main thing." His psychic strength (words he might object to) and determination to keep going are very much intact.
Still, he is bothered. "My circles have given me a pretty rough time. Some of the reviews [of About Behaviorism] are really vicious. But I don't read most of them... As one of my colleagues said, I've had 'the worst press since Darwin.' I'd have to say Freud would be a near runner-up on that. I get fantastic name-calling. I just don't understand why anyone would do it. A review of my book came out just a couple of weeks ago by a disturbed psychiatrist named Szasz: I'm a 'murderer, a megalomaniac and a liar.' I mean, what gives? What's eating them? Fortunately, I don't lie awake nights writhing in anger over it all. I don't suffer any destructive emotions."
He may not be plagued by "destructive emotions," but judging from his behavior, Skinner is still deeply concerned by "what people will think." His most recent book, About Behaviorism, is not only a behaviorist primer for non-professionals, it is also a direct answer to several years of criticism--criticism which negatively reinforced him to write such a book.
The point is that B.F. Skinner is not the thick-skinned man he tends to portray. According to his own principles, he is the man he was reinforced to be--a man who so desperately tried to control what was "right" for himself that he rejected criticism and avoided understanding why others thought him wrong. But as he writes his autobiography in the early hours of the morning--going over his notebooks and immersing himself in his past--Skinner will either have to fight again all the old battles, or else begin to re-evaluate his ideas and himself in relative to others.