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Was
Skinner a Nativist?
Richard W. Malott1
Behavior Analysis Program
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University
Skinner argued that dog’s barking could not be conditioned.
And Kurt Salzinger got a PhD degree from Columbia for proving him
wrong. Check with Kurt on the details.
Unfortunately, from my view, Skinner was much more of a nativist,
than many of us environmentalists would like to think. In a major
speech at ABA, he casually mentioned that intelligence was inherited;
he said this way before his protégé Richard Hernstein
co-authored The Bell Curve. Skinner’s talk dealt with the origins
of language, or as we say in the biz, verbal behavior.
And in the 60’s or 70’s or 80’s Skinner and Hernstein
got into a fascinating and disturbing, but generally ignored public
debate, with them being on opposite sides from what we might anticipate—Skinner
being the nativist and Hernstein being the environmentalist, liked
Hernstein out Skinnered Skinner. Furthermore, Skinner was almost petulant
about the whole thing. I suspect something was going on behind the
scenes, but I have no idea what. Skinner started by dissing and disassociating
himself from the Brelands and the implication that their Misbehavior
of Organisms contained any surprising news, like of course pigs will
start rooting the coins that were originally used as operant manipulanda.
This debate consisted of a series of three articles each (not letters
to the editor) published in three consecutive issues of the American
Psychologist, with Skinner arguing that the lion’s stalking
its pray was not operant, and I guess not respondent, but some third
sort of released behavior and suggesting that you could never train
a cow to stalk, whereas Hernstein maintained a much more operant position.
Skinner has also argued that the dog’s walking in circles before
lying down is not learned, nor is what he called imitative behavior
in lower animals (I think in Science and Human Behavior).
Incidentally, there are some nice data showing that the salmon’s
homing instinct is really the operant swimming responses being reinforced
by swimming up a gradient of water-born chemical stimulation that
gets increasingly intense and thus increasingly reinforcing the closer
the salmon gets to its spawning ground. Unfortunately, there is little
operant analyses of this sort applied to animal behavior found in
the natural environment, so-called instinctive behavior.
Though I occasionally dis Skinner, I do so because I occasionally
dis everyone and everything. Or as the old song goes, You only dis
the one you love. Skinner is (not was) the man. In other words, Skinner
lives!
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