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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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