Zeitgeist of the Time

Skinner began his career with his enrollment at Harvard in 1928 and he remained involved with psychology until his death in 1990. Skinner's zeitgeist, then, can be viewed as consisting of three separate periods:

1. 1928-World War II (Behaviorism)
2. World War II-1960s (Applied Behaviorism)
3. 1960s-death (Defending Behaviorism)

Skinner believed that our environment shaped our current behavior;therefore,in order to observe Skinner's behavior over time,we will start with the zeitgeist of the 1920s. The U.S. in the 1920s was looking for beliefs to replace outdated values based on myth and superstition. Behaviorism, with Watson's focus on social engineering, was designed to "mold the good worker- not the griper or clock watcher" (Birnbaum , 1955). This resonated strongly in a culture focused on business, success, and personal achievement; this aspect of Behaviorism is part of what appealed to Skinner. According to Watson (1924),behaviorism offered the following to American society: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select----". Skinner, suffering from depression after his failed attempt to compose a novel, was eager to embrace the philosophy of hope offered by behaviorism.

World War II and the period after the war until the 1960s was the second phase of the effect of zeitgeist on Skinner's psychology. Skinner was primarily a pure scientist working on operant conditioning before the war; after World War II Skinner began to promote the use of operant conditioning to engineer behavior (Capshew, 1993). What caused Skinner's metamorphosis from laboratory scientist to social engineer? According to Capshew (1993), there were three possible reasons given by Skinner:

1. Project Pigeon- a missile guidance system which utilized pigeons to guide bombs dropped form military aircraft; it was never adopted by the military, despite the pigeons' accuracy
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2. "The Aircrib"- created as the "baby-tender" to help his wife raise their second daughter; commercially marketed as the "Aircrib" it did not enjoy much commercial success because of perception that it lacked empathy. (Demorest, 2005)


3. Walden Two- Skinner's concept of a utopian society based on the principles of reinforcement.

The last portion of Skinner's career (late 1960s-1980s) was basically in opposition to the changing zeitgeist; interest in cognitive factors was again popular in society and psychology. Skinner, in his final address to the American Psychological Association, used the process of analogy to compare Victorian resistance to Darwin's theory by the religious with resistance to behaviorism by believers in the Mind (Demorest, 2005). Skinner died from leukemia eight days later, but his influence can still be felt in the zeitgeist of American science.