I was actually intrigued by the Psychologist B.F.

Skinner’s theory when it comes to behavior he was the

only one I felt connected to especially in my line of work as a Social Worker. B.F. Skinner was a
Psychologist and a Behaviorist of the 2oth century. Skinner believed that we should not look at internal
thoughts of a person and their motivations to the why’s and how’s of behavior and of course we cannot
see what they are thinking. Skinner believed that the external behavior was the one that was
observable. And we can determine so much more on how a person acts or reacts to a situation. His
theory based on human behavior was that every action has a consequence and based on that behavior
whether it be good or bad would determine the consequence or the outcome for either a reward or
punishment. So in other words his theory uses positive and negative reinforcements based on the
situation to modify behavior. For example in school when children act out in a negative way the teacher
would first try to redirect the behavior to have a better positive outcome. But if the child continues to be
defiant then they are punished. The teacher would either take something away from them or have them
sit in time out. If the child was good all day and did not have trouble listening to the teacher the reward
would be maybe some ice cream or an extra star on their star chart. This has proven to be effective for
teachers when children show obedience or disobedience in anyway. The whole objective is to influence
positive or good behavior while deterring away from the negative behavior. If the reward was good
they will most likely do it again because they like the feeling of it. But if the reward was a bad reward or
punishment most likely they will not repeat the same behavior because they do not like that feeling.
This was based on operant conditioning which was coined by Skinner himself.

The point of this article is to explain or interpret that Skinner believed that people were more into
figuring out what was going on mentally or internally without trying to look on the human behavior
overall. As a social worker I can relate to this because we are more focused on the internal thought then
just the behavior. We look for the unconscious thoughts, and motivations. When Skinner explains that it
is more than just that I can understand where he is coming from. This is why I said earlier in the
passages that Social work and psychology are closely related but psychology is more in depth of human
behavior. Skinner explains that there were 3 obstacles that made this approach get over looked such as
humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology, and psychotherapy. He mentioned that “these three
approaches are more acceptable to us and have a better appeal than the behaviorists approach”.
Skinner (1987). The behaviorist approach makes connections or causes events to external stimuli.