Question

Create a 1 page mini debate transcript for these two students:

Imagine this scenario: You are attending a local psychology conference and you find two graduate level psychology students entered in a hot debate, with a crowd of people around them. You are curious and come closer to see what everyone is interested in. You find that they are debating the work and personality of BF Skinner. One of the students, Rick Nilsen claims that Skinner was a cool headed scientist who based his opinions about the human being only on observable behavior. The other student, Blanca Alvarez, says that Skinner was not just as simple as he seemed. He believed in behaviorism, just like other people believed in Marxism or any other –ism. • What points would each one make?

Answer 1

Blanca Alvarez points could be as following.

• B F Skinner successfully studied behavior in a laboratory in a carefully designed and controlled manner. Hence,his theory of behaviorism is scientific and explains behavior reliably,accurately with objectivity.
• Skinner is called father of Operant conditioning though his work was based on Thorndike's law of effect because Skinner's behaviorism explained behavior by looking into the action and it's consequences. Thus,his theory was based on operants the intentional actions that produced effect on the environment.
• Skinner's behaviorism can practically be applied for the behavior modification and skill enhancement of an individual. Those behaviors that needs to developed or enhanced should be positively reinforced to be strengthened and the undesired behaviors can be eliminated by or weakened by negative reinforcement.

Rick Nilsen's claim.

• Skinner cannot explain human behaviors by the laboratory studies of animal behavior and that behavior is not objective and measurable at all times because there are internal subjective mental factors associated with each behavior of an individual.
• Skinner ignored cognitive and mental abilities while studying behaviors and simply explained behaviors on the measurable and observable cause effect operants.
• Not every behavior requires reinforcement,some behaviors are learned spontaneously and unconsciously in the social context.
• Skinner overlooked the mental process of insight that plays an important role in learning behavior which was established by other scientist in further studies.