B.F. Skinner was born March 20, 1904. B.F. Skinner described his Pennsylvania childhood as "warm and stable." As a boy, he enjoyed building and inventing things; a skill he would later use in his own psychological experiments. He received a B.A. in English literature in 1926 from Hamilton College, and spent some time as a struggling writer before discovering the writings of Watson and Pavlov. Inspired by these works, Skinner decided to abandon his career as a novelist and entered the psychology graduate program at Harvard University.
B.F. Skinner is famous for his research on operant conditioning and negative reinforcement. He developed a device called the "cumulative recorder," which showed rates of responding as a sloped line. Using this device, he found that behavior did not depend on the preceding stimulus as Watson and Pavlov maintained. Instead, Skinner found that behaviors were dependent upon what happens after the response. Skinner called this operant behavior.
At the age of 24 Skinner enrolled in the Psychology Department of Harvard University.
Still rebellious and impatient with what he considered unintelligent ideas, Skinner found a mentor equally caustic and hard-driving. William Crozier was the chair of a new department of Physiology. Crozier fervently adhered to a program of studying the behavior of "the animal as a whole" without appealing, as the psychologists did, to processes going on inside. That exactly matched Skinner's goal of relating behavior to experimental conditions. The student was encouraged to experiment. Each department, Psychology, and Physiology, assumed the other was supervising the young student, but the fact was he was "doing exactly as I pleased". With his enthusiasm and talent for building new equipment, Skinner constructed apparatus after apparatus as his rats' behavior suggested changes.
