When I read Beyond Freedom and Dignity last summer, I knew little about behaviorism beyond what was presented in the text. Skinner's argument in that book resolved around his concept of behaviorism and how it could be used to benefit mankind, but it was sorely lacking in explanation of behaviorism in the many facets it can be used to explain the self.

In many ways, About Behaviorism is even more controversial then Beyond Freedom. It not only sees reinforcers as being the sole determination of human choice, it downplays notions of the mind and feelings even more. To Skinner a feeling is little more then a trained response to a certain stimuli presented by the environment. An event does not actually make a person angry, instead it creates a reaction that we label and teach as being angry. It seems a bit of a stretch to deny the relevance of all feeling.

Skinner and other radical behaviorialists have discovered an important point in looking beyond feeling for true answers. The stimuli that make us feel good are often hidden behind claims of feeling. Why is going to the woods so reinforcing that it makes us feel like going for a hike? It is because there is a lack of punishments in the woods that are so common in our rules based society. Most of his thoughts on behaviorialism seem well grounded, even if they are controversial. His ideas on memory and our ability to imagine the past in a rough fashion are far more controversial. He states that while the human brain does not actually cognate on it's own, it keeps a retoire of learned behaviors based on previous contact with stimuli. We do not store memories, but we do have a way of reflexively keeping behaviors. Instead of being able to actually describe an event, we are able to describe how we behaved in the past to an event.

It is too bad that B. F. Skinner's ideas are all but ignored in contemporary psychology. All of the focus on the self and how we experience the world ignores the true social injustice of the world of around us. Instead of encouraging people to fight for what is right, cognitive psychology encourages us to manipulate our experience of the world in false ways. Skinner is a real environmentalist while others ignore the environment as being unimportant.

If you want to understand behavioralism then read this book. Skinner's ideas on the mind are as relevant today as thirty years ago. Stop pretending to live in a state of internalized feelings and start interacting and changing the world around you. Social change might only be partial, but it is always more satisfying and more complete then internalized feelings.