Skinner Story 5: Da Landscape Gardener

If anybody is feeling that there is a surfeit of blog entries on B.F.Skinner, please blame Dhaanika -- she is the one responsible for this latest spate of activity from me. I advise caution though -- she is located in the very heart of Indus Ladies headquarters and is highly placed in their food chain
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B.F.Skinner graduated from Hamilton College in New York with a degree in English. His goal was to be a writer. Even though his degree was only in English, he was well-grounded in the sciences, a tribute to American high school and small liberal arts college education, at least of that time.

He spent a year trying to write but was not successful. Later on, he would call this his Dark Year. Skinner's parents were very worried about their only child wasting away his time and life. Finally, Skinner gave up his writing ambitions and took up a laborer's job, as a landscape gardener. A truck would come and pick him up to take him to his workplace and drop him off at home at the end of the day. Skinner was very good with his hands and seemed to have enjoyed this work. His boss liked his work and gave him a $ 0.50 / hour raise. It was possible that Skinner would have made a lifelong career out of this but circumstances intervened -- it was discovered that Skinner was allergic to some of the plants he was working with and thus he had to quit this line of work. Those who know what he did with his actual career as a groundbreaking psychologist will appreciate what a tragedy it would have been if he had continued to work as a landscape gardener. It would have been much worse than Einstein living out his career as a patent clerk in Berne.

During this failed year Skinner came to know of the work of a man called John Watson (who is considered to be the father of the behavioristic approach in psychology), in some of magazines he read. [This was a bit like Einstein doing his physics work while working as a patent clerk.] Bertrand Russell had very positive things to say about Watson in these magazines. Watson is known for his following well-known bragging:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

Seeing his interest in psychology, a professor at Hamilton College -- and a close friend -- suggested that Skinner go for graduate study at Harvard. Even though Harvard had a great reputation, it did not have a strong psychology department. Skinner entered Harvard with his mind already made up as to how to approach the field. He faced a lot of hostility. But he also received support from professors outside the department such as the medical school. His these advisor -- the man who made him jump ledges one time -- dropped out of his thesis committee, a few days before the thesis defense, because he did not feel comfortable with Skinner's approach. (This same man was to call Skinner's thesis "truly a thesis", about 20 years later.) Again the emdical school came to Skinner's rescue.

A digression: Click here to read a letter Albert Einstein's dad wrote to a Professor Ostwald trying to get him a job -- this was four years before Albert's miracle year when he published four papers, each of which could have won a Nobel Prize. (Only one did.) Professor Ostwald never responded to Albert's dad's letter but was the first one to nominate him for a Nobel Prize nine years later.

There is also the postcard that Albert sent to a Dutch professor with a postage paid reply attachment. That professor never bothered to reply to him. Once he became very famous, that reply attached postcard made it to a museum

 

Some of the attacks on Skinner (by people like Ayn Rand and Spiro Agnew for instance have been quite nasty. But then Darwin faced this.)

In the "establishment", Skinner himself found support though his ideas were violently opposed. Credit for this should go to the US and its institutions. It doesn't take much to see how brilliant he was. This usually gets support -- everybody likes to hitch their bandwagon to a winner; besides, genuine admiration and awe is not totally lost.

Skinner found out years later that the professor that dropped out of Skinner's thesis committee at the last minute had given him recommendations of "Very anxious to please. And most exceptionally able" even though Skinner fought with him and was putting him out of business with his revolutionary ideas.

Skinner couldn't get a job after his PhD. But an elite group called the Society of Fellows was being formed at that time and they relaxed age limits to get Skinner into that. IBM had Skinner on a retainer, just in case his teaching machines caught on big time. Students were dropping out of all kinds of fields -- like electrical engineering - to work with him.

Yet it was a hard life. His own department turned against him, a few years after he joined Harvard as a professor. The best departments in this field today are places like North Texas, Western Michigan, Florida, and Kansas to mention a few. Given his intelligence and ability to make friends, he could have done anything he chose to. (Being a Wasp didn't hurt either. Those were the days they had limitations on the number of Jews admitted to Ivy League colleges.)

Anyway, single-handedly he pushed the field ahead. The sad part is that people don't even realize that such as field exists.

And we are the beneficiaries of it.