B. F. Skinner
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B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), an American psychologist, and Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss psychologist, were two of the most influential human development theorists of the twentieth century. The two men approached the question of development from very different angles. Skinner, a behaviorist, worked from a learning perspective and saw human development as a continuous process in which changes in behavior were responses to experience and adaptation to the environment. Piaget, on the other hand, took a cognitive approach and was concerned with the evolution of mental structures. Where Skinner saw development in quantitative terms (i.e., changes in the amount learned), Piaget held that development occurred in stages in which qualitative changes (i.e., changes in how the person thinks) enabled the individual to construct her/his world through progressively more complicated processes. These stages, he proposed, are coordinated with age and are cumulative. Skinner was devoted to the idea that development could and should be the object of rigorous scientific study in which well-designed experiments would provide data on learning mechanisms. But Piaget did little experimental work of this type and, for the most part, relied on careful observation of, at first, his own children. Despite their differing approaches however, Skinner's and Piaget's theories were not entirely mutually exclusive and the study of both approaches contributes to understanding human development.
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Skinner thus saw all learning as a series of increasingly complex interactions of environment and behavior--via both classical and operant conditioning. In developmental terms he saw only "progressive, orderly changes in the organization of the environment-behavior relations" and in order to determine exactly how the individual develops it is necessary to study changing levels of complexity in these interactions (Gewirtz & Peláez-Nogueras, 1992, p. 1419). But in conjunction with his theory Skinner also adopted what has been called the "antimentalist" position, holding that the common sense notion that "tends to attribute an act to some causal internal source, often conceived of as a need or drive," is mistaken in viewing these mental events "as explanatory entities" (Richelle, 1993, pp. 10-11). To accept them as such, he argued, was to ignore the role of conditioning which can clearly be shown to be present in all, he claimed, learning operations. But Skinner went much farther than this and also claimed that, while his theory does not deny the existence of mind, "mental states do not initiate behavior but are caused by it [and], in the same way that the environment controls a person's beha
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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