Skinner, Burrhus Frederic

Early Influences

B. F. Skinner's life spanned most of the 20th century. He was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, on March 20, 1904, and died on August 18, 1990, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the time of Skinner's birth, Susquehanna was a conservative town of about 2,000 inhabitants, and its main business, the railroad, was booming. Skinner's father was a lawyer, his mother a housewife. Frederic and his brother, younger by 2 years, grew up in a stable home. Their parents raised them with a mixture of strictness and leniency. The boys were given stern admonitions about proper social behavior. An improper remark or slouching in a chair would bring a “Tut, tut,” from his mother, followed by a warning, “What will people think?” But in exploring and constructing things, the young Fred had few constraints. He used his father's hand tools to build things from old planks, scraps of wood, and parts of machinery readily available in the garage. The list of the contraptions the boy built includes a small reading room with shelves and a candle bracket, small houses in the ramshackle back yard complete with cellars dug 6 feet down, a cabin with glass windows, a steam cannon that shot plugs of carrots across the yard when sufficiently fired up, and slides, teeter-totters, merry-go-rounds, and carts. No one taught Skinner how to make things or how to use tools. He mentioned his frustration in trying to screw together two oak planks, not having been told to drill a hole first. He figured out how to do things on his own, an independence that was to serve him well later in graduate school.

Education

Skinner's early schooling was typical of small-town public schools in the early 20th century. He went through 12 grades in the same building, at a walking distance from his home. In his eighth-grade class, Skinner repeated a remark his father had made that some people thought that Francis Bacon had written the plays attributed to Shakespeare. The teacher dismissed the idea. To bolster his claim, the young student read about Bacon and several of his works. What he read had a lasting impact. Bacon is mentioned in 12 of Skinner's 20 books.

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