B. F. Skinner's utopian vision: behind and beyond<i>walden two</i>

Altus, Deborah E.; Morris, Edward K.

doi:10.1080/1028258042000266004

Cited by 19 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…For his part Skinner outlined an appealing potential future in Walden Two. Although more controversial features of the novel have traditionally been the focus of attention, it can also be understood as a blueprint for ecological health (Altus & Morris, 2004). Skinner (1976) described a community, inspired by Thoreau's original Walden, in which people reduced "some of the things they normally consume to eliminate some of the aversive labors otherwise required" (Evans, 1981, p. 46).…”

Section: Overconsumption Underconsumption and Consumption Skillsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability: From Excess to Aesthetics

Grant

2010

Behav. Soc. Iss.

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Sustainability is defined as the operation of a steady-state economy in which natural resource inputs and waste-product outputs are held constant. Key issues in attaining sustainability are addressing the problems of overconsumption of resourceintensive reinforcers, underconsumption of resource-light reinforcers, and lack of consumption skills that yield an enduring source of intrinsically reinforcing challenges and pleasures. Behavioral impediments to a sustainable society are described together with opportunities to achieve it. Opportunities emphasize sustainable futures people will find appealing rather than austere. These opportunities include a replacement of consumer culture with alternative value systems, embodied in John Stuart Mill's art of living, Tibor Scitovsky's cultural reawakening, B. F. Skinner's arts-based utopia, voluntary simplifiers, and the aesthetically-based values of Bohemian communities.

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Section: Overconsumption Underconsumption and Consumption Skillsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability: From Excess to Aesthetics

Grant

2010

Behav. Soc. Iss.

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“…Elms (1981) has argued that Skinner wrote Walden Two as a way to work through some of his existential and developmental crises.16Altus and Morris (2004) point out that the most important aspect of Skinner's utopian vision was not his specific blueprint for the good life, but his emphasis on an empirical, experimenting approach. They wrote, "Skinner utopian vision was not the practices he described in Walden Two, but how the community arrived at them-empirically" (p. 271).…”

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confidence: 99%

B. F. Skinner and technology’s nation: Technocracy, social engineering, and the good life in 20th-century America.

Rutherford¹

2017

History of Psychology

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Psychologist B. F. Skinner developed and promoted a technology of behavior as the basis for widespread social reform over much of his career. In 1948, he published his behaviorally engineered vision of the good life in his utopian novel Walden Two (Skinner, 1948). Skinner's efforts were part of a much larger social engineering tradition that received one of its fullest expressions in the Technocracy Movement of the 1930s. Fifteen years before Skinner's , at the height of the Technocracy Movement's public visibility in the United States, technocrat Harold Loeb (1933/1996) published his utopia,. In this article, I place the socially engineered visions of the good life promoted by the Technocracy Movement and by Skinner on an intellectual and ideological continuum to amplify and explore American attitudes toward psychology, technology, and social engineering during the middle decades of the 20th century. I argue that responses to both reveal the possibilities and limits of the social engineering enterprise, and suggest that historians of technology might consider how the history of psychology and other psy-disciplines can deepen conceptualizations of the relationships among the psychological, the social, and the technological in this period. (PsycINFO Database Record

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B. F. Skinner’s contributions to applied behavior analysis

2005

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Our paper reviews and analyzes B. F. Skinner's contributions to applied behavior analysis in order to assess his role as the field's originator and founder. We found, first, that his contributions fall into five categorizes: the style and content of his science, his interpretations of typical and atypical human behavior, the implications he drew from his science for application, his descriptions of possible applications, and his own applications to nonhuman and human behavior. Second, we found that he explicitly or implicitly addressed all seven dimensions of applied behavior analysis. These contributions and the dimensions notwithstanding, he neither incorporated the field's scientific (e.g., analytic) and social dimensions (e.g., applied) into any program of published research such that he was its originator, nor did he systematically integrate, advance, and promote the dimensions so to have been its founder. As the founder of behavior analysis, however, he was the father of applied behavior analysis.

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B. F. Skinner's utopian vision: behind and beyondwalden two

Cited by 19 publications

References 77 publications

Sustainability: From Excess to Aesthetics

Sustainability: From Excess to Aesthetics

B. F. Skinner and technology’s nation: Technocracy, social engineering, and the good life in 20th-century America.

B. F. Skinner’s contributions to applied behavior analysis

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