Theories In Action

Operant conditioning has become a very influential area of psychology, because it has successfully provided practical solutions to many problems in human behavior. Operant principles discovered in the laboratory are now being employed in a vast number of areas that include healthcare, education, mental health, prisons, and animal training, among many others.

Research

Applied behavior analysis Skinner was primarily concerned with understanding behavior and the process of learning. Although his experiments were largely with animals, he did generalize his findings to humans. Contrary to some criticisms of Skinner's deterministic principles, he did acknowledge that people could determine the causes of most behavior by identifying environmental conditions that support the behavior and then...