Walden Two (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: B. F. Skinner
- First Published: 1948
- Type of Plot: Utopian
- Time of Work: Spring, soon after World War II
- Setting: Somewhere in the United States
- Principal Characters: Professor Burris, Professor Augustine Castle, T. E. Frazier, Rogers, Barbara Macklin, Steve Jamnik, Mary Grove
- Genres: Long fiction, Utopian fiction
- Subjects: Science or scientists, Totalitarianism, Behaviorism, Utopias, Behavior modification
- Locales: United States
The Novel
Walden Two is cast mostly in the form of a dialogue—in the tradition of Plato’s Socratic dialogues—in which the renowned and controversial behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner presents his utopian vision of how human society could be reorganized on the basis of “behavioral engineering.” As the most famous and influential behaviorist of the twentieth century, Skinner was well qualified to argue that the modification and control of human behavior through “operant conditioning,” behavioral modification, and positive reinforcement could create a...
[The entire page is 2214 words long]
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