Topic > The Reality of Human Freedom - 1006

Is human freedom just an illusion? BF Skinner is a behavioral psychologist. He carried out an extreme experiment with subjects conditioned to perform simple behaviors, such as pressing a lever or pecking a disc, and then receiving the food reward. By stimulating the animals in a general environment, kept the animal away from sexual activity, building a nest and feeding them in a physiological condition, the response was that the animal did everything, such as turning towards or away from a light, jumping to a sound. The result was that they were able to carry out more highly organized activities. Could he transfer his experience and theories directly to humans? Traditionally, under the assumption, behavior resulted from causes internal to the individual. All individuals were held accountable for their conduct and received credit for their accomplishments. Skinner believed that the principles of operant conditioning could and should be applied on a large scale. The psychological experiment may need to minimize the human mind and inner personalities, as well as separate self-determination. He set up the experiment to demonstrate that man was the sum of his experiences and the stimuli that invaded consciousness and unconsciousness. As a result, he realized that conditioning could be applied to explain human behavior because the object of human psychology was only the behavior of human beings. For example, a child was driving across a crumbling bridge and his father joked about the bridge collapsing and all of them falling into the river below. The father found it funny and so he decided to do it every time they crossed the bridge. Years later, the child has grown up and is now afraid to cross any bridge. We believe that the most natural phenomena can be understood, quantified, predicted and ultimately controlled. The scientific revolution stopped at the gates of the natural sciences, bypassing man. We can predict where an electron will go and send a robot to Mars; but we cannot predict and stop economic crises and no control over wars and battles. If we were asked to predict phenomena we would think we should know more about them. As a result, today we can know more about Jupiter than about the person next to us. However, between our ability to explore human behavior and study bacteria, there are fundamental differences between electrons, because bacteria don't get angry at us when we put them under the microscope.