Perhaps, the most influential idea stemming from Skinner’s radical behaviorism was his theory of operant conditioned behavior. He argued that behavior is influenced by the consequences of actions, not by the stimuli that precede them. For example, if a person is given food every day after doing a certain chore, they will begin to associate doing the chore with getting food. In other words, operant learning is the process of reinforcing desirable behaviors and punishing undesirable ones. Despite his admiration for Pavao and Watson, he felt that behavior is not typically learned through the association of an act with a corresponding stimulus and that this classic conditioning was something of a unique and rather artificial case.
His experiments, following Thorndike’s tradition, used animals in special designed devices, allowing them to explore their environment to find out the actions that produced rewards. Skinner concluded that the consequence of any action is what is important to learning behavior – an animal performs an operation and experiences a resultant stimulus that reinforces that operation. The crucial difference between operant conditioning and classical conditioning is that the former includes the subject’s activity, whereas the latter does not.
