Debate Analysis

A Dialogue on Education and Control — B. F. Skinner - Carl Rogers (1976)

Channel: Biophily2

Primary speakers:Carl RogersB. F. Skinner

G. A. Gladstein: This cassette package represents a milestone in the history of the development of the ideas of two outstanding psychologists, the Schinner and Karl R. Rogers. As indicated in the accompanying pamphlet, the dialogue included here remains as their most thorough exploration of their respective points of view. I think you will find their ideas as challenging today as they were in 1962. Listening to these tapes should also give you some feeling for the excitement we experienced in participating in that dialogue. The first cassette begins with their opening statements. At this time, then, we shall turn to the first presentation. You recall, according to your program, that we are allowing approximately 15 minutes first for Dr. Rogers and then for Dr. Schinner to give a brief review of the controversy as they see it. It gives me then great satisfaction to present to you Dr. Karl R. Rogers.

Carl Rogers: Thank you, Dr. Gladstein. It's good to be here, good to see Fred Schinner again. Good to look forward to the chance of having an opportunity to pursue and depth some of our common interests and common differences. I also look out over this audience, which I expected to be a very small audience, and I'm tempted to say, who are you? But I trust that we will learn as we begin to get questions and contributions from you. I'd like to try to summarize briefly some of the important elements which underlie our dialogue as they seem to me. I think there's a fresh current in our culture, a fresh breeze that's blowing through the world that's exhibiting itself in many ways and speaking through many voices. It's expressed in a growing interest in existentialism and in the existentialist part of

G. A. Gladstein: you.

Carl Rogers: It's evident in ways that may seem odd to some of you, such as the interest in Zen Buddhism. It shows itself in the concern of the self and psychology and in the interest in a phenomenological approach to psychological problems. Even on the political scene, it is evident, I believe, and the absurd to one new country after another arising out of a colonial past. It is exhibited in the mass law as termed the new third force in the American psychology, the development of self-theories, the concern with the existential person, the discussions of being and becoming as over against the two older forces, the positivistic behaviorism part of you and the Freudian part of you. Man has long felt himself to be forth a new declaration of independence. He is discarding the alibis of unfreedom. He is choosing himself, endeavoring to become himself. Not a puppet, not a slave, not a copy of some model, but his own unique individual self. He is saying in no uncertain terms, I am, I exist. I choose myself in life. I choose the meaning of death. I find myself very sympathetic to this trend because it is so deeply in line of the experience I have had in working with clients in therapy. As one therapist has said, the essence of therapy is the client's movement from feeling unfree and controlled by others toward the frightening but rewarding sense of freedom to map out and choose his new personality. I myself and one of the papers that some of you have read have described the therapeutic development as a self-initiated process of learning to be free. This learning is composed of movement from as well as movement toward. From being persons driven by inner forces they do not understand, fearful and distrustful of these deeper feelings and of themselves, living by values they have taken from others, they move significantly. They move to being persons who accept and even enjoy their own feelings, who value and trust the deeper layers of their nature to find strength in being their own uniqueness, who live by values that they experience. This learning, this movement enables them to live as more individuated, more creative, more responsive and more responsible persons. Clients are, as I have tried to indicate, often sharply aware of such directions in themselves as they move with fearfulness toward being freely themselves. But how can I talk about freedom when as a behavioral scientist I conduct research on the assumption that the sequences of cause and effect operate quite as much in the psychological as in the physical world? What possible definition of freedom can there be in a modern world? Let me try to tell you what it means to me, again quoting from one of these papers. In the first place the freedom which my clients experience is essentially an inner thing, something which exists in the living person, quite aside from any outward choice of alternatives which we so often think of as constituting freedom. I'm speaking of the kind of freedom which, frankly, vividly described in his experience of the concentration camp when everything possessions, identity, choice of alternatives was taken from the prisoners. But even months and years in such an environment showed only, and I quote, that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one's own attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's own way. It is this inner, subjective, existential freedom which I have observed. It is the realization in my clients that I can live myself here and now by my own choice. It is the quality of courage which enables a person to step into the uncertainty of the unknown as he chooses himself. It is the discovery of meaning from within oneself, meaning which comes from listening sensitively and openly to the complexities of what one is experiencing. It is the burden of being responsible for the self one chooses to be. It is the recognition by the person that he is an emerging process, not a static in product. The individual who is thus deeply and courageously thinking his own thoughts, becoming his own uniqueness, responsibly choosing himself, may be fortunate in having hundreds of objective outer alternatives in which to choose or he may be unfortunate in having none but his freedom exists regardless. So we are, first of all, speaking of something which exists within the individual, of something phenomenological rather than objective but nonetheless to be prized. The second point in differential misexperience of freedom is that it exists not as a contradiction to the picture of the psychological universe as a sequence of cause and effect but as a complement to such a universe. Freedom rightly understood is a fulfillment by the person of the ordered sequence of his life. As Martin Boeber put it, the free man believes in destiny and believes that it stands in need of him. He moves out voluntarily, freely, responsibly, to play his significant part in a world whose determined events move through him and through his spontaneous choice and will. This is the experience of one client after another as he moves in therapy to turn an acceptance of the realities of the world outside and inside himself and also moves start becoming a responsible agent in this real world. As I've indicated before, this significant human freedom exists alongside the complete determinism of modern science as a paradox. It exists in our human experience with as much reality as do the facts of science and we cannot wisely disregard it. It's one of the great contributions of our century that we are beginning to realize that man's moods, attitudes, actions, his adaptations as well as his male adaptations can be understood in the same lawful terms as the events of the physical world. Viewed from this objective perspective, it seems probable that we will increasingly be able to understand man's actions in terms of laws, which will be similar to the scientific laws discovered in the natural sciences. It is this that leads to the possibility of being able to control human behavior. It's this that leads to the issue of this discussion. There seems no doubt that the behavioral sciences will move steadily in the direction of making man an object to himself. A complex sequence of events no different in kind from the complex chain of equations by which various chemical substances interact to form new substances or to release energy. But no matter how completely man comes to understand himself as a determined phenomenon, the product of past elements and forces, and the determined cause of future events and behaviors, he can never live as an object. He can only live subjectively. Some of the most pathetic individuals I know are those who are continually attempting to understand and predict their behavior objectively. Each action is meaningful to them only as the predetermined effect of preceding causes and their whole life becomes an unhappy caricature of the centipede, self-consciously watching his feet. In my experience, some of the failures in psychoanalytic therapy sometimes exhibit this over-intellectualized objectivity toward themselves. But the person who is developing his full potential is able to accept the subjective aspect of himself and to live subjectively. When he is angry, he is angry, not merely an exhibition of the effects of adrenaline. When he loves, he is loving and not merely a perfected turtle of object. He moves in self-selected directions, he chooses responsibly, he is a person who thinks and feels and experiences, he is not merely an object in whom these events occur. We cannot, without great peril, deny this subjective element in ourselves. It precedes our scientific activities, it's more all-encompassing than scientific knowledge. It is an essential part of being human, of being a person, and no present or future development of the behavioral sciences can ever contradict this basic fact. Yet I am very well aware that the experimentalist, positivist, behaviorist, stream of thought and psychology, conductor skin air is the most able exponent of that trend, hold very different views. For example, here are some of the words and concepts that I have used, which are totally or almost totally, without meaning, in the behaviorist frame of reference. Freedom, for example, is a term with no meaning. Choice, in the sense that I have used it, has no meaning. Subjectivity is, I believe, regarded as a very little importance. Purpose, self-direction, value or value choice, none of these have any meaning. This personal responsibility, as a concept, has no meaning. The democratic philosophy of human nature, Dr. Skinner has pointed out, has been a useful resource of the revolutionist in the past, but is now very probably out of date. So it's clear that some of the most basic concepts of this new third-force in psychology, have no meaning at all for the behaviorist group. I trust that this dialogue, today and tomorrow, may help us to clear up any misunderstandings of such differences, and also to clarify our differences for real differences do exist. In summary, I would say that to the extent that a behaviorist point of view in psychology is leading us toward a disregard of the person, or toward treating persons primarily as manipulable objects, or toward control of the person, shaping up his behavior without his participant choice, or toward minimizing the significance of the subjective, then I question it very deeply. My experience would lead me to say that, to that extent, it's going against one of the strongest undercurrents of modern life, and is taking us down a pathway with destructive consequences.

G. A. Gladstein: At this point, we will ask Dr. Beatts Skinner, Harvard University, to present his own brief review of the controversy as he sees Dr. Skinner.

B. F. Skinner: Thank you very much for the success time, Carl Rogers. I always make the same mistake. When debating the Carl Rogers, I always assume that he will make no effort to influence the audience, and then I ask for follow-in, and speak as I'm speaking now, to group of people who are very far from free to accept my views. In fact, I was just reminded of a story that I once heard about Carl Rogers, and I'll tell it now hoping to confirm or have him deny it. I suppose it isn't possible, at least I'm sure it is grown in this dimension. The story I heard is as follows. Carl Rogers was never much of a duck hunter, but he was persuaded to find one occasion to go duck hunting. He and some friends went into a blind and sat through a dreary cold early dawn, and no ducks arrived until the very end of the time when shooting was possible. Finally, one lone duck came in, and his friends allowed him to shoot, and he did. At the same time, along the shore, a few hundred yards away, another man shot at the same duck. The duck fell, caught. Dr. Rogers died out of the blind and started toward the duck. The other man got out of the blind, and his blind started toward the same duck. They arrived at the same moment. Dr. Rogers turned to him, and said, you feel that this is your duck. The reason I was reminded of that story was that the end of the day is that Dr. Rogers brought the duck home. I shall do my best to prevent a similar failure. We do pray on a good many things, and I like to feel that perhaps I have had some influence on Dr. Rogers because from time to time he has conceded certain friends. He has agreed that human behavior has been controlled and is probably coming to be controlled with greater success as the science of behavior evolves. Now, the controllability of behavior is an old story, of course. Historians have always been delighted when they could prove an influence of some kind of biographical event on a hero. Biographers take the same line. The social sciences have certainly brought further evidence of its mystical nature, and I believe that an experimental analysis of the behavior of an individual organism has now essentially clinched the point. I don't believe you could ever prove that all the behavior of a human organism is controlled, but the assumption is, I think, more and more plausible, at least as a working assumption, before a science, and I believe also, as a working assumption, for more general considerations regarding human affairs in general. Now, Dr. Rogers in conceding this much has tended to narrow the notion of control. In the paper that I refer to, he cites as examples of recent advances in controlling behavior, the evidence that under certain social conditions may be led to make judgments which are contrary to the evidence of his senses. In other experiments, it is shown that a person may change his opinion without being aware of what is influenced him to do so. He is trying to satisfy electrical stimulation as an all-compelling kind of gratification that might very well be used to control behavior, and, of course, the effects of drugs, producing vivid hallucinations, changes in disposition, personality, that be cited by Dr. Rogers. Now, the control may mean much more than this. These particular examples are examples in surreptitious control, control where the control is not aware that he is being controlled, or they are special examples of powerful control. Now, what I am talking about when I say the control of human behavior is any contribution which is made toward determining a man's action. It does not need to be surreptitious, it does not mean that the man may not be fully aware of what is being done to him, and it does not mean that it would be 100% successful. I am talking about such control as is achieved in economics with various weight systems, the ordinary, whether ineffective ones, or special incentive wages, and so on. One has only to examine other nations, other cultures, to appreciate the extent to which, in America, our economic system does energize people, makes them productive, makes them enterprising, and undertaking new kinds of things. I mean by control the various police and military forces which government use to keep people working within certain illegal frameworks. I mean by control the various techniques which are used in education, to bring about what we call the acquisition of knowledge, or traits of character, and so on. Now, the fact that occasionally an employee doesn't go to work for the goal, or occasionally a man becomes a hobo and stops working all together, or the fact that a student plays hooky, or that someone breaks a law or escapes from jail, this does not mean to me that these are not very powerful controlling influences. The exceptions are to be expected, because in no one of these cases are the variables which are manipulated, the only variables and hence the control is not 100%. So I hope that when we're talking here about control, we will speak more generally, and not them at this, to conceal control. Although there are special problems involved there, I admit, and would not also hope to deal only with 100% effective control. Now, that is one thing that I wanted to state in these early remarks. I think it will come up again in the discussions. Another one has to do with the implications of the notion that human behavior is controlled, and that's for the moment let's talk about complete control. Another one of my valued opponents in this line of thinking is Joseph Wood Crouch, whose book The Major of Man published, I think in 1954, is largely an attack on world and two, my utopian novel, and also on other works of mind. He has recently returned to the attack in an article in the Saturday Review of Literature, in which suddenly I find myself class with the existentialists. But being cited by the Crouch has imbalizing what he calls the dead end of the tendency represented by Darwin and Marx, and he excites me as denying categorically and absolutely that man has any control over his destiny that he has any power to choose or determine. And he goes on to document this by saying that I write in my book science and human behavior, the inner man, who is held responsible for the behavior of the external biological organism, is only a pre-scientific substitute for the kinds of causes which are discovered in the course of a scientific analysis, and all these causes lie outside the end of the video. And he goes on from this dead end. The fact that man is rather succumbed for the moment completely controlled by his genetic and environmental history does not in any sense mean that he cannot control his own destiny. He has already been doing this both in the field of genetics and in the field of the environment, because from the very beginning of civilization or culture or man as we know him, man has been working upon the very genetic and environmental forces which are responsible for him. And the geneticists today are beginning to talk quite openly about the possibility of improvements in man through genetic measures. And just yesterday, evidently according to Morning Paper, Professor Huxley has come out again in favor of sperm banks or special donor fathership so that in the world of the future the father will be proud not that the child is of his own blood, but that he has the best blood that money can buy. And the environmental control is already here and has been here for thousands of years. Man is largely responsible for the environment in which men live. He is certainly responsible for this very pleasant environment here this afternoon in every detail. We live more and more in a man-made world and he has been a world which man has worked out largely because of his bearing on his behavior. It is reduced the need to escape from extremes of temperature and serlon. We tend to be reasonably comfortable, well fed and can then devote ourselves to things which are more important. This is a contribution of a purely physical technology. But the social technology, the cultural technology which has gone along with this, is even more important. What man has done is to create for himself a world in which he is governed, in which he is employed or which he can hire, in which he can gain necessary wealth through borrowing or stealing or something that kind, he has built a world in which he is able to behave in ways which would otherwise be impossible. And in this sense he has controlled himself. If it is true that human behavior is 100% the product of a genetic and environmental history, it is nevertheless true that man has created and can modify that genetic and environmental history and in that sense he can control himself. Now that is not a pun. I am not playing on words here. Very often it is true that the man who builds the environment, whether it is a physical world or a cultural world, he is not the man who is controlled by it. But that is often the case. And as I have analyzed elsewhere, the techniques of self-control, which we can extract from religious ethical moral works of the past, can be analyzed in terms of a manipulation of an environment, will be resolved that the man who is thus manipulated the environment will behave in a way which will cause a mess trouble or gain him greater achievements. So that we do control ourselves even in the world in which human behavior is totally controlled because we modify that behavior. Now this may seem, again, even if we don't regard it as a play on words, it may seem logically impossible. But the point is that we do this not because even then we step outside any causal stream or outside the stream of history, but because it happens to be in man's nature to take steps of this story. And this brings me to a third thing that we will certainly be dealing with again and again, I am sure, in this debate, that is the so-called choice of values. Why do we, in controlling man, controlling one direction and not in another? How do we decide in advance how we want to control? This comes up in the case of education. Suppose you have a very powerful educational technique, but we do teach. The psychology can tell you the techniques, can it tell you what ought to be taught? So now, this is our own field of value judgment, but I don't think that it may necessarily be put outside the realm of science. So as far as I'm concerned, there is only one science, there is only one way of knowing that it may be in the hands of scientists or in others, but it comes to the same thing. And I don't know of any special wisdom, which is available when science must stop and turn the choice of values over to others. As I see the question of values, they concern some characteristics of human behavior, which have led to various kinds of exploration in a design of culture. You can explain some activities of man in the case of physical technology by appealing to the immediate results. Early people hunt and fish for food because in hunting and fishing, you are reinforced immediately with something edible. Later, culture develops methods of storing food, drying, preserving, freezing. They develop methods of agriculture where something must be done in the early spring and you eat only in late August or September, perhaps in Taiwan. Slowly, a culture builds a capacity to do things because of more and more remote consequences. Now, this is also true in the case of the cultural technology which man has worked out. A strong man able to quit anyone else in a battle will steal, will take from others, will force them to labor for him and so on. This becomes an early primitive kind of governmental structure. And we explain it in terms of the immediately enforcement of this strong man who is capable of exerting that kind of power. Later, a government which becomes more sensible in its long-term consequences will work out ways of controlling which will not resort to brute force. And we'll have a greater survival value in the long run because such governments will make better use of the people governed. As you can trace in physical technology, the becoming important of more and more remote consequences, so you can trace this in cultural technology. And I think this brings us to what is my way of thinking, the crucial issue. Dr. Rogers has referred to the suggestion that there are three ways of looking at human behavior. The problem or the positive behavior is, or that will happen to name for it which emphasizes the self whether the individual becomes an interest in the self as a source of wisdom, source of strength in offering conduct. David Bacon, very interesting book on Troy's sources, health notice that the Protestant Reformation and the Jewish aesthetic mystical movement, and Troy Trumdellater, in his psychoanalysis, are exemplified in a kind of revolt against external control. This is the conflict between psychoanalysis and governmental operations. For example, is the general turning to the individual to find salvation. This is the theme before for the part of the Reformation that one can seek once God within himself and so on. And Troy carries this out hoping to find within the individual the source of a pattern of life which is not imposed from outside. Now, I don't think that is a correct way of stating the case, and I think it can be modified in a way which fits my purpose very well. The change is not from an external control of the individual to internal control. It is a change from coercive punitive control to other techniques of control which are related in the long run, if you won't be surprised to hear me say, the positive reinforcement. There are ways in which you can control people so that you influence what they want to do, and there are ways in which you can control them so that they are forced to do what they do not want to do. Now, a shift from a legalistic coercive system to individual freedom, this is all the theory of democracy too, appears to take the good behavior of the individual out of the hands of the police and turn it over to the individual himself. I suggest, as a subject for future discussion here, that it will turn out that the inner control, which is then discovered as an alternative to the external, is nothing but the product of another kind of external control which has been concerned with getting individuals to want to behave in certain ways rather than in coercion and to behave in those ways because of an external threat. As I see the trend of the evolution of culture, it is away from the rather immediate, punitive, successful ways of controlling people to go as more remote techniques which are based upon a knowledge of human behavior, require a very sensitive understanding of these techniques which in the long run exert a much more powerful control. And the control which I believe is more likely to build a stronger group because it releases resources, and here I would agree with Dr. Rogers of the individual which are quite lost under aggressive control. So those are the three things I want to mention. We do agree that the behavior is controlled, but I want to interpret that broadly. We, I hope, agree that even on an assumption of complete determinism, man is and has been free to determine his destiny by the design of the world which determines him, and that the slow evolution of cultural practices could never well be working toward the releasing of potentialories of the individual without necessarily thereby leaving it in the last analysis to the individual to determine his own behavior.

Carl Rogers: If you see just that I started off since he admitted the last words, I think first I'd like to clear up this duck story. There's a great deal of truth in that story except for the punchline. Instead of saying you feel it's you shot the duck, the reserve instead to proceed you very highly regarded in scientific circles, we flipped a coin and that proved that I had shot the duck. As I listen to Dr. Skinner's remarks I felt as I often have when I have bred his material that there is so much on which we are in real agreement that it's puzzling to know why would 500 people turn out to see what the differences are. And I think I picked that seriously that although we do seem to be in agreement on a great many scores, you know what I suspect there are some real differences which are not entirely verbal. I don't believe you people would all be interested if you didn't feel there was something more at stake here other than slight semantic differences. I'm not sure yet that I can really pin down what those differences are. I think one feeling I had as he spoke is that the scientific view is the whole world for him. It seemed to me. It isn't that it is one very very useful way in which we perceive the world. It is the whole world. I noticed he had no comment on the paradox that to me has considerable meaning. I hope he will comment on that. There is one story I want to tell but also bear on that same issue I believe. For more than a year now I wanted to ask Dr. Skinner about this. We were both at a conference in Boston a little more than a year ago I think. I thought it was me of 61. I don't know. It was quite a while ago. It was published in summer of 61. He had given his paper on the design of cultures and then had commented on that. After hearing his comments I directed these remarks to him. I'll read this from the tape recorded discussion. I said from what I understood Dr. Skinner to say it is his understanding that though he might have thought he chose to come to this meeting, he thought he had a purpose in giving this speech. Such thoughts are really illusory. He actually made certain marks on paper and emitted certain sounds here simply because his genetic makeup and his past environment had apparently conditioned his behavior in such a way that it was rewarding to make these sounds. And that he as a person doesn't enter into this. In fact if I get his thinking correctly from his strictly scientific point of view, he as a person perhaps doesn't exist. I thought I would draw him out on the subjective side if I was there but to my amazement he said he wouldn't go into the question of whether he had any choice in the matter and added I do accept your characterization of my own presence here. I wondered ever since. I really would like you to know more clearly. I think that gets close to a hundred of some of the differences between us.

B. F. Skinner: I think it gets very close. There is this strange feeling that if you deny the individual freedom or deny the interpretation of the individual based upon freedom and personal responsibility, that somehow the individual vanishes. Well this is not at all the conclusion that one could arrive at as I indicated very briefly and stating one of what I thought would be a recurring theme. I think you can make the assumption that each of us is completely determined to do what he is now doing and is going to do by his own genetic and environmental history. I say this to my class at the end of the term. I give a course in human behavior with a fairly large number of students and many of them become very anxious about this. In fact I just this year have learned two strange things about my course at Harvard. One that it sends more students to courses in the Divinity School and any other undergraduate course. And also that it sends more to the health service. There is a special syndrome that it's all recognized when it turns out. Now I try to reassure my students and I think in the long run obviously they go on to the health service or the Divinity School after it. I haven't been successful in this but I think in general I am in pointing out to them that each of them is an absolutely useful. And absolutely unique locust through which certain lines of course pass each one of you represents an absolutely unique genetic combination of factors in the evolution of the human race. Each of you represents an absolutely unique combination of environmental forces. Your family and your child at school you pass through the various books you read, the various governmental and economic forces under which you lived and so on. Now I can visualize the growth of a more and more successful human being as a biological organism and a more and more successful culture or society as a cultural organization. Or as an organism which has proceeded via the ordinary principles of evolution and the eventual selection of the more and more powerful version when diversity turns up which gives me a reasonable sense of my own individuality. And I think for a good reason for telling anyone else that he is himself in individual and has possibly very important contributions to make. Now I don't do this to exorbit my students. That would be quite inconsistent of me to exhort them except insofar as I can prove that my own history has suggested that I might exhort in order to produce certain effects. I don't believe in exhorting. I don't believe in the notion of personal responsibility in a legal sense. I think it disappears when you resort to non-versive techniques of control. This is an issue which in our earlier debate I brought up that when people are held responsible for their acts in the sense that they can be justly punished for doing something the consequences of which they foresaw, then you have a meaning to the notion of responsibility. But when they have been induced to behave in other ways without aversive consequences entering into the picture there is no meaning to the conception of personal responsibility. But there is never any question of the uniqueness of the individual or of his possible importance in the evolution of a future culture. I don't think anything we have now is by any means the last word.

Carl Rogers: It kind of like to come back to the first part of that because one of the things I have thought about is what meaningly and wonder would it have to a person so like a freedom writer to tell him that he is the locus of a number of unique forces which have conditioned him to move southward, have conditioned him to sit in certain places which are illegal, has been operated, conditioned and rewarded for behaviors which would bring him in conflict with the law. He finds it rewarding to emit certain sounds when he is beaten etc. I mean I recognize the picture of behavior that you are giving as a picture that seems to me to be in line with our general and current knowledge of people who are viewed from the outside but I notice you steer very clear always of even taking a look at the person from the inside. When I say I think of trying to explain to a freedom writer his actions in those terms, I don't believe that this makes something quite meaningless out of something which socially has meaning.

B. F. Skinner: Does this make any sense to you know like there are two points here you might ask the question of supposing I could convince this freedom writer that I was right would he then stop being a freedom writer. I think you are getting at that the one thing on to that it is his conception of himself as someone who can do something to bring about an important change for which he will then be able to take a modest credit and so on. People certain people at least will admire him for having done this and so on. Now I think he does do this because of a heritage which has come to him from his own culture regarding the necessity for undertaking a certain kind of martyrdom undergoing punitive treatment in order to bring about some other state of affairs. If he has been through a culture which goes in for this he will do it there are many culture which would never produce freedom writers at all. Apart from whether he would then stop there is the other issue as to whether it is correct to say that he is doing this for reasons which are important to him beyond his training. The converse of this is what happens to the link went or the alcoholic when he has seized upon this justification who say well I am sorry I know I am an old drunk but I really am ill shouldn't complain you shouldn't criticize me I need treatment. Now up to a certain point society has control drunk in this by shaming the town drunk by teaching children either to laugh at these people it is still good comedy to put on a drunk act in a play or to have them blame these people to point out how their family suffer and so on. This is an effort to control through punishment. Now a modern view of this is that not I think if that is wrong it just doesn't work and the better view would be to try to find other ways of creating an alcoholic and the alcoholic may seize upon this to escape from the censure and blame. Well he said more or less entitled to do that in the sense that you have left yourself open to this when your shift from one technique of control through punishment to another which will let us say in that case it might very well be medical but it could be through positive educational measures. When you shift there is a transitional period in which people do seem to be at those ends they are lost the old system isn't working the new system hasn't taken control either in both cases you have a form of control but I think you have in the long run a better one if you could work out a positive educational treatment for alcoholism. This would involve a great deal of cultural engineering it would be very difficult I myself think that any government worth its salt should prohibit any advertising which makes the consumption of alcoholic beverages attractive or honorable or distinguished and so on. I'm not saying we should keep people from buying alcoholic beverages that didn't work but I think you ought to be able to keep advertisers from making the drenching of alcoholic beverages beautiful and glamorous and so on. This is a thought in a kind of design of a culture and if you could eliminate all of that with a positive educational program I think you could treat the alcoholic. So he would no longer need to be shamed or thrown in jail or punished or threatened with a damn nation whatever the versus control is and I would myself prefer a culture which works that way not because possibly because of my own preference for non-aversive techniques but because in the long run such a culture would be more effective. In such a culture there would be no moral struggle there would be no need for exerting one's personal responsibility.

Carl Rogers: There was a listen to that the message I'm getting from it and I'd be glad to be corrected if it's not right is that you saying I'll talk at any length about how one influences or controls behavior from the outside but any comments on whether man's subjective view of himself has any importance whatsoever that I don't wish to get into. And I guess what I'm saying and what I was trying to indicate when I talked about the freedom writer is that if we take only the objective external perspective on man if this is kind of a modern Calvinism as the way it strikes me where the clock was all wound up. Originally and it now runs inevitably through its conclusion and if we say that's the total picture of man there is nothing more to be said about this freedom writer or any other person other than that he is quite inevitably doing exactly what he was conditioned to do and that he himself as a person has no part in this. If that is given as our total picture of man then to me that's insufficient that's inadequate it gives a picture of man as meaningless I think it gives a picture of the universe as meaningless. And I guess the reason why I can't help but have some feeling about this is that if it doesn't for a moment check with what I learn with people from the inside in other words in one sense I find myself certainly in 90% or more agreement with all you say about people when you're talking about them from the outside but I notice you are never willing to get at them from the inside.

B. F. Skinner: This could be a point of which we will simply go on disagreeing I don't want to question the reality of the evidence that you're pointing to and I don't question it because I surprise many people by talking about my own feelings. Who knows what you're going to reveal I always come back to this is our now falling back from my experience as a scientist I always come back to the discovery repeated discovery that when I give up trying to account for something with an inner entity some sort and try very awkwardly at first to deal with external entities which might be responsible for it. I go through a period when a thing is awkward and obviously I'm talking around the simple statement and so on and yet in the long run it comes out. I went a long time using the concept of drive for example and talking about behavior was I think the last of the fictions that I just possessed myself up in my history as a theoretician. It was awfully awkward to say instead of saying that this rat has a high hunger drive to say well this rat is 80% of his body weight or he's been deprived of food for 24 or 48 hours something like that. It seems so simple there's something called hunger and there it is actually in practice it is extremely valuable to insist upon the conditions which generate this drive and this is positiveism of course but I think it's a very valuable practice. If I could just give you another example on this I think we're both trying to understand each other here. I'm doing a book at present time I don't mind my getting an ad in. I'm doing a book and the technology of teaching which will not be along this position on teaching machines at all but an analysis of the processes of instruction from this point of view. There are certain chapters in there which I think would be of interest because they seem to me to represent a search for the external correlates of the kinds of character traits that we have always assigned to the inner man. Now you can dispose I think of knowledge and skills usually those are I think fictions of knowledge of something is only evident when you can talk intelligently about it and so on and I prefer to talk about the behavior talking about things than about knowledge but to take such things as the enjoyment of literature for example or an interest in what you're doing or a dedication or industry or preservation against the fatigue of excessive work and so on. Or courage doing something in the face of aversive consequences. These things are very easily assigned to personality traits which seem to come with the baby and people who have them can do these things and people who don't who don't have them don't do them. The dedicated scientist who is in his laboratory 15 hours a day and so on he seems to have something zeal dedication which many people don't have and we give up we assume that a great many people could never be absorbed in the subject to that extent. Now you can show I think with reasonable certainty on the basis of evidence available now that the extent to which a person enjoys music or art or literature books or the extent to which a person continues to work with a high level of interest in a given field that these things can be traced to lucky histories of reinforcement. For example just take enjoying books usually a school wants to boast of the level of its students and so they make the students read books form before they ought to read them and no one has ever made any reasonable effort to schedule a set of books so that having got a successful result from reading one page and another page and so on you continue to read and you get periodic reflections from this which keep you going. Now if that is done properly I'm sure you could build in any individual an extraordinary capacity for enjoying himself with books and the same is true of music and so on. In the case of dedication of scientific zeal if you want to teach science in a sense of teaching someone to want to be a scientist this is quite different from teaching him how to use apparatus in a laboratory course. You want to schedule discoveries so that he has the experience of making a discovery the first day when he tries it maybe two or three days later he makes another and then ten days later he makes another one and we know how to stretch this schedule out so that eventually you've got either on the one hand a pigeon that bats is against a key at 10,000 times a day for three or several years or a scientist who bats his brains out on the walls of his laboratory 16 hours a day. 16 hours a day for this many years now I can't take a far away and say well in that case I can show you the schedule they may seem ridiculous to interpret fairer day in terms of pigeons but I can show you people who are reinforced by gambling enterprises on the same schedule who are committed. Now if you've ever seen a room full of women playing bingo I don't know why it isn't women play bingo but they have terrific dedication of a thought which American industry would love to be able to command with ordinary wage systems but the variable ratio schedule in the bingo game is enough to build this extraordinary he'll sit there four or five cards and listen to numbers and looking very keenly by the hour. Now this is is this something that they're born with no it is something which is got into them because of their history reinforcement and I would take these words such as enjoyment courage as examples of what you would find in the individual that I am trying to find outside.

Carl Rogers: Well that's very good statement I think of the possibilities and potentialities of human control of their coming to problems which all of us will face in the consequences of which we'll all face. I have I think two comments on what you've just said one has to do with the fact that in your talking about your desire to find the external causes of behavior is behavior is viewed externally. You talked in terms of I've heard many people use for it is as though for every external cause that we can find then you can drop a previous erroneous internal cause which you formerly positive. I would like to make it clear that's not what I'm talking about at all I think that that is a part of the advance of science that things that performally dealt with as though they were caused by little homuncular within the individual are various positive internal causes we do find other types of causation for such behavior. The thing that I would want to stress and that seems to me has an importance which you give it not at all is the fact that and does live a subjective life quite as well as being a when viewed from a scientific perspective a sequence of cause and effect. I wondered when you said you often spoke about your feelings I wondered why perhaps it is that you haven't yet found the cause of those or something but it seems to me there are other reasons for speaking of our feelings it seems to me that man's a subjective life has a significance as a different perspective on life which stands quite separately and paradoxically in relationship to our view of the image. It seems to me as one molecule in a vast chain of cause and effect and I think that one might say well but that's only just different way of looking at it really makes no difference no I think that's not true at all I believe that when the subjective life does seem to have significance then we adopt different courses different courses of action then we do if we regard it as having no significance at all. And there I'd like to turn to your very good remarks about learning machines I think that's what they ought to be called and teaching machines.

B. F. Skinner: I might interrupt the computer people use to talk about a machine which learns machine which modifies itself and it's because of its own experience and I think that they have the right and the call it a learning machine. In French you can use the same word for learn and teach but you can't in English and so I think that machine will call them teaching machines.

Carl Rogers: It seems to me that depending on whether we give subjectivity any significance we might use program learning in quite different ways well his mathematics are inadequate if he could go to a do a program of mathematics at that point to learn what he needs to know this would be optimal. If he needs to know more about optics and at that time there are programs along that line he can take another program learn that sort of thing. All of it coming at a time when his interest is maximal his need is maximal I'm sure the learning would be quick and would be efficient. I think it can lead to the very best of what I would think of as a student-centered type of teaching and learning. Select some slightly more debatable examples. Suppose that he does wish to improve in his appreciation of art. Well he could easily take a program in art appreciation which would lead him very much to understand the principles of it. He could take a program which would lead him to understand and appreciate some of the things that the abstract painters are trying to achieve. My mind that would be excellent because then he would be faced within himself with the choice of his own values his own decisions his own personal appreciation and where he stood in regard to items of that sort. Or even in the political field I think I can think of nothing more really educational and if there was a good program of the principles and benefits of the communist way of life and a good program on the principles and benefits of a more democratic approach. And if a student had to take both so that then what he would be faced with would be internal subjective concern conflict difference which he would have to straighten out within himself. That's the kind of thing that I think I mean when I say that placing some importance on the subjective leads to a different approach than simply shaping up a person's behavior for example.

B. F. Skinner: I think perhaps I ought to take some time to state how one views experience and this inner life from the point of view of a behavioral science. I don't deny for a moment that each of us has a small part of the universe in close within his skin with which he has specially good connections. You can have your toothache but I can't have it and this will go for great many other physiological conditions now in spite of a libel often urged against me I don't think the organism is empty. I'm sure that all sorts of things go on inside the only thing I'm concerned with is not having to wait until the physiologists have figured all of that out to move forward and I'm sure you would take the same line there. But what is the nature of self observation in that case now if there are things that go on inside you with which you have a special connection it but you might then say well those are the things that you will know that no one else can know about you. But we know them. I've analyzed this problem in my book on verbal behavior and also in that old operation is in favor on the ways in which a verbal community can teach the individual to know himself. Now I can teach a child color if he has color vision by getting him to say red blue green and so on at appropriate times when I'm holding up red blue green is something that I have color vision also or at least I have these labeled. So that or I can analyze them with a spectrograph or something in case I know something about the stimulus and I can say to him right or wrong right or wrong as he learns the names of the colors but I can't teach him the names of his emotions in the same way I can say now there you see that's difference and this is embarrassment. I may guess correctly that he's feeling different and use the word different and he may then use it. What I mean by correct is that the way I use it is very difficult and many people have pointed this out to set up any common vocabulary for the description of inner events and this would include not only emotional but sensory events experiential events. The observation of your own behavioral tendencies the probability that you will behave in a given way today or tomorrow what you've done in the past reporting on your behavior. So that this although people do come to watch things going on inside them while they are being stimulated while they are acting in various ways this always seems to me follows the action or follows the stimulation. It's always something exposed factor and I would argue that the inner events which seem so important to us are not essential to action and probably do not in any important case precede action. When I talk about these inner things as fiction you use the word erroneous I wouldn't call them errors I think they are dispensable verbal tools that we could get rid of and profit from being rid of. So when I talk about these people say yes but I can feel my hunger I can feel my anxiety I can feel my to meditate and so on. Well can you Freud I think made an important contribution in the notion of the unconscious now the unconscious to me is not bothered by the notion of the unconscious. So far as I'm concerned conscious and unconscious behavior are all the same the only distinction between the case of conscious behavior you know what you're doing or why you did it in case of unconscious you don't. And other is this exposed factor thing can happen in the case of conscious act it doesn't happen in the case of unconscious before I think showed clearly that the kinds of variables which influence conscious behavior can also be proved to have been responsible for unconscious behavior. So that he freed the causal nature of experience from the need for observation that is what happens to you will affect your behavior whether you know it or not. When you do know what you say is conscious when you don't know it you say you're not conscious Freud's evidence isn't conclusive to everyone but I think we would accept general principle that there are things we do we don't know we're doing or we don't know we've done them or we don't know we're going to do it. There are reasons for acting that we don't know about there are others we know now if this is the case then experience will always be something which follows action or at least a disposition to act and will not have any causal status and I would always want to look beyond experience to whatever it is which gives rise to the experience. Your references to education take the line of course which Rousseau first portrayed so beautifully in that marvelous book a meal was John Dury and William James and others were advocating at the end of last century that you want the student to be interested if you can make him interested then he will learn. You suggested that someone might want to build a telescope and would then turn to the proper programs to learn about optics. I'm concerned with his wanting to build a telescope if this means to you something inside him which is moving him to build a telescope then the teaching machine would only apply to showing him how to do this but I would want to trace his wanting to build a telescope back to earlier events outside him. And which he came into contact with telescopes or pictures of telescopes or books about them and stone and so on. The student who wants to learn more about art you say you say it's all right to use program instruction to teach the student what he wants to know about that I want to teach him to want to know more about art and I think that can be done. I think this is not something which arises spontaneously within him something which comes from his own past history.

Carl Rogers: I certainly feel all kinds of cognitive remarks I could make about what you're saying but the thing that suddenly strikes me is that perhaps I could communicate best to you and to the audience by a story that may seem to have known. Relevance but I think he's a great relevant to this discussion just a very short time ago. One of the clients for the human working was trying to tell me how he had always been able to cope with authority and all kinds of difficult situations by just drawing into a nothingness. This was kind of a new learning for him to realize that he had just pulled in and become blank whenever anyone made too many demands on him and so on. As I listened to all of what he was saying it was much more confused than I've put it. I said to him I guess the way I'm getting that is that really you had kind of a private joke against the world no one could possibly defeat you. You could just pull in and this was your little joke and he listened for a moment and thought a moment and then he began to chuckle and then he broke into really uncontrollable laughter and he was so embarrassed because he wanted to stop. And I think both of us couldn't help but realize that he was for the first time really openly enjoying the joke he had been playing on the world for many years. Now where did he be and well for me it fits in in a number of ways to be sure we're both of us talking and I'm talking and I speak about that incident with him about behavior which had its roots in the past. No question about that. I'm talking about I guess the thing that first set off this in mind that you're saying we really couldn't teach a person what to call a feeling in a sense that's what part of therapy is and that's what this was a fairly vivid example of. He certainly had never thought of himself as playing a joke on life or a joke on the people who tried to control him and yet when that was put in those times it suddenly rang all kinds of inner balls and he realized that is it and he broke out as I say lashing up the joke you know which hand in life. Now I don't know what it just by telling a small incident of that kind I can also communicate the fact that the explanation of that purely from the outside even though it could be made adequate and complete is not a complete story of that kind of inner learning which took place in him. And I think here I'm sure we're both being influenced by our own past experience where probably you've not had the opportunity to really know what goes on inside the pigeon and wrap in the same kind of way that I've had a chance to know what goes on within the human being but I think that because of that difference in past experience. You stress one dimension only and it seems to me both dimensions are significant.

B. F. Skinner: Well let me report my reactions to that story. The phenomenon of escaping from would be controllers is of course very characteristic. The student plays trowent with education had its own work for this truancy which incidentally comes from an old word meaning wretched. Religion has its apostasy. Governments have its escapees its own version of apostasy. Economics have strikes where people refuse to work although paid or consumer strikes refuse to buy goods at a too high price and so on. These are reactions to inept control and you do this with respect not only to the organized controllers as I've mentioned but to the general ethical control in the sense of the people. Exerted by the group of which you are a member. The hermit is an escapee from a social life. The beat neck is a different type of escapee. The inner drawn in with drawn kind of first is that too. Now you evidently are working witherson who has resorted to this kind of reaction to control. If he himself first for years the words pulled in and became blank without any direction. This would indicate to me that he was at least characterizing his own behavior in his rather metaphorical way. Perhaps you don't want this to be a metaphor but I do. I think pulling in I don't know what you do. You're still as large as you were before but you may be becoming historically blind for the environment or just not going to notice things. You are certainly pulling in your world in that you're cutting off reactions to it. Now the first step in this person's history then would be that he had reacted this way and presumably got him into trouble. That's why he was coming to see you. Now perhaps you for the first time indicated to him or in talking with you he indicated to himself that he was indeed getting away from control by this gesture. He may never have seen why he was doing this to harm it might not realize that he likes the life of a hermit because nobody's criticizing him or something of that sort. Now he gets an insight if you like into the actual negative reinforcement which is leading him to behave in this way. That would be the second step. The first, the actual escape from control. The second, the seeing of the days is escape. He may have very well escaped without knowing that he's doing it. Now he sees he's doing it. Now I can have the count for the laughter. It might be the suddenness of the real days. I can't account for laughter anyway. So this person bothers me. That aside of this case, it had occurred. I thought it would not inevitably occur in someone who had suddenly realized that he was retreating from society and in doing so, escaping from his influence. Some of this might have been known to this individual before he came to you. I'm sure that if he talked with you, he saw more of what he was doing and saw the reason why he was doing it. So that is to make them in substance of the game and self understanding such a case.

Carl Rogers: Well, I don't know whether this gets anywhere in the intellectual discussion. It really fascinates me your reaction to this of not wishing to understand any human experience except in highly structured intellectualistic terms. That was particularly intrigued by your reaction to his phrase pulling in because actually must have been as large, gestory pulled in as he was before. True enough. Yet how different that is from the kind of things that have been meaningful in my own experience. When a client begins to talk in terms of analogies and fantasies, I realize he's really beginning to get somewhere. The person who is able to speak in really fantasy terms, allegorical terms, terms that are not related to the strict structure of everyday life. This tends to mean that he is thinking significantly and feeling significantly about the deeper meanings of his own life. This person who talks about pulling in and about the blankness that he experienced, I'm sure both of those could be shown to be behaviorally meaningless terms. But as terms descriptive of his own subjective orientation to life, they're extremely meaningful. Somehow in these last few years I felt more keenly than I have before, personally, what the difference may be between us, that you are saying all of life or any particular incident from life can be neatly packaged, analyzed and so forth. In terms of strictly intellectual terms, which have nothing to do with meaning, which are straight descriptions of outward events. And I guess I feel that's great if you can do it, but I don't believe it. I feel at a point of view that is that narrow, runs the same risk as the kind of students who used to see so many of it at Chicago, who had committed their whole lives to the feeling that I don't have to feel, I don't have to choose, everything can be worked out rationally. My life is just going to be lived on a completely rational basis, and that's fine except it doesn't work.

B. F. Skinner: I thought I had agreed as to the existence of these experiences. What I'm objecting to is the assumption of causal efficacy. I know that you shouldn't be held responsible for Freudian psychology, but I'd like to know that. I think this thing I want to point out is true with Freud because of the elaborate metaphor which he used to deal with the relation between these intermetal events and the external therapy which he claimed to achieve. I don't believe, and I've talked with good analysts who were young. I don't believe that any evidence is available to establish the temporal sequence between being cured and recalling a traumatic experience. That maybe as the Freudians would have it, on the analogy of excising a tumor, that getting the traumatic experience out of the unconscious works secure. But it could also be the case that the cure permits the patient to recognize and recall the traumatic experience. So that you are not at all sure that you have excised a cause, a cause of trouble, and hence brought about therapy. Now I think, as I say, I'm not burdening you with that, but I do think, I do feel, as in our discussion this afternoon, that you are wanting to order events in such a way that an understanding of one's inner experience. The inner experience comes before the overt, as you would say, consequences of this. You said that when a client begins to talk in terms of analogies or to stark reporting fantasies, then he begins to get somewhere. Now I assume that this getting somewhere means that he does now begin to understand himself, perhaps works out better ways of dealing with the world. If you will permit me to suppose that getting somewhere is capable of a rational description. Then I think that the issue between us is whether or not one's rational understanding of where he stands in the world follows from irrational or, and don't mean it in a pejorative sense, but fantasy glimpses of his own experience. Or rather, the experiences do not, as a matter of fact, come after some glimpses of the rational fact. In my example of the pulling in that took that line, I suggested that the first thing that happened to this client was to understand that in drawing into himself as he put it, he was indeed escaping from unpleasant aspects of the world around him. He might have done this with drawing and been able to see that he was doing it without knowing that the main important consequence was that he was freeing himself from averse stimulation. Then I would have said in that case too that any metaphor he might use in connection with the joke perhaps, which in this case was suggested to him, that this would come afterward rather than before an actual understanding of external events. Now, external events, I don't mean sheer behavior, I mean behavior in relation to controlling variables. And he now saw that he was turning away from important things in the environment because in doing so, he reduced the net averse stimulation in his life. I think they're going to have to either read it, disagree on this point or try to clear it up further. Whether, I'm raising the question of the relative importance of these experiences, I think not their existence.

Carl Rogers: I think two one other point that perhaps could be carried away is that I don't believe in any fundamental way. We differ about the approach one would take to trying to resolve a scientific question. For example, I am much interested in what does really produce change in psychotherapy, have certainly played with all kinds of hypotheses, including psychotherapy being possibly operant-conditioning, all kinds of different hypotheses. And though we would both agree, this would be an empirical fact. And then you could set up the studies, which probably would gradually throw light on what that is. And what the causes of change might be, I don't believe we differ to the kind of approach we would take in getting a scientific answer to a particular puzzle. I don't mean to make a large issue of this because I think this would get us a stray, but it is my own hypothesis that experience precedes insight. And I get it, you were saying the other way around, that is, I think when this person burst out an uncontrollable laughter, he was really appreciating and experiencing the satisfaction of tricking all his controllers to use your terminology. And that as a consequence of that experience, he now later on would be able to put into words that kind of insight. Again, that's an empirical fact. It could be the other way around. One other comment, too, that I would like to make is that it seems to me that you're still believing that when I speak of subjective experiences, inner experiences and so on, that I'm talking about them as a cause of something external. In other words, that I've sort of brought in some outside little force to operate. That isn't the meaning I give to it. The subjective experiencing of man in my estimation is a preceding dimension, that it is a dimension which precedes any of our scientific desire, scientific activities, scientific behavior. It is, in my estimation, a more primitive fact than our scientific behavior. But I don't bring it in as a little gadget to produce causal explanations. That's not true. I'm thinking of this as a significant dimension of life, which is, I say, is more primitive, more basic, is the aspect of life to which we turn to see whether we regard one approach to science as better than another, as a matter of fact, or whether we regard this or that as better. And that as a part of our subjective life and experience, we have gradually developed the most marvelously complex set of rules against deceiving ourselves, and we call that science. And I have a great deal of respect for that, and I think we move significantly along scientific lines, but I think it will be unfortunate if that narrower perspective of science. Science blinds us to the fact that we are also, and most basically, subjective beings. And I think we move significantly along scientific lines, but I think it will be unfortunate if that narrower perspective of science blinds us to the fact that we are also, and most basically, subjective beings.

B. F. Skinner: Well, I think this is going to remain a difference. You will have some very powerful and important authorities on your side. It has been a terrible revival of interest in the personal aspects. I have spent many an hour trying to explain to him how one might deal with the question of whether the green he sees is not the red I see and so on, and he went to his grave, not knowing the answer to that and being very much worried about it. If you very highly put on your book on personal science, I think this is a wrong tack. I don't think science is the experience of scientists at all. I think it is a corpus of procedures and practices. I should hate to think that physics is in any sense what goes on in the mind of a physicist. It is what physicists have done and what they can do. And a series of marks which belong to conventional languages which permit other people to do things, including to talk about them quantitatively and so on. If experience seems very immediate and valuable and important, I think this is another consequence of the fact that I pointed out that each of us has a gift of the universe inside his skin and he is a good touch with it. If I teach a child the meaning of the word toothache, I have got to know when the child has a toothache. If I am a dentist and I am coping around in a child jumps and so on, I say, now there you are, that is a toothache. Or if the child comes in and does this and is jealous, woman and so on, you have a toothache. Now the evidence of the dentist is the sight of a tooth with a certain cavity and a bit of steel striking it. The sight of what I see is and against a jaw. Those are the mediating stimuli that enable me to teach the child the meaning of the word toothache. But the child is getting a very powerful stimulus from the tooth itself and forever after that is what the child means by toothache. This is so very much more important than the external criteria that the community has used to teach him this term. Now where there are powerful stimuli of that sort, they naturally take control of the word. What the word describes in the child is the actual painful stimulus and not a hand with the jaw. In the case of human behavior and in the case of a lot of other things where we have to work with a great variety of external stimuli, work no very strong internal counterparts, the terms continue to refer to what is evident to the community. This is, I think, generally true of the language which describes our own behavior. We learn this when it is overt brought enough and scope so that people can say, yes, you are now lifting your hand, you are now saying the word now and so on. But later you can lift your hand without moving a muscle and you can say a word to yourself moving only very small muscles for perhaps not at all. And you will describe this, you say, yes, I just a moment ago I said something to myself and I can close my eyes and see this room reasonably well now and I'm perfectly frank and telling you that I'm hearing that. Something is going on which is going on when my eyes were open and I can report on that but this becomes less impressive as something different from what happens with my eyes open. So that I feel in general that while those who deal with experience are likely to make a great deal of the interstimulation that those of us who deal with behavior are much more likely to talk about the common elements available to the verbal community as well as the individual. So naturally I want to minimize the ache in the tooth ache and deal with an operational definition of tooth ache. Now that means maybe awfully silly because tooth aches are really know about them and they're very important and powerful. But operational definition is describing one's own behavior, one's moods and so on. I think they're quite different and I would prefer myself to remain in general at the level of behavior without denying for a moment that something is going on when I am angry with someone which I can react to as I react to a tooth ache. Although I would still want to define anger in terms of the damage committed to bond others and so on. I want a behavioral definition of anger although I grant that in many cases reasonable consistency would be obtained and asking one to describe right and dull pressures in his chest as they did in the old days.

Carl Rogers: But I guess that desire for a behavioral description of anger would scarcely apply when you were angry.

B. F. Skinner: I would not have when I was young now as a scientist and would very much. I wouldn't have known how to describe the behavior when I was a child and I would have picked up the word anger and would tie it on to a certain marked but not too consistent stimulus. I generated by my autonomic nervous system among other things. Now I would definitely want to define anger in such a way that I could describe my angry acts or see anger in my acts when this was absolutely anaesthetic. If I have said anything today because he would hurt you then if I have not seen this I lack scientific insight and not a knowledge of my feelings. I confess that I have not felt angry toward you at any time of the day. I think someone could prove to me that I have used an example or a slight figure to speak to something as a dirty day. Now that would be an objective behavior definition of anger as I would put more faith in anyone's proof that I have been angry toward you than I would have any evidence from my own inner feelings.

Carl Rogers: Well, that's exceedingly interesting. I guess there I don't understand the left. I am trying to make sense of that and I'm not quite sure whether you're saying when you experience anger now what you feel is or what your subjective process is. I'm having some autonomic reactions directed towards so and so is it really that is what you know.

B. F. Skinner: In general, certain kinds of behavior patterns are accompanied by autonomic discharge. It's not always emotional, strong exercise. This thing that we call anger which I would want to define as a predisposition to harm or damage and so on. It's a behavioral definition. Yes, I am sure often accompanied by stimulation which is relatively consistent and so that I might without moving at all and without being aware of any actual impulse to act in any way report that I feel angry perhaps you might give me an injection but rather know something like that. On the other hand, I think that the one thing that Freud has done is to make us examine our acts not to discover our feelings but we didn't have any of them unconscious. But to discover the consequences which were influential in determining our behavior and if I would take to be a behavioral analysis of an emotion all unconscious behaviors got to be that by definition because you don't have any conscious counterpart.

Carl Rogers: You don't have to know whatsoever. I'm really trying very hard to find out whether you are aware of living subjectively and it seems to me you've said things on both sides of that and I really don't feel quite sure or you'll think every hope so.

B. F. Skinner: So if you mean by this that I have learned to observe certain states of my own body perhaps to discuss some with some consistency and connection with my behaviors and so on report to you that I enjoy listening to Wagner and what I'm doing when I'm listening to it and so on. Yes, there this I do. I do it. I live a very emotional life. I suppose in that sense. But the thing that interests me about my emotions is not that I expect to go on enjoying life that way. The thing that I'm concerned with is my emotion in the sense of my disposition to act this way or that with respect to various states of affairs and I have many times gone back and looked at something I wrote and then shot to discover the emotionally noted words in this. I was not aware of it and I can't believe now that I felt that way about anybody and by feeling that I mean it that I was inclined to damage people this way. If this is a discovery of any stimulation in here or wherever it is, I don't know where it is. People's authorities have different over the years. I think it's a very trivial thing for me to discover that I am angry in that sense. I think it's very important to me to discover whether or not my behavior with respect to people at large is angry behavior. And that seems to me to be practically unconnected with what's going on inside me. Now I can enjoy being angry at someone. I can enjoy lots of better emotions and anger and I hope to go on doing so. In this sense I live a life of experience, of course. I would share all those feelings with you because I think I too live a life of feelings and sometimes regret them and often enjoy them and so on.

Carl Rogers: Part of what I've been trying to say certainly is that subjective feeling life, which to be sure, then if we can step outside of ourselves and look at it, but the subjective feeling life itself is an exceedingly important part of being human. And I see no reason for being apologetic in regard to it. I feel that it gives dimension and perspective to our more objective views to leave that for a moment because before we get completely beyond it, I'd like to go back to some of your comments about science which interested me a great deal. And if I understood that correctly, you really do see scientific knowledge as a corpus of external fact which kind of exists regardless of you, me, the physicists or anyone else sort of out here in semantic space. I think that one of the efforts of science can't help but be to achieve such a body of truth which is separate from any individual and so on. And yet it seems to me that the actual pursuit of science is a highly personal thing governed by subjective decisions in which subjective choices determine what we will study, determine the methods we use, determine the kind of meanings that we draw from it. Now, when enough people draw similar meanings from similar experiences, we say that seems to be a pretty well verified scientific fact, but I still think it rests on a subjective base. One thing that is always interested me, I don't think I've ever tried to put it in the words and I'm not quite sure how this will come out, is that as I watch clients who move a good deal in therapy, it seems to me that as they approach a better adjustment, they have in a sense learned to live a subjective science. I don't know whether this will seem like a complete contradiction in terms, but what I mean by that is that as the person becomes more open to what is going on within himself, he has better data on which to act, his hypotheses are more likely to be confirmed by his experience. He is in a curious way living out the very best of science on an internal subjective basis in regard to the events going on within him, the hypotheses he draws from those and the consequent behaviors upon which he acts, that's something that has always intrigued me.

B. F. Skinner: We were getting along famously there for a minute or two, I was admitting that I enjoyed my experiences and you were enjoying yours. That was fine until you start making them responsible for choices and decisions. Now you start making them do something, you say, they don't do anything, they're the result of doing something. I think when a person is making a decision, he is undoubtedly working on himself. But through the environment or through an internalization of action which was first learned in the environment, and that the both afterward feel the rightness of a choice or decision perhaps, but this is something which follows. If I were to teach someone how to make decisions, I would not, naturally, try to teach him this inner life, I would teach him the external mathematical statistical, whatever it would be, procedures you go through in arriving at the most likely decision in a given set of circumstances. Now what is happening when you make a lightning decision, I don't think you or I know that, either as he has inner or external data that happens so fast that not likely to follow it. I would insist on my distinction about the causal efficacy, I don't mean for a moment that a person who has arrived at a decision about his own life doesn't then feel a decision. I feel to describe and feel what he's now going to do and so on, but I would want to go as far as possible and asking whether or not the essential ingredients or not, the environment and his self-controlling, self-managing manipulations of the environment.

Carl Rogers: I feel various responses to that, but you were kind enough to give me the first statement this afternoon and I see by the clock that time is really up, so I'll give you the last bird in the discussion today. Thank you very much.

B. F. Skinner: Dr. Rott has kindly offered to let me start first this time since I let him do that yesterday. I hope this is symbolic of a continuing effort to deal fairly with each other in this protracted interview. I want to make two points in my opening remarks this morning. One I want to respond to Dr. Taminan's hardly veiled hint that we ought to start talking about education pretty soon and I want also to try to make progress in coming to some understanding with Dr. Rogers about the techniques which we separately aspires in arriving at, but I'm sure are very similar goals. It seems to me that the main issue which developed yesterday concern the question of inner experience and its place in human behavior. The conference has been very well designed, I think, to permit some kind of intellectual progress to go on. I'm going to try to state my case as clearly as I can and hope that after Dr. Rogers has made his ring remarks we can attempt to see whether there is a basic disagreement here or whether we are in some sense talking about the same thing. I want to examine three cases from the analysis of education which have to do with supposed inner events relevant to what is necessarily an external process of instruction. Now I don't hope that Dr. Rogers responsible for any one of these, but I have to regard him as a color traveler in the sense that the points I'm going to bring up seem to me to exemplify an effort to account for a behavior by isolating the originating event as something to do with inner experience. I want to take the three educational problems of teaching knowledge, verbal knowledge or skill, teaching thinking and teaching some of the personality traits which I did mention in passing yesterday. The first one of these has to do with the meaning of verbal behavior. I've written a rather long and I'm told very difficult but which attempts to account for verbal behavior on the part of the speaker and responses to verbal stimuli in the part of the listener without invoking the notion of meaning or the earlier notion of idea or proposition. These three terms, the older notion of the meaning of a proposition, the idea expressed in words or the more recent one information conveyed by a remark. These are all seem to me to make a fundamental mistake in supposing that there is some kind of cognitive activity which is not itself verbal which happens before verbal behavior and the verbal behavior becomes simply the symptom or symbol words being the same thing actually of the inner activity. Now, to take a non verbal example first, there is the old joke of the difference between a man racing for a train and the man training for a race. Physiologically they're both doing the same thing. How do they differ? Now, if you believe in meaning, something which characterizes behavior and I suppose someone like Tom and would have done so, then you would have to suppose that their behaviors are not identical. They may be physiologically but one of them is possessing the meaning of catching a train and the other one is possessing the meaning of improving himself or a future race. Actually, I look for that difference not in the behavior but I think is the same in both cases, it could be at least, but in the variables which are responsible for the behavior. In one case, there is a different history and what Tom will call a different purpose involved. Now, purpose is another, one of these inner things which, as a matter of fact Dr. Rogers mentioned, has something which had no meaning or a behavioristic analysis. I think in a sense it has a very great meaning and I have tried to suggest that by apologizing for the frequency in which I talk about reinforcement by pointing out that it is nothing more than an other way of talking about purpose. The only difference being that it identifies the characteristic moment at which an event is important. In the evolution of behavior, if you say a spider is building a web in order to catch flies, so that the spider will survive and perpetuate its kind, it looks as if the future catching a flies in the web has something to do with the building of the web. Now, actually I think a biologist would agree that that is the wrong order of events and that the purpose of the web flies in the past, that spiders which have in the past built effective web have found a supply of food which has meant that they have survived well the behavior and it is an inherited behavior pattern and quite sure in that case, which was responsible for that supply of food. So in the biological evolutionary scheme of things, what seems to be the future purpose of an event is actually a reference to past instances. And this is true in the case of operant behavior also because what I am doing now in order to have an effect on you can hardly be determined by the effect which I have not yet had. But it is determined by the effects I have had in the past which have shaped my verbal behavior in various ways and that you are of course going to shape my behavior in the next 5 or 10 minutes. I am verbally willing to accept the point of the joke about the rat who points out that he has me well controlled. I think that any science is eventually shaped as a human activity by its subject matter. The man designing a cyclotron designs it precisely so that certain events will happen in it in a given way and if he does not do that, this cyclotron will be discarded and someone else will survive. So these feelings that you have that the meaning of what you are doing, the purpose of what you are doing is very important are genuine enough. If I ask some man what are you running for is I am running the catch of train. This does not mean to me that he is aware of his purpose in anything except the sense that he is aware of the conditions under which he is running and of course the condition which will bring that running to an end. He observes this as a purpose in his past and in analyzing the teaching of verbal knowledge I think it is very important to understand that you are always concerned with the teaching of behavior and not the ideas expressed in the behavior. Logically there is no such thing as a proposition apart from all the ways in which the proposition can be expressed but that is a pretty logical statement that makes my sense either. What you do to teach a given idea in depth is to teach it in many ways of speaking and that is the closest you will ever get to an idea apart from verbal behavior. Some set of conditions which are responsible for a whole cluster of verbal responses and the difference between root, learning and teaching insightfully is very often just that. If you teach a thing not as a memorized single verbal response but as a cluster of responses related to the same variables. Now the second example where people have sought something inside the storage in order to explain his behavior and therefore to my mind, misinterpreted the object of education is an example that I will go right back and take the scene in Plato's Meno. In which its awkwardity is it retends to teach the slave boy the thug which is golden fear. Now Plato was a devil of the inner life and felt as a matter of fact that the soul knows the truth and that learning is merely remembering, recollecting, recollecting perhaps in the sense of reassembling but suggesting that the process of education is only bringing out something which is latent in the stilt. This is still a strong philosophy in education today. Let's examine that case. Socrates wants to prove this point that any human organism knows a very difficult proposition, the doubling of the square. He goes a boy in and goes through a ritualistic procedure which is highly so critic in its essence. First of all constructs a square and says to the boy this is a square isn't it the boy says yes. If I do this a device in the two parts doesn't it the boy says yes and so on and he goes on this way. And this example is still cited today as proof of a way of teaching the insightful understanding of mathematical theorem with the general pattern of drawing the solution out of the student. Now I want to the trouble once of having the boy's comments copied out of that passage in the Meno. And when you put them together they run exactly one minute I don't have my the sheet with me I didn't know this case would come up. The whole set of responses of the boy goes something like this. Yes certainly Socrates quite right Socrates now of course not Socrates yes you're undoubtedly right Socrates and so on. And when it gets through there is no effort made to show whether the boy can go through this again and I'm probably sure he could not. He has done nothing but agreed to Socrates. The one of this is one of the great frauds of educational literature. It is still cited as an example of how one can draw true out from the inside the occurrence of the student. This is still the theory back of many current mathematics curricular programs. You must get the student excited you must get him to discover for himself. And the implication is that you don't know until you have discovery for yourself. That's something you've discovered yourself you will remember better. Well I have no doubt that in the hands of a good teacher this kind of Socrates technique can stimulate interest curiosity and perhaps even effort and industry on the part of the student. But when you analyze what is happening in that case it comes back to the behavioral manipulations that I've been talking about. There's never been never any demonstration that I would subscribe to. That we do all possess you could in ourselves in some way in form and that we can be led to discovery for ourselves. Men discovered geometry you could I suppose brought together a long history of discovery put it in a book. It was a difficult thing to suppose we must do it all over again before we know geometry is I think a very inefficient way to approach education. I've seen a seventh grade teacher trying to teach grammar to a class in just this way. Now the Greek discovered grammar too and it was a great discovery and it must have taken a great deal of time. Well I a seventh grade class must go through all of that again in its own. I don't know but this teacher was starting he had a sentence written on the board. He was trying to get the students to say that's the thing word and that's an action word. The boys who spoke up and said noun and verb or shush they were told that mustn't use those words. Let's find out about this for ourselves. And for a long class period the students struggled toward the recognition of two types of words which turn out then to be called nouns and verbs. Now this may have some motivating effect although I can think of much better ways of motivating children. I think there is nothing about grammar that you cannot understand unless you've discovered it for yourself. Now a third example will be some of the character traits that I talked about yesterday as examples again of behavior which we like to attribute to something inside the organism. I mentioned the enjoyment of art, music, literature, one's interest in what one does and so on. A someone brought up at night the question of emotional conditioning and I'll take one example which involves that. There are some children who can take punishment without crying, racing to be particularly brave, who can take novel experiences without panicking. Now how can we bring this about? Is there something called courage which is born into some of us and not into others so that we must give up on this? Or could anyone be given these traits of character? Rousseau and the book I've already mentioned they've made which is a remarkable treatise on human behavior. I will be fundamentally wrong but nevertheless a most ingenious book for its time. Rousseau suggests ways in which you could teach children to take strongly a verse in stimuli without emotional reactions. He begins with the idea of the cold bath water which will make a baby cry. He says begin on the first day with water at body temperature and then reduce the temperature every day. And he says use the thermometer, we're going to be scientific about this. You bring the temperature down one degree every day and eventually you're plopping the baby in white water and the baby takes this perfectly well is not disturbed by it at all. You may not call it an emotion that is the ability to take something which an ordinary child has not been through that forced into history would not be able to take. It might be timid, it might be croven, cowardly, all his life. But Rousseau also took the case of a much more emotional example. He tells about the story of Hector Nandramaki and the baby who was frightened by his father's war helmet as he says farewell to him. And he raises a question of why it is that small children can be frightened by ugly masks or faces. And he suggests that you construct a whole series of masks going from a very pleasant face to a perfectly terrifying face by very small steps. Do you first of all work with a baby one day where the pleasant face on and then you slowly move into this and he's never been disturbed at any time by this very frightening spectacle but is now not emotionally disturbed by it. Now, I believe that we have seriously neglected the emotional training in our educational systems. People object violently to that scene in world until in which the children are supposed to wear lallypops around their necks but not to touch them with their tongues during the day and so on. But I would like to see a little more moral and ethical self-control taught. This can be done, I'm sure, so that everyone will be a brave man, a brave woman who will be able to take necessary painful stimuli without flinching and so on, who will not be much disturbed by what otherwise would be terribly emotional circumstances. This would include periods of failure, periods of frustration, periods of otherwise unhappiness. Now, I've taken these three examples, the meaning of a verbal proposition, the thinking through of a problem in say mathematics and a character trait. These are all areas in which the national tendency used to suppose that this individual who is marked by this possesses something inside himself which is very important. The person who knows it, he's got it in here. He can talk about it, yes, but when he isn't talking about it, it's in here. Well, I'm sure it's in here, too, in some physiological condition. And I'm sure that the person knows very often whether it's in there or not, but he's got it in there because it's been put in. Knowledge has been implanted, not drawn out. Many people to misunderstand the meaning of the word educate, ducaring, drawing something out from inside the student. Knowledge has implanted in our job as educators, yes, to implant the behavior or to shape the behavior or to build it up and strengthen it. Well, and to try to find it already in the student and draw it out. I don't deny for a moment the existence of these things which one can see when one looks at oneself and reports on whether he's a fraud or not, whether he is getting the point of his problem or not, whether he sees the point of an explanation of the theorem and so on. I'm sure this goes on. The question between us is not one of the existence of the inner events, but their status as explanatory, efficacious, causes of the over-behavior which seems to me to be the business of education to set up. One other big point here, when you put a student into a difficult situation, one which might frighten him, but it doesn't because he controls himself, one which might puzzle him, but it doesn't because he solves the problem and so on, one which might show him up to be entering, but it doesn't because he comes through with the answer. When you're doing this sacred swim technique, creating a situation which a child or a student must be knowledgeable, insightful, and brave, you'll leave it up to the individual to solve his own instructional problems, and that has been the regular trend in education. On the other hand, and when he does solve them in the rare case, you admire him. You admire Abraham Lincoln for getting an education, although no one taught him. You don't admire Franklin Roosevelt for getting an education, however, because Harvard taught him. There is nothing to admire, but if the educational system is powerful enough to produce these results in everyone, the only point of admiring is to make up for the deficiencies of your education. I would prefer a world with which everyone got an education without trying very hard. If we don't have that world, I will share in your admiration for a man who gets an education against great odds. But the difference is that the reasons for admiring will disappear in an effective world. We'll miss that, but it's something we've got to learn to get along without.

Carl Rogers: I just came and told me that he got up early this morning. I didn't know he got up that early. And so did I. I feel when I got to all that he has been saying, I'm not quite sure who he is he's talking to, but somehow he's not talking to me. I mean, that's so often and probably our differences are quite real and quite deep. It's very difficult to prevent communication from sliding off center and talking past each other. I really have no particular response to what he has just said because they say I really don't feel that he is talking to the kind of issues I feel instead I'm compelled or feel impelled to give a speech of mine too. Probably the real reconciliation, the real making of this into a dialogue, make him later in this hour, or perhaps it can only occur in you. I'm not sure we'll have to see. I thought about yesterday's session. I felt that because the topic was one of control of behavior, my own remarks tended really necessarily to be critical and anti. That's not too characteristic of me. I'm more a person who affirms than who criticizes. And so I felt a little unhappy about that. And I thought that perhaps to offset that, I'd like to make a few remarks about the design of a culture to use Dr. Skinner's good phrase as I see it. Also, I will bring in the matter of education that I'd like to bring it in within that context. I think what part of my purpose in doing this is to indicate that when one does place a value on the subjective aspects of experience, then when one designs a culture, one takes different directions, then if one does not value that. The thing that specifically got me to thinking about this was Wendell Johnson's very good challenge to us and to you that perhaps one of the first things we should do was to point out the differences between pigeons and persons. That somehow had real meaning to me. I think that persons do have a capacity for awareness. We have this rich capacity for symbolization, which to my mind is probably synonymous with awareness. We have a capacity for a rich subjective living. We have a capacity for something I like to think of as an organismic valuing process. That is that we are able to test objects and events in terms of our own experiencing as to the values they have for us in enhancing us or being destructive in our experience. Those are a few of the capacities which persons have. I think most of those pigeons have relatively little capacity for except the last and I might learn from them. I'd like to talk a little bit about designing a culture which will maximize the truly human qualities and attempt to build a culture for persons not for pigeons. I'd start out on this, basing my remarks on some of the research that we've done in psychotherapy. Because I am to some degree a scientist, I was a little amused last night to think of myself only as an overwhelmed practitioner. I have had some experience with the scientific self as well. I think that some of the studies that have been completed in the realm of psychotherapy indicate that we know something of the kind of psychological climate which would promote and maximize the most truly human qualities. We've begun to specify some of the elements of that psychological climate. We know that when a person is prized as a person, valued as a person, this helps. We know that when the personal meanings which he finds within his own experience are deeply understood by another so that they are confirmed in him, this too is a quality of the psychological climate which can release in human qualities. We know that when he comes into a genuine subjective encounter with other real persons, this too is an element which helps to release. I think that in the kind of culture I would be in favor of designing that parents and teachers and others could be helped by trying to establish such conditions in the life situation of the persons with whom they deal. Now we will certainly expect and wish to discover more of the elements which would have that kind of releasing qualities. Our goal in such studies and in such research would be to find the conditions which would increase the capacity for a personal choice, increase the capacity for self-direction, increase the capacity for spontaneity and creativity, for independence, for flexibility, will increase the tendency which Donald Johnson described so well last night as being turned personal scientific living, that is living in terms of scientific principles within one's own personal and subjective life. I suppose that you could say that in short we would by establishing these conditions tend to bring about in individuals the likelihood that these persons could not be shaped up by controllers. I think again part of the panel discussion last night was quite accurate in my view and that to respect. Now a word or two about the application of those ideas to the educational situation. I feel that I have a number of occasions endeavor to try to establish those conditions as a learning climate for students. And I haven't always been successful. I feel that there's a good deal we do not know about the kinds of conditions that really do release freedom in people. And yet, when one has been able to set the psychological climate which enables individuals to become more free in choosing their purposes, more self-directing toward their goals, if they tend to feel a greater reliance on their own initiative, the results are sufficiently exciting and sufficiently compelling from an achievement point of view that one can't rest, quietly without trying to advance that field further. It is I think that we are talking here of something which can be empirically measured and studied. That the kind of educational climate which I would hope would be created in this culture we might design for persons would be such as to enhance and promote self-directed learning. It doesn't mean going back to have to struggle step by step through all of the Greeks learning centuries ago. It means following through one's current purposes using all of the modern resources available. But it doesn't mean doing that on a self-chosen, self-directed, self-initiated basis. I think that kind of an education would not achieve static goals which we could define in advance. What it would achieve would be the development of changing persons with a greater degree of self-confidence in directing themselves. To my mind, this is something that the modern world very badly needs. Quite another way of talking about what I'm describing is that as I see some of these developments, the whole philosophy of democracy and its stress upon self-determination and so on, has thus far made very slight progress in the world. We have established it a little bit in the political realm and it has begun to show slight pervasiveness in other areas. But the thing I'm talking about is extending the philosophy of democracy down to individual life, individual learning, group and family living and so on, where it would be not only the worth of the individual, but his capacity and right for self-determination and choice which would be important. Obviously the kind of thing I'm talking about would not produce a closed society. No one could possibly plan this in advance as a closed book. But it would produce would be an open changing kind of society. Change and the process of change would be built into it. This too I think is valuable. By developing a society in which parents and teachers and all of those in positions of leadership whether governmental or otherwise were skilled in providing the conditions which make for personal growth, we would have a society in which very well and individual self-actualization would take place. We would have individual persons developing uniquely with a sense of personal freedom and freely seeking solutions each one to do the problems that were real to him, as well as seeking solutions to the problems of his society. In this kind of a culture which I'm talking about, every citizen would be a responsible planner. Every citizen would be a member of the elite. Every citizen would be a phrasher, not just one somewhere in the background. Thus the likelihood of a society being a living, changing flow of intelligent encounter with the problems faced in the world would be greatly enhanced. We would have initiated a process of continuing and self-directed change not a community with static goals established by one person or established by an elite. I think it would be very clear that to me the most important task of the behavioral sciences is to discover and to endeavor to establish the conditions which release variability, release creative behavior, and self-directedness, thus making the individual less predictable and less likely to be controlled. And I think that this is just as feasible a goal for the behavioral sciences as to establish a planned control. Well, end of speech.

Questioner 1: The Skinner opened up on.

Carl Rogers: One of the stories that I've heard, I don't know whether it's true, but if it isn't, that should or could be true, is that one of the people who was early investigating the operant conditioning of verbal behavior made a very convincing presentation of this to his students and they conducted research and showed that you could condition the verbal behavior of individuals and so on. So his students thought it would be fun to operantly condition him. So he had a certain gesture that he tended to use somewhat and they all agreed, okay, when he uses that gesture, we'll nod or smile or look, especially attentive. We'll rewarding for that behavior, we will condition his behavior to increase the gesture. And so they did that and it worked. More and more, he began to use this particular gesture that they were rewarding. So that when they felt they had him sufficiently conditioned, they told him about their low experiment, and he all had a good laugh together. Now, the point that for me is crucial,

G. A. Gladstein: is that once the instructor realized that he was being manipulated by these rewards,

Carl Rogers: they would no longer operate as rewards. They won't look precisely how he would perceive them, probably as being a little bit appreciating of himself. At any rate, it's perfectly clear that though all of the external behaviors might remain exactly the same, they might decide to go on, operantly conditioning is just you. But the rewards would no longer be effective. Why, because of a change in the subjective perception of the instructor, as to what constitutes a reward, and no longer with this head nodding and smiling and so on, be perceived as a reward? Well, it's that kind of thing that I think we need to include in our world of science.

B. F. Skinner: First, let me clear up that anecdote. There are actually two cases blended together here. In one of them, I shaped the behavior of a psychiatrist, who was participating in a round table, and it was, I thought, talking a little too much for good communication. Perhaps a step of paper down the table to a friend of mine, saying, watch Dr. X's left hand, I'm going to shape a chopping response. It doesn't happen that Dr. X was a cross-table for me and talked mainly at me, and he did tend to adjust your great deal. So I simply looked to one side, so at the corner of my eye, I could see pretty much his general posture. Whenever his left arm was up, I looked at him, but dead hand, and whenever his left hand went down, I nodded. Within five minutes, he was... The note came back. Let's see if it extinguished. I must confess I wasn't able to. The other story, which I think is in part of this apocryphal story you just heard, is that I, sometime ago, gave a series of lectures at Midwestern College, and a professor at the college who had read Joseph Wood Crouch and other similar authors was in a rage that I had been asked to speak. And they opened up the week that I was in residence there by telling his class that I was a mess, and that so long as I stayed in an ivory tower all would be well, but if I ever showed any signs of having a practical effect, he would be in favor of calling out the firing squad. My disturbance in his class resented this a little, and did plan this particular trick. They agreed that they would first of all reinforce him for coming over and standing on the right hand corner of the platform, and when they had achieved that, they would then reinforce him for going back and facing the blackboard. They did this just by all being very dead, and until he moved not directly, and then they began to smile, agreeing with him, and very soon he was teetering on the corner of the platform. They had a signal went out, that was enough of that. These teeters were quiet, but they were all dead in the pan. When they turned back, told the boy, and turned, looked at those, they were all nodding again. And they told me, I wasn't there, they told me, did he finish the lecture, facing the blackboard, talking over the show? Now, in media case, to my knowledge, as the controlled person, in that case, ever learned what happened, and I should not like to think of the consequences, because it is certainly true that, once you discover that these characteristic social reinforcers have been used for a purpose, they don't build your resistance against them. The back slapping Dale Carnegie fellow was out to make you his friend and influence you. It doesn't go very far if you have read Dale Carnegie also. But it is not true that the reinforcers don't work, and I don't know anyone who has not been to some extent reinforced by flattery, even though you know the interior purposes of the Flatterer. The gambler, the other logical gambler knows all too well. Buying his gambling at least, I need books scheduled to reinforce him. He's the victim of his barrelbaratio schedule. They cannot, for that reason, stop it. The social reinforcement of a poor smile and so on can be destroyed if you discover that the person who your case is out to control it, because that does deviate of the reinforcer. But when the reinforcer has his stability, as money has, you, I know very well that it's being used to control you and still suffer control. I want to tell another. What would I talk to that after that coming on that?

Carl Rogers: Because I think that it's extremely interesting to think through this issue, that a clearly a human behavior, which is effective only when it can be or mostly effective, only when the operation of that theory can be concealed from those and whom it is operating, that seems to me to be a relatively unsatisfactory theory of human behavior. For example, the persons involved in tool became aware of the planning and so on that had gone into it. And if to that extent it would destroy the effectiveness of many of the reinforcers, then somehow that's not a very complete or effective theory of behavior. This has been one of the things that has perplexed me and I'm interested that you skin air grease on that. On the other hand, in another field, it has always interested me that there is some periods of psychotherapy, for example. George Kelly's procedures in therapy being one which, operating effectively only as the client is quite unaware of the theory that the therapist is acting upon and the principal is trying to promote. Now, it has seemed to me to be of interest that in the kind of approach that makes sense to me in therapy, the more the individual notice of the climate I would like to create, the principles that seem to me to be operative, the more intelligently he can participate in the experience of therapy. And it seems to me the same thing would be true in the culture that I was trying to describe, that the more the individual realized the basic principles we were after, the more he realized that theory of what was happening, the more intelligent and probabilism or enthusiastic would be his participation in that culture. I must say that for me that is one reason for feeling that it is a more potent or widely usable theory, that it is not destroyed by people becoming aware of what's happening.

B. F. Skinner: I'm afraid I didn't make my point. The reason that discovering that someone is flattering you instantly, leads to a counter-controlling action on your part, is not that there's anything wrong with an ocean of reinforcement, but that particular reinforcer has been devalued. If I am paying subjectively, would you say, no, I wouldn't. Actually, a piece of money, a dollar bill, has reinforcing effects, power, value, because it is exchangeable at this paper. It could lay for immediately reinforcing goods at one kind or another. Now, if the money devalues, if that bill becomes worthless, it will no longer reinforce. But that doesn't raise any objection to its reinforcing effect. When it heads this particular value and the thing which deep values it, is that it is no longer exchangeable before our primary reinforcers. I don't know of any case in which knowledge of the process of reinforcement does destroy its effect. If someone is insincere in his compliments, the effect is destroyed, just as the effect of money as a reinforcer is destroyed in an excessive inflation. I myself work for a living, although I know perfectly well that I'm being reinforced with money. I came out here, and getting reinforced is still came. I'm very delighted to be here. If you're trying to reduce and throw your weight, you're highly aware of the reinforcing effects of various food stuffs and so on. Although you may be successful in counter-conquering on this, you don't deny that these are reinforcing, and if you don't watch it, they will strengthen certain behaviors of ingestion to the point that which you'll be damaged. This is a common misunderstanding that if you know you're being worked on, it won't work. If you know that the money that's being used to pay you is bad money, it won't work. But that comes about by an extinction of the conditioning process, which made it a conditionary enforcer in the first place.

Carl Rogers: I'm interested in your statement that to the extent that the individual realizes this reinforcer is offered insincerely or something like that, that it will change in value for him. If this brings me to something that is a very real healing reaction that I would like to express, I have a high respect for your sincerity. You seem to me to be a genuinely sincere person, yet as I watch the way in which your theories are described as working in practice, I get a very different feeling. I was quite perplexed last night to sense the way I was reacting to Professor Tesla's reading of this excerpt from Aldon II. It's been quite a while since I've read Aldon II. There's a really good company as a fresh thing. And I was genuinely surprised at the revulsion I felt, and I tried to puzzle out afterward why, because what was being described were these group therapy devotional type exercises which certainly were innocuous enough in themselves. And I think I realized that the reason I have the reaction I did was that it seems to me that in the world as you would like to see it, nothing is really genuine. Everything has a pseudo quality to it. It is partly, I think, because of your devaluation of the subjective, everything real is something different from what it seems to be. That is, for the people in these devotional type exercises, these expressions of loyalty to the code and so on, I assume that for them those would be experienced subjectively as a real devotion. But only phrasier knows and knew that they were planned that way, that these were not real, that they're nothing but a piece of human engineering designed to keep people in line with the code. And I realized that if an individual in Aldon II ever realized that, the least he would do I think would be to stop going to those exercises. So, as I sense the whole society is based on the notion of surreptitious control and it made me wonder how long a real Aldon II would last. And if what I hear is correct, this is no idle question because I have heard that you're really trying to get funds to establish a Aldon II. I would like to throw this in that in spite of your sincerity which I really trust, it seems to me that the hypothetical worlds you construct are basically insincere.

B. F. Skinner: They're not what they seem to be, they're not genuine. First, I'm glad that you give me an opportunity to comment on Dr. Tesla's comments, and roll them too, though we're not designed to warm the cocktails of the heart of an author. But I actually planned it that way. There are two things about that book which have to be taken into account, I think, in discussing Frazier. Professor Tesla raised the question of the difficulty of critic has and identifying the author with a particular character. One thing he can do is to ask the author. I am here to say that when I wrote the book, I was in great doubts about Frazier. I think the book is mainly a struggle between two aspects of my own personality, represented by Boris and Frazier. But when I had given Frazier as a fictional character the chance to say things, I didn't dare say myself, it all seemed to me to make sense, and I am now a confirmed Frazier.

G. A. Gladstein: No.

B. F. Skinner: This, however, doesn't make that particular passage a strong passage for two reasons. The first place Frazier makes this point. I've made him deliberately an unpleasant person, and there's a scene in which this whole question is argued out. The whole point here is, as Frazier says, that a person who may, through a scientific analysis, work out a better way of life, may not himself be able to lead that life. He may not himself be the kind of admirable person that particular culture can not produce, because he himself is not a product of it. And his photos have all the things to the contrary. One can arrive at good cultural practices without being able to absorb them himself. Frazier has what you might call negative charisma. All great leaders have had charisma. There's personal force. Jesus have charisma, we say Paul have charisma. The other leaders have had our less admirable charisma. They were effective as people. But Frazier is not effective as a person. In fact, Frazier tells the point of that out. No one knows who he is or no one knows his part in founding the community. He tries to get a couple of architects to come and explain something to his small group, and they go off swimming instead and sell run. He is not a leader in that sense, currently at all. And this was deliberately put into the book. So the his description of their Sunday services was meant to be cynical, meant to arouse the reader to a critical attitude. I wrote the book to alert people to the possibilities of utopia. The main problem that someone pointed out is that it was back quite a long time, very critical thinking about utopia. The problem today is not whether they're possible, but how to prevent them. This can be serious. Dr. Roberts has said, I am, I believe, sincere about this. I'm very much concerned about the possible misuse of the behavioral technology. The other piece in that passage is weak. The attributed last night, the brought in the various values, which Frazier lists, I had to write a book. Describing an experiment, and I had to guess at the result of a ten-year run. The point of the book is that all cultures are experimental, or should they either experimental whether they're designed to be or not because they were eventually disappeared, they are not strong, but that a properly designed culture should. Design itself has an experiment so that it can be tested, it can change as occasion dictates. And I had to guess at the values, which would have emerged at the end of ten years, and they turned out to be middle-class values. I'm verbally aware of that. I'm aware of my middle-class state, my middle-class training, and naturally I would go for things like health, wisdom, wealth, comfort, productivity, creativity, and so on. But the passage in which those are discussed directly, I think, presents them in a better light. To begin with, you have to settle on some plan for a community. And so to begin with, I prefer health to illness. I prefer wisdom to ignorance and so on. And I think we could all agree on that without overlooking the fact that there are times when one must decide whether to value health above wisdom and so on. You start a design based upon some of these principles. I don't really think that they are values in a philosophical sense. You have to design for something. You plan for something. And to begin with, you would choose what seems best in our way of life. But under the conditions of an experimental community, you might very well find these things changing. The thing I worry about is that we will be too successful, not in regimenting people, but in making them too rambunctious and hard to handle. I'm not sure we'll ever start an experimental community. But if I do, one of the things that should be most challenging will be the total ecological control of the child from birth for the first five or six years. Those are the great wasted years in our present culture. These sensitive organisms during that period are capable of fantastic achievements and all arrive at the age of five or six badly messed up. Now that can be done in a different way. It will be done with total control at the beginning on the part of the environment that will certainly engender techniques of self-management and self-control so that the environment can relax as the child grows and the child will be on his own. I quite agree with Dr. Rodgers that we need to release the inner freedom of the individual, meaning by that freedom from explicit and particularly opposite external controls. So he does. Talk to himself, go over plans, reveal himself as an individual and so on. And I want to teach him how to do this. These techniques of self-management can be taught and should be taught at a tender age. In the sense that Professor Tesla was hoping that the child's psychiatrist last night would say that six was too early to arrive at ethical maternity. And I'm delighted to say that my colleague is a psychological and psychiatric science has backed me up. There's no reason why a child at the age of six cannot have arrived at a very effective system of ethical self-management. And I think that is true. It's not too early. We don't know what is too early. That's one of the awful things about one of these inner forces that I'm sure Dr. Rodgers would discard his rapidly as I, the whole notion of readiness. The child can't learn to read until he's ready to read. And so on. This is one of the worst of the inhibiting inner experiential, fictional, hypothetical limitations on human behavior. Omar Moore, the Yale University, has three-and-a-half year-old children typing on the electric typewriter's complete sentences using correct fingering. And these are not routine learned patterns at all. They are verbal responses to projected sentences on the screen. Three-and-a-half years old. And these are nohobin, middle-class children. They're not geniuses at all. We have no idea what this very intricate human organism is capable of. I want to give Dr. Rodgers a little time to answer what's before we stop. What I hope before the morning is over. That I can also raise the question of how pigeons differ from people.

Carl Rogers: I feel one of the things that enrich one of the really basic things in which day-to-day skin air I agree is in there be roughly vast and untapped potential. The reality is that the human organism have not been fully released or fully developed. And though we might take somewhat different pathways to that on that score, I think we're in real agreement. I was also intrigued because I haven't been sure how much he would call it control. I would call it influence. How much influence I might have had on Dr. Skinner. I was intrigued that his statement that if you're going to design a culture, if you're going to design a society, you have to choose certain values to start with. I don't know what he means in his terminology by having to choose certain values because it was my whole understanding that it was unprecisely that point that he felt this was not feasible. I would hardly agree though with his statement that we do have to choose. We do have to choose certain values that those precede are attempt to redesign a culture. And I will also hope that we would choose values which in themselves incorporated the whole process of change. This is why I never have been fond of the rather static type of values where they're middle class or otherwise which are incorporated in more than two or in some of Dr. Skinner's ratings. And I'd like to change the topic just a bit to bring in more of the issue that we haven't touched on and that I would like to bring in. This is the feeling I have that we are very likely to settle for much too narrow of view of the behavioral sciences. This I think is one of the real differences between us. I'd like to read very quickly just two statements, one from a psychiatrist and one from a psychologist that put this in a good way. That your dean as a psychiatrist says, unfortunately those who make a fetish of scientific method tend to exclude subjectivity from their data because it is not quote scientific. For my part I cannot believe that any study of man which excludes the subjective can be a science at all that best it is only a partial science. I should think that a science must include all the data of experience and when life problems are the subject matter then the data of subjectivity must bulk exceedingly large. Origin, big and tall in California puts it in terms that are a little too drastic to suit my face but still are meaningful. He said the behaviors have shown us the true nature of neurosis and not in what they have taught but in how they have redefined man to avoid real danger of adopting much too narrowly perspective. When we turn the tools of our science to the study of man and I hope that as we try to design cultures as we endeavor to improve education as we endeavor to release these potentialities in the individual we can have a science which takes a look at the whole range of data and at the wholeness of the human being. That is one thing that I have felt increasingly through this discussion I wanted to say. I would just make one mark before we break it.

B. F. Skinner: I do not, I believe that exclude anything from my considerations. I thought that I had several times acknowledged the existence of events within the individual with which that individual has especially intimate contact. I confessed to having feelings and so on. I confessed to their importance in my life. As a scientist I raised a question on whether they are something which preceded and determined my action or are always something by way of an observation of my own behavior after the fact or possibly before the fact if what I am actually observing are the conditions which are to be responsive. I think we are arriving at two fairly satisfactory conditions here. We have identified I think some basic differences. In the other hand I think that I have brought it greatly from this. You asked who I was talking to and felt that I was not talking to you in my opening remarks. You and I ought to be able to analyze the verbal behavior better than that. It seems to me that I am interested in more than anyone else. I think in the nature of verbal contact. I have written a book about it and I have been interested in it too. I don't believe any more than yet or in the communication of ideas back and forth, the implanting of opinions, attitudes and so on. These I think are not effective ways of talking about verbal behavior. I didn't come out here to tell you anything in the ordinary sense of communicating or to be told anything in that sense. I came out here to participate in certain amounts of verbal behavior as I might have come out here to play football or something like that. I would hope to go away and change from this and I think I am change. Although I may not know through what extent. There is a story about Bertrand Stein which is relevant here I think. Bertrand Stein and Alice B. Talkless were companion or having dinner one night with Robert Hutchins when he was president of Chicago. Mortimer Havler was there and other from the Lex and there was a very reliable discussion. When he became to close, Alice B. Talkless went up to Mortimer Havler and said, Bertrand Stein has said things here to might it will take her months to understand.

Carl Rogers: I look forward to a very good month following this month. Let's take a break.

G. A. Gladstein: During this next hour we hope to function two ways to help you resolve perhaps some of the questions that you have been faced with. First half hour we will deal with some written questions. Most of them were given to us last evening as a result of the group meetings. As a matter of fact we have synthesized these into about 20. We have this many which were in the hundreds so this posed some problem for us. Out of the 20 we have tried to select ten. Let's hope we get beyond five. I shall indicate the question each of the main participants have a copy of the list and then ask the one to whom it was directed to respond. If the other person would like to respond, he may certainly do so. The first one is this. Directed to Dr. Rogers is a subjective feeling of freedom. A sufficient evidence that this freedom is real and that man is not subject to the control of his genetic and environmental conditions.

Carl Rogers: I think that that indicates some misunderstanding of the point of view I have presented because as I have said I feel in thorough agreement with Dr. Skinner. That viewed from the external scientific objective perspective man is determined by his genetic and cultural influences. I have also said that in an entirely different dimension such things as freedom and choice are extremely real. I think I would remind you of the example I gave of Victor Frankl in the concentration camp. It would have been very interesting to try to tell him that the freedom of choice which he felt remained to himself was completely unreal. He knew it was real because he saw people who did not exercise that who felt they really were completely controlled. I like flies for the ones who had the best chance of survival for those who still retain the concept that I am a person I choose. For me this is an entirely different dimension which is not easily reconcilable to the deterministic point of view. I look at it as being similar to the situation in physics where you can prove that the wave theory of light is supported by evidence. So is the corpuscular theory. The two of them are contradictory. They are not at the present state of knowledge reconcilable but I think one would only be narrowing his perception of physics to deny one of those and accept only the other. It is in the same sense that is why I keep using the term paradox that I regard these two dimensions as both real although they exist in a paradoxical relationship. Have you skinned or do you have a response?

B. F. Skinner: Yes, there are areas in the world where people have very little of this conception of self or of personal worth. And it is very difficult for us coming from our culture to deal with them or to understand what is involved or why they are not more active in their own behalf. I would trace this difference not to a genetic difference or nothing to do with the basic structure of the organisms in these two parts of the world but rather to what we call literature of democracy. When you are trying to overthrow the despotic control of a ruler, your only strength is likely to be found in the people themselves. The literature of democracy has provided a long history in which the individual has been assured that he is the ultimate source of power which is true that he himself can rise against someone who would control him. By organizing with others who have similar intonations, he can become a powerful force and in some sense he can rule himself or at least he can consent to being ruled by someone who rules more in line with his own interests. That was, as I see it, a discovery of a theory of democracy and I don't mean Greek or Roman democracy which was that of an elite. This was a discovery of the importance of the common man and of the fact that you could bring us to his attention and convert him into a person who was able to take political and usually revolutionary military activity and overthrow other kinds of control. We have this in our culture, we do teach our children that they themselves are the final measure that life is designed for them and that if they are not getting what they want they can do something about it. And this carried over brother feebly it would seem to concentration camps and to prisoner of war camps for example in Korea and to the Chinese. There seems to be some evidence that the democratic way of life is suffering is not being transmitted by our culture well and I think I can see the reasons for this. It is in conflict with certain scientific facts about personal freedom and initiative and I'm interested in trying to work out a philosophy which will do just as much for the individual but which will not take on the expression turned with inner initiating activity which has served their purpose and I think are now outmoded.

G. A. Gladstein: The second question directed mainly to Dr. Skinner. You spoke of your preference for studying observable behaviors rather than less observable areas such as personality traits. Do you regard the study and measurement of these behaviors as sufficient for the science of human behavior or do you feel you must then move up the abstraction ladder and somehow relate observable behaviors to broader concepts such as personality?

B. F. Skinner: I'm aware of the oversimplification of the operand situation as an experimental situation. All early science is oversimplified because you can't do anything until you develop techniques which will permit you to handle simple relations once you have those you can handle more complex. In current work in the field of operating conditioning we deal with very elaborate samples or segments of behavior and we could I think set up a reasonable analogy to some of the problems we've been discussing at this conference. However I'll hold my remarks on the difference between pigeons and people until later. The question about personality is not whether it is an area to be studied but whether it is a useful concept. It is one of these inner terms. I think it has been a dangerous one. If you say that a juvenile delinquent is suffering from a disordered personality and then you want to explain the disordered personality you will have to get back to the individual's earlier history and perhaps possibly genetic factors but very much more likely is cultural conditioning. And once you've got back there I think you can use those facts to explain the juvenile delinquency itself rather than going through the middle term of personality. As I see it, personality is an explanatory fiction which does at times seem to offer the chances of talking about broader patterns of behavior, greater constellations of behavior than are conveniently handled in terms of behavior itself. And it may serve some heuristic purpose at this stage in our knowledge. Although I would always caution the person interested in personality that he must eventually get back to what it is that as you say expresses a personality and that once this has analyzed effectively you will come up with an alternative way of dealing with these problems to be much more satisfactory when you come to do anything about this. You would want to relate problem behavior to the various conditions which influence behavior without calling it the expression of a problem-ridden personality. I see no advantage in the other term except a temporary one in permitting you to talk about what seemed like pretty big issues and not too awkward away. I think the saving and awkwardness is paid for at a very great price.

G. A. Gladstein: Dr. Roger, do you want to respond to that?

Carl Rogers: I might comment just very briefly. Every time a question has to do with scientific procedure, Dr. Skinner and I find ourselves in a great deal of agreement. I think too that from the perspective of science it is observable behavior that we are both interested in. For example, in trying to study the process of change as it occurs in psychotherapy, we have been spending a great deal of time in trying to analyze out the observable behaviors which are indicative of change and to study those observable behaviors. I think that insofar as theory is concerned that as our science maturs, more and more theories will be the reconciliation and integration of large bodies of observed data rather than taking off into outer space and being primarily constructions of fantasy.

G. A. Gladstein: The next question is directed to both and of a little different vein. Is this just another philosophical discussion about free will versus determinism, if not, how does it differ?

B. F. Skinner: I think it is not just another philosophical discussion because we are both concerned with very important practical consequences. I am concerned with arriving at a conception of the individual which is one we accept, find useful, find dignified and worthwhile, yet which is in mind with and compatible with the approach of a natural science or a social science to human behavior. I feel the time has come when this issue must be taken out of the realm of philosophical discussion and deliberately faced. If we are still, as we are in political science, in literary criticism and areas, many areas dealing with human behavior is still likely to be dealing with a conception of men which allows a great deal of pre-play for to preach individual as spontaneous changes of course and so on, we are going to get into trouble. We must make palatable and I hope worthwhile a different kind of picture of man and while the issue of determinism is certainly raised here, I should hope that what we have said here will go well beyond what is usually said in late evening discussions of that topic in dormitories.

Carl Rogers: I would certainly agree that this doesn't seem to me either to be a philosophical discussion about free will versus feminism. I think for one thing, both of us agree that when viewed from a scientific perspective, man's behavior does appear to be determined and that the whole realm of the behavioral sciences is interested in studying those sequences of cause and effect. I think I have tried to indicate that our science should be broad enough to include a concern with and an interest in the subjective as well as the purely external behaviors. Then I have also indicated as I did a moment ago in response to the other question that I believe that we need recognition of the fact that a scientific perspective is not all of life and in my estimation is not a sufficient basis for a total philosophy of life or of persons. So that to me is what the discussion has been about.

G. A. Gladstein: The next question is more of a practically oriented type and I assume primarily for Dr. Rogers, although Dr. Skinny might want to respond also. Can a high school counselor use both conditioning principles and for Algerian psychotherapy with equal effectiveness?

Carl Rogers: I think that a high school counselor or any counselor is obligated to be continually searching for what is effective in producing constructive personality change. Fortunately, this question is one that in the long run will yield itself to empirical investigation. So far there have been few investigations along that line and none that I know of with high school students. But one that is remotely related was a study by two men who endeavored to use three different types of therapy with alcoholics in an institution. And one of those was a learning theory type of approach, not an operant conditioning approach, but a learning theory type of approach. Another was an analytic approach, the third was a client centered type of approach. And there the results were studied objectively in terms of tests, in terms of return to the hospital for alcoholism and so on. It was always been a research that has been of a good deal of interest to me because the group carrying it on started out with the personal bias, and it's almost impossible in such a situation to escape some personal bias, that it would be the learning theory approach that would be most helpful. And as it turned out, that was the least helpful, in fact, showed objective evidence of having done some damage to these individuals. The one that turned out to be most effective was the client centered approach, that I don't adopt that as final conclusion or anything of that sort. That was one study, we need to have many studies of what actually is effective in producing constructive change.

B. F. Skinner: I'm not at all surprised that a learning theory approach could go wrong because I've seen so many of them so badly designed that I wouldn't recognize them. I would want to know the details before I would confess to any anxiety about this particular case.

Carl Rogers: It could make you less anxious. This was Murray's learning theory, and he did serve as consultant on it, so it was put in terms of for realistic as he was concerned. Yeah, but that still doesn't raise your views.

B. F. Skinner: The word counseling here bothers me, I obviously like not the authority of this table and not the field, and I'm not at all happy about trying to conjure up some use of operative conditioning principles with respect to a student on one side of the table and the counselor on the other. I would guess that a lot needs to be done before our counselor could safely work in simply the field of reinforcement in helping people in those circumstances. I would say that the counselor, who was interested in the mental health, they'll be called it of a school system, my better spend his time not at that table at all, but looking into how the children are handled in the school, how they come to school, how their schedules are arranged, what things they get out of school, what problems arise, because of the teachers, which they are matched up and so on. I would say a more preventive therapy approach, I suppose, in this case, I'm sure that Dr. Rogers is interested in how does I am, too. But I don't feel that these problems must wait for a transplantation across a counseling table, or at least certainly not, on the counseling account. I wouldn't feel that the application to education, of the principles that I find productive and useful, would be much more concerned with the social design of the educational system than dealing with its special effects on individual students.

G. A. Gladstein: The following question is directed to both, what is the role of a quote of conduct, unquote, or quote, religion, unquote, in a culture as you view it?

Carl Rogers: I have tried to give a good deal of thought to the question of the way in which people arrive at their values. To me, thinking along that line is relevant to this question. I'm afraid code of conduct is a phrase that would not have much meaning to me in the kind of culture I was trying to describe briefly this morning. On the other hand, the kind of evaluating process, which seems to be characteristic of psychologically mature people in our culture, I would hope would be characteristic of individuals in the sort of culture I would like to see established. And I'm not sure that I can communicate that briefly, but I will try. It seems to me that the person who is psychologically mature tends to be open to the various aspects of his experience, is open to the external aspects, the demands of society, the likelihood of smooth or turbulent interpersonal relationships, the legal demands, the demands of the physical environment and so on. He's also open to and sensitive to the feeling reactions and personal meanings, which exist in his own experiencing, which grow out of his own past learnings. And out of that, it seems to me every new object, every new event is evaluated by him in his own experiencing as either making for his own welfare or not making for his own welfare. It is that the most sensitive, valuing process in existence exists, I believe, in the psychologically mature person, and that when he is engaged in this valuing process in the interaction of his environment and so on, that this is not a selfish kind of valuing, even though he could be sure of values things as to whether they make for his own actualization or not. But it is an essentially social kind of valuing process, simply because of the nature of the human animal, who turns out to be a highly social animal at heart. So that I would not be inclined to discuss a code of conduct, I would not be inclined to discuss a religion in this society and this culture I was trying to describe. But I would be much concerned that individuals were able, sensitively and openly, to be their own evaluators of the experiences and events in which they were involved.

B. F. Skinner: I see the question has bearing on the whole issue of the evolution of cultural practices. When a group of people start living together, they begin to affect each other, they are part of the environments of each other. A strong man may, for example, dispoil all the others because of his own personal strength, but the others quickly, or quickly in terms of evolutionary time, may very well counter-control by organizing and by calling it wrong to use force. Later, someone becomes clever and uses his wits and decimes other people. This needs perhaps even a strong man. This is rare rabbit deceiving, rare wolf and rare fox. Rare fox also comes into it on the side of a sharpie. But then it is decided that it is wrong to misrepresent, it's wrong to deceive. I don't mean it's decided in a sense anybody sits down and comes to that conclusion. You just start punishing in various group ways, people who use force to deceive others and so on. Now that can all go on without codification. And I'm sure that the jurors practice the principles in the Ten Commandments before they were codified. The value of the codification here that it clarifies the practices of the group makes it possible for the individual to conform more regularly. It's an instructional kind of thing. You see that as you turn away from cultural technology to physical technology. Early physical techniques, such as had to be taught by an artist and to an apprentice, often were put in the form of rules of what we would take to be in the case of cultures, maxims or proverbs. For example, in the Middle Ages, the blacksmith bringing a boy in to operate the bellows which kept his forage going to talk to boy as little poem which goes as follows. Up high, down low, up fast, down slow, and that's the way to blow. Now actually what is involved here is the proper operation of a bellows. You must take the full excursion, up high, down low. On the way up, nothing is happening. So it's up fast, down slow. Otherwise you blow to the fire of fire actually. So that if you once learned just a little poem, you become an expert bellows boy. You can just up high, down low, up fast, down slow. As Mark pointed out in his history, science and mechanics, that early scientific laws are probably this sort. They are statements of effective behavior or they guide effective behavior. And there is no mystery to the fact that the great codifiers, the great law givers have always been highly honored. The Romans fight a great role in civilization in codifying laws which undoubtedly were practiced before they were ever codified. And I think there is something to be gained from codification. You can teach precept instead of practice. And I think we gave up a great deal when we decided that we have to teach ethical and moral principles only by practice and not by precept. I see no reason why as you teach science by precept, you can't teach ethics by precept too. And you can do it if you can control the motivation of the student and generally these turning, this turning to practice instead of precept has been a service for motivation for the student rather than for effective instruction. Now, the difference between a moral code of that sort and a religion is to me simply a difference in the implied or expressed sanctions involved. If you simply say that if you behave in this way, people will like you, you'll get along, everyone will be better off. That is a naturalistic religion. It is pointing to the consequences which make a cultural practice worthwhile. If you say in other hand that the code has been revealed by a prophet, it is the word of God as the sanctions lie in another world. And if you follow the code, you will be rewarded by that. If it may have all rewards heaven and if you don't, you will be punished by that. If it may have all negative reinforcement hell, then you are working in the field of religion. But no doubt in my mind that these have been effective sanctions and may continue to be so. The naturalistic approaches to argue that man does not need that kind of supernatural sanction and that it is possible to add up your humanistic ethics. It is something which remains to be demonstrated, but for all of this question of the codification seems to me to be a cultural invention, a cultural design which terrifies the controlling forces which the group exercises over the behavior of the individual.

Carl Rogers: To make one small facetious comment that perhaps the trouble with meetings of this sort and with any attempt to settle issues between individuals or groups is that we don't follow that bellows motto. Instead, we should up slowly in order to gradually take in and really understand what is being said, but usually we up fast. We should down slow in order to only thoughtfully express ourselves what usually happens is we down fast and out comes a great gush of air.

B. F. Skinner: May I find out, however, that what those into the fire is cold air.

G. A. Gladstein: Our next question is again directed to both in an applied area. How do Rodgers and Skinner perceive the problem of parental control and influences on child rearing practices? How would they handle a child from birth to age six?

B. F. Skinner: Don't fall over yourselves, please. In two minutes I assume. I don't want to sit up here and imply that I'm available to answer all questions you may ask. I haven't the biggest idea how the average American home can arrange those conditions which I am fairly sure I can specify to raise happy, well informed, skillful, creative, productive tribe. I think I failed in my own case as a parent and I'd rather subscribe to Frazier's statement that home is not the place to rear children.

Carl Rogers: I guess my comments would apply to whoever rears them whether in or out of the home like Dr. Skinner I would agree that this is what I think should be done, not what I have been able to do. But it seems to me that the kind of psychological climate which promotes growth and development is the same whether we're talking about therapy or the school or home. And I believe that we are making genuinely solid scientific progress in learning the elements and attitudes which compose a psychological climate which does make for the most constructive, most solid individual and personal development. The kinds of attitudes that I think are shown to be useful in therapy and I suspect would show up as being useful and promising at home are those that mentioned in some of the papers you have and so on. I think the evidence indicates that people who are real who are not afraid of exhibiting themselves in terms of the feelings they're actually experiencing those are more constructive individuals in human relationships than those who are putting up a facade. I think that a climate in which the individual is prized whether we're talking about a small child or a therapy client helps to create a useful climate for growing persons. I think that when an individual finds that his inner life of meanings is really understood by another person so that he doesn't live in an existential isolation. This too seems to be of assistance in making him a human being in helping him to grow and develop and I suspect that those attitudes would be useful in child rearing. Then I have an odd notion about the kind of limitations that would be most helpful in the rearing of a child so often we think of that in terms of what can the child be permitted to do, what can't he be permitted to do and so on. I would like to see as much as possible of that very necessary limitation of behavior grow out of confrontation of feelings. I've often said that the mother who was all worn out and says to her child at night, well I don't think you've been getting enough sleep lately. I think the best that you went to bed an hour early tonight is in for trouble. She's not being genuine. She gets resistance, etc. If she could be honest about what she is feeling that I am simply too tired tonight to put up with you for another minute. You're going to bed. I can't stand you any longer. This would be a far more healthy kind of relationship. The child still will be unhappy about going to bed but he's unhappy because of the real reason and this can exist as a real aspect of the relationship between them. Also it has a reciprocal effect on the mother that having really expressed her feeling of I've had it, she then realizes she has other feelings too and she's going to put that child to bed more tenderly than she would had she gone under the facade. My notion of the best in limitations on child behavior is when the child's feelings are in real contact with the parent's feelings and out of that comes some realistic limitation of behavior that is over the long run mutually acceptable. In given instances it may be more acceptable to one than to the other but over the long run you arrive at a realistic relationship of feelings that is mutually acceptable and which helps the person to live in a human world of feelings because he has had to react to and adjust to the real feelings of another person and to do that in terms of his own real feelings.

G. A. Gladstein: I think at this point we have come to the second part of our question period. Some of the questions which we could not answer that were submitted to us in writing perhaps some of you would be willing to raise in person. I suggest that perhaps we start on my immediate left and swing around the room. Any questions on immediate left? Yes ma'am. The question is as I understand it in an ideal community where we reduce all tensions would we also reduce the existence of a genius or of like individual.

B. F. Skinner: I take it best directed at me. Freud faced the same question after having shown that great works of genius were essentially neurotic then proposed cure neuroses which would indicate that he has something against genius or at least works of genius. But he had an answer and I think it is a perfectly good one that people are geniuses against whatever background they may be living in and in a world where there are many neuroses some of these will be really fine neuroses and we will call them works of art or works of genius. But in a world in which people are living a more orderly life a more successful life it will there will be works of genius also because of the capacity of man to do great things but they will be rather different. There won't be an art based upon neurotic tendencies there won't be a literature feels with personal conflicts if there are no personal conflicts. An example of this imagine the case in which children's stories a fireman is portrayed as an heroic person as an appropriate example to use today and dilute. It's very important if you have buildings that are likely to burn down to have brave firemen but now you invent fireproof buildings and get rid of all the ones that are not fireproof there's no longer any need for a brave fireman. This means it in the world of the future all of those things you love to read about as a child will not exist and something will be missing. The same thing is true a much more important way with respect to war. Now poets are awfully good at glorifying anything that happens to need glorifying. In the past war has been inevitable I hope it is not in the future but we have covered this up and learned to enjoy it by making heroes out of warriors. And a great part of the literature of the world is dealt with heroic warriors. But now if we do achieve a world which is at peace and this is so complete that we can't imagine the world of war we will not be interested in the literature having to do with heroes who kill other people in battle. And I should suppose that the works of Sayodostoevsky would be relatively meaningless in a world in which no one had any fantastic need to confess and imagine sin or something of this kind. Personally I would settle for that I would sacrifice the works of Dostoevsky to reach such a world and I don't for a moment imagine the people are going to be any less creative, any less imaginative or any less geniuses because their subject matter is going to be of a different nature. There are a few cases in point of people who have been very productive artistically and it doesn't seem to have been mainly a question of working off neuroses. Johann Sebastian Bach had 19 children and they can include something from that about his father's. And yet he could not help writing music. I just get that he was still composing music. That's a Freudian answer and I would use it myself. I'm sure that there are activities in which the genius which is a man will manifest itself and that it is not dealing with neurotic topics so much the better.

Carl Rogers: And I would agree with that last sentence but in general I would take a slightly different approach to this question. In the kind of culture I tried to talk about briefly this morning I hope I didn't give the impression that there would be no tension. I think that the kind of tension that would exist that just gave a very minute example of and talking about the mother and child. There are always tensions in interpersonal relations. There are also tensions in all of us as we face new and more demanding tasks in life. And I think that out of those constructive tensions which are less than the completely destructive tensions which can also occur. Out of those constructive tensions in life there will be loads of creativity and plenty of genius in my estimation.

G. A. Gladstein: Question in this part of the audience? Yes. As I get the question is perhaps we have not given due notice to the power of positive reinforcement and is Roger's concept of sub-actualization tied in with this.

B. F. Skinner: I don't think for a moment positive reinforcement is the only process which can be used in the design of a culture. It happens to be I think a very important one but a total analysis of the various main springs of human action seem to be relevant to any phase of human behavior. And I won't say that I would improve Dr. Roger's practices by reinterpreting what he does in my own term but I think I could do that. I'm sure we are both dealing with the human organism as given by the genetic human process and to the extent that we are successful we have discovered important characteristics of that organism. I would like to see the human being actualize himself, reach his fullest potentiality and I'm sure that when we once get any glimpse of that is going to be a very surprising thing.

Carl Rogers: I don't know that I get this question with sufficient clarity to come in on it too helpfully but I think I would say that reinforcement is surely a positive tool. I think that in developing the potential of the individual we have often thought only of external reinforcements. I think that the nature of the human organism is such that many things are discovered to be internally rewarding. For example, I think we do not have to reward the child for curious and exploratory behavior. That is something which organismically he finds satisfying. I think that that would be true of a number of the life activities of the individual who is moving toward the development of his potentialities.

G. A. Gladstein: Question of this area? Yes, way back then. Because I understand the question that perhaps the two sets of values of Rogers and Skinner are about the same and in particular for Dr. Skinner, does the way that he trains his own students differ from how one might deal in psychotherapy?

B. F. Skinner: Well, I don't know that I am any happier about the way I train my students and I am the way that I raise my own children that I don't have too much control over the education environment either, although I am trying to do more about that perhaps. I do agree with the bundle Johnson last night in supposing that there is something called rational behavior which is usually exemplified in science and that you want to get a patient in therapy, I suppose, to see the world about him in his own problems in rational rather than irrational terms. I think perhaps Dr. Rogers would hold that there are emotional or experiential elements here that will be rather different from the scientific process. But insofar as it is helpful to respond to the world in a rational way, then I would suppose that good education is a kind of at least preventive therapy if it could not be used also for therapy after trouble at a risen. I have spent quite a lot of time analyzing superstitious behavior in other forms of irrational behavior. I think you control that the techniques of science are designed to protect us against some of this and to that extent they are useful cultural practices. And I am sure that a therapist is doing something of the same sort in clarifying influences which have had a deleterious effect and bringing the individual more strictly under the control of the environment as it actually is.

Carl Rogers: I welcome being reminded of that article of Dr. Skinner's Indian American Psychologist, which was a very inspiring article on the processes of science as he had experienced them in his own career. This is the one you are talking about, isn't it? I hadn't quite thought of that in relationship to this discussion. As I remember that article, Dr. Skinner there gives a very vivid picture of the scientific life as process. And this is exactly the kind of thing which I have been trying to describe as the good life from any angle, that far from knowing where he was going to come out, he had to live in process and had to let learnings emerge as they emerged. And they shaped his new behavior and so on. Somehow this makes me feel a great deal better about Dr. Skinner to realize that in his own life, in his own life he values that emerging unpredictable process. And I guess what I have been trying to say about the kind of culture I would want to design and the kind of outcomes I see in therapy, when therapy is successful, it leads to exactly that kind of thing that the individual becomes an ongoing process of life in which the outcome is not set. There are not static goals. You don't even know whether you will come out happy. You are living this on a day by day basis, endeavoring to be open to all of your experiences with another real aspect in that article of endeavoring to be open to all aspects of what had occurred in order to burn from them. This I think is a very good example, very closely related to Wendell Johnson's notion of the personal life as being essentially the living of a scientific approach. On this we could really get together because to me this sense of life as a process which can only be existentially lived if it is to be meaningful, that makes all kinds of sense. Makes to me much more sense than saying here is where we should come out and we must plan it that way.

B. F. Skinner: This may be a historic moment I think I have been changed by that argument. The point of that article was actually to criticize the codification of science by methodologists, statisticians, design and experiment people who have been very little experience with science as it is practice, try to tell you how the scientist works. I think it is a great mistake that we teach our young psychologists science in the form of statistics because this has very little to do with actual scientific practice. However I am not going to concede everything because I am interested in teaching scientific practice as such and I should suppose that with skillful planning one could make sure that more people would be the product of lucky histories of this sort. I am sure I have a great deal of luck which is not only directed me in profitable directions but is kept me going by the very lucky schedule of reinforcement which I have experienced. But I think this ought to be viewed as a very important factor in building scientific dedication and some of it can be arranged although I quite agree that you cannot foresee all of the courses going to take. I am now beginning to understand what you mean by becoming.

Carl Rogers: This is very meaningful to me because I quite share your feeling that I too would want to teach a scientific approach and so on. I do want to stress again the fact that the kind of professional living and the experiencing of a professional scientific life which you were describing in that article comes, as you say, very, very close to what I am talking about when I talk about a person in process of becoming. This would be most gratifying to find that we do strike some each similarity on that score.

G. A. Gladstein: I think we have time for one last question this section. As I get the question is on these internal factors or variables Dr Skinner has indicated that one can always identify external causes and what would lead one not to conclude that one could start with these as the possible originating causes.

B. F. Skinner: I think the question is mainly concerned with the practice of science. I quite agree that the whole causal stream goes on back indefinitely that there must be some reason why the environment is as it is at the moment of influence as an individual and so on. I question these things mainly because of their historical connotations of mentalism, of non-physical mediators or manipulators of physical events which I don't think is a useful approach at all. If you take these inner events to be eventually when the physiologists get around to it, discoverable as such, then I don't deny that if something happens to me as a child and today my inability to deal openly with a colleague reflects the anxiety that the results from my having been punished for fighting my brother or something like that. If something has lasted in me, if that is a correct connection, something has survived in me from punishment for sibling rivalry 50 years of gall, my inability to deal openly with a figurative brother in the group today. Something has survived is there. The question is the dimensions of this and my objection to these inner experiential, if not mentalistic events is that they don't. Very adequately report what change must have been made in me 50 years ago, nor do they offer very much help in predicting what is now happening to me as a result of that event 50 years ago. As opposed to you say that what I was punished for repeatedly striking my brother until I reached the point where I didn't strike him but I always felt anxious because I was on the point of striking him that I have an anxiety and that is persistent at the present time and it makes it impossible for me to be open with my friends today or something like that. What does the word anxiety do here? You can say well you can feel anxious but that's true and if I have been punished for striking someone and am now inclined to strike and this generates physiological changes into me which I have been report as anxiety. But the word anxiety is not carrying the history of that punishment very accurately and it certainly is not giving many details to the prediction of what I cannot or can do at the present time. I'm not questioning that something has happened in the individual which is inside him and I don't question the fact that someday and I think rather the distant future and neurologist physiologist will tell us what that is. I am criticizing the purely verbal use of these concepts to present time because I think they damage our case by making us believe we know more than we do know and by mischaracterizing what are often important variables.

Carl Rogers: On this score I would find myself in real general agreement with Dr. Skinner. I feel that there has been much too much use made of internal events as though we knew them descriptively and then we used them as explanations of causes of other events and this long range inference for you reach a mile for an inference has never appealed to me and I don't really believe it as a justifiable part of science. I think that one of the young men who is working with us as a post-actorial fellow here to go Alan Bergen has written a couple of papers. I like both the content but I particularly like the title there under the general title of tardy science of subjective experience and what he is doing is pointing out the progress we are making in determining objective cues of inner subjective events which will bring us closer to being able to study objectively some of the internal meanings and subjective experiences which I think we all of us can do agree are no doubt in fact operating in our behavior question is how close can we get to them in studying them. I would also point out that this interest in trying to get more objective cues to the subjective aspects of experience is related to but by no means the same as the stress on the importance of the subjective in life which I have stressed earlier.

G. A. Gladstein: I'm then to Dr Skinner as presenting his closing statements first.

B. F. Skinner: I want to take up this question of planning and whether it in any way injures the product planned. It is very important I think to keep in mind the fact that any culture at any time is a kind of behavioral experiment. Every child born into American life today will come under certain very powerful cultural practices. I have an education which makes the most of the capacities of the genetic stuff of American life if we have ethical religious and moral practices which keep people behaving with respect to each other in ways which reduce their need to defend themselves against attack and worries and that kind and so on. Then America is strong and we will continue to develop better practices and we will make a very important contribution to the practices of the future which of course none of us can perceive at the present time. These things work in a way something like biological evolution but not entirely. In cultural evolution you have a Lamarckian practice. Someone hipped upon a cultural practice, a new way of handling children in kindergarten, a new way of paying wages. There are thousands of these little cultural designs and inventions. Some of them survive because they contribute to the strength of the group, others disappear because they produce trouble. In this way we advance through codification or otherwise we build a corpus of cultural practices which is to be tested whether we like it or not in the crucible of survival. If Russia or China or some other drug culture is going to advance more rapidly than whether we like it or not we shall have to take second place. I don't think that for a moment with Russia here ago not at all impressed by the way in which they energize the human behavior of their people, not impressed by their standards of a good life or anything that sort. But I still don't think we can rest on our laurels and I think it behooves us to examine culture. Now this is one that occurs a new state because if you simply hit upon a cultural invention as an accident or because of the personal idiosyncrasies of someone it may turn out to be a very good practice. Whether it's good or not has very little to do with its origins or where it came from. The person who is perhaps quite unintelligent might hit upon a better way of rearing his children and would be copied by others and become an established practice for a long time. The origins are not important the survival effects are but at some point in the history of this evolutionary process something new emerges. And this is the growth of science as a way of dealing with nature and the eventual application of science to human behavior. And when that has come about when the techniques of science have been well developed and brought to bear on the problem of human behavior then we are in a better position to see the relation between cultural practices and the resulting strong or weak behavior of the individual who has been submitted to them. And then we can design we can plan practices because of predicted effects which will be important to us and they will be important to us just in the same way in which the accidental practices are important to us and they will survive or disappear in the same way also. So that at some point with the development of the science of behavior man is able to accelerate the evolution of cultures by designing practices instead of allowing them just to arise through accident in one way or another. This is also true in genetic evolution we are now able to some extent to change the germplasm we've been able a long time to by selection of parents to change genetic structures it can produce mutations and the chemists are not far off I'm sure from making weather specific changes in chromosomes and so on. At that point something new will have occurred in the evolution of the organism as a biological entity and already something new has occurred in the evolution of cultures as evolving and surviving entities so that we can by using intelligence and the scientific method improve our culture. Now this can be interpreted however as meddling as doing something about other people as trying to control other people and of course the word control is as someone point out last night a value charged word we have all been controlled for purposes of exploitation. We've been controlled through techniques which are a verse in themselves and so on so we have had and developed a philosophy which is opposed to control and even opposed to planning. Now I think this is silly I think if we try to insist that human cultures not be planned we suppose a door on a remarkable opportunity which may never come to us again. To refer to another critic of Walden to Joseph Wood Crouch who would attack the book violently just because of his plan let me suggest the following situation to you. Mr. Crouch prefers the southwest and wanders around out there as I thought of an amateur naturalist. Suppose in his wanderings he came to a mesa and climbed up and discovered a tribe of Indians living there under conditions which are exactly comparable to Walden too. The educational system prepares them for the life they're going to meet. The children are well cared for, happy, productive. They have economic practices which give them all a simple but abundant good life. They have what they need to eat, clothes, those themselves. They have artistic activities and so on. Music flourishes and all of this. Wood and Crouch come down out of that mountain and jumping to the world by fools we are this is it. Here is a way of life that is acceptable to me because it is maximizing all of the potential is the people who are living in it. But then some Indian following him down out of the mesa taps him on the shoulder and says there's just one thing I forgot to tell you an old Indian named Skinner planted this way. That would destroy the whole thing. That someone had caught this out rather than that it had been the product of an accidental evolution of cultures would make it absolutely worthless because that old Indian would have had all sorts of despotic tyrannical motives. And even though he's dead now perhaps or no one knows who he is, he will have been controlling people. These people will be living a life which he planned. Now if we are so silly as to allow our reactions to past patterns of control to interfere with our free exercise of science and the design of culture then we are going to get exactly what we are going to get somebody else will not be that silly and they will be the people who will contribute to the world of the future.

Carl Rogers: I've forgotten who it was that we marked last night that we would be really discovering the learnings in this meeting for weeks and months afterwards. I certainly feel that's very true. I find it very difficult to come up with any really concluding remarks. I think I would like to say I've acquired an increasing respect for Dr. Skinner, the person. His sincerity, gentleness, his whip, his wide scholarly interests. The honesty with which he is trying to face the implications of the directions in which the behavioral sciences are taking us. I certainly have learned deeply from him both in the past and during these meetings. I have often felt and would like to say that I think he is the one person in the behavioral stream of psychology who has really had a highly significant impact on our society and our culture and I respect his work. I think that there do remain some profound differences between us, though I think definitely less than when these discussions commenced. But I suspect that the deeper differences will not be reconciled by us, they will be reconciled by you and by other people. I think that I thought might come up for mention in this discussion that it hasn't so far is that I don't know whether Dr. Skinner is aware of this, but a former student of his and a former student of mine are working together on developing a programmed instruction for the improvement of interpersonal relationships. So that in sort of the second generation, it seems possible that there will be significant tensions as there are between the two who are working on that but nevertheless working tard a reconciliation. I see very large areas of agreement between us which I won't particularly try to specify. One is the fact that many of these remarks that Dr. Skinner has just made do point tard the fact that a behavioral science is going to have a or may at least have a very significant part in designing our culture and the profound question remains of what kind of a part it will play. We certainly have real agreement on the rules of science and in regard to the human being when he's looked at through a scientific perspective. I think that from this perspective we both see behavior as determined, we both see the possibility of establishing preconditions which lead to desired effects and which do in essence lead to the basis for a design of culture. But there is a real difference in regard to the way science is viewed by us. As I see it, Skinner sees himself and the world and the individual in his Waldem too as nothing but automated figures moving inexorably in their preordained path. I hold this perspective as a fruitful one in my work as a scientist but not as a total worldview and as inadequate as a viewpoint tard all of man. I think it's obvious all through our discussions that one of our sharpest differences is in regard to the place of the subjective. To me words like freedom have deep experiential meaning and reality and significance and I hope that I've helped indicate that when we do believe in individual freedom and choice as a paradoxical reality in a determined world then we take different steps and different directions and have a different kind of regard for the human individual then we do if we do not hold that view. I believe that this is one point on which we really differ although I have been surprised that several of the things I have heard Dr. Skinner say and feel now that I'm a little unsure to just where he does stand. With real conviction on point yesterday he said I believe I was so shaken by this I've forgotten just what it was he believed. When he mentioned that if we were to design a culture it would be necessary to choose the values which we wish to establish. When this morning a few moments ago he spoke of working out a philosophy which would be appropriate. To me a philosophy is the meaning of experience that seems to me to be quite contradictory to some of the things he said so I'm not sure that any rate it has come through clearly that he has and lives a subjective life in which belief and freedom operate. But it also seems to me that he attaches secondary or little importance to the subjective life for others and doesn't consider it very seriously in his design of a culture. In this respect I think I do differ rather deeply. Another difference that has interested me through this discussion is that I believe Dr. Skinner doesn't discriminate at all between control and influence to me those seem quite discriminable. But to me it's important whether the person with whom we are dealing has a participative choice and if I understand him correctly this seems to him to be quite secondary and not particularly important. Take for example our own impact on this audience I would not see it as comparable to shaping up the behavior of pigeons to play ping pong. And yet if I get his viewpoint correctly to him these two would be basically identical. Now the thing which for me differentiates it from dealing with pigeon behavior is that one of the things I prize about this meeting is that you are free to choose subjectively what you wish to accept and reject of what we are saying. One of the things that I would value not only for this meeting but for any kind of culture I would hope to have any part in designing is that it would be full of experiences like this where people would be faced with the difficulty and reality of choice. Or you are exposed to differing facts viewpoints opinions and so on and must within yourself choose the stance that you are going to take in regard to such issues. To me I would want that to be and regarded as being one of the essential bases for maximizing the human potential is to make continually available the opportunity and the necessity of choice. Another point in which perhaps we differ and here again I am a bit puzzled is in regard to the value of genuineness. I have come to feel particularly in my work in therapy that one of the most important values in human relationships is the quality of genuineness of one person being in real and genuine contact with another. An individual being as completely as he is able to be the feelings which he is experiencing at that moment and in a culture that I would have any part in designing I would hope that the leaders would be, or you may not like, would be transparent that they would not be concealing that they would be people who would be willing to expose their views, attitudes, feelings to the individuals with whom they would be. There is no question in my mind about the personal genuineness of Dr. Skinner but I get puzzled when he talks about designing cultures because there it seems as though to over simplify and perhaps be a little extreme it seems as though nothing is for real. It is the behaviors which are induced are for other purposes not for themselves. I think I understand that in that he feels that since all human relationships are simply manipulations whether we know it or not then the quality of genuineness doesn't have much significance. I think I can understand that but it doesn't square with my experience. Then another difference that I would recognize is over our willingness to control and here again this difference between control and influence comes up. I myself would certainly hope to be able to feel that often at times I am able both in dealing with individuals and the groups to try to establish conditions which free and release and make for spontaneity so that I do help to establish preconditions which bring about certain consequences. My experience is in doing that have been such as to give me a great deal of confidence in the basic characteristics of the human individual when he is free. So that my whole aim would be to provide conditions for optimal release and growth rather than being primarily interested in control. There is one helpful, hopeful and ironic thing that I would like to mention. That is that for a man who believes that the words value and choice and purpose really retain very little of their ordinary meaning in a scientific world. There is just no question but what Dr. Skinner's work has stirred up will continue to stir up enormous controversy over choice of values and purpose and the directions that we choose to go. In this sense I guess I feel he is really on my side because that is exactly what I would like to do too. That is the way I see the purpose of this meeting that we have tried to expose various points of view, various possible purposes, various values in regard to education in regard to the design of the future culture and that the choice of those values is going to be something we all will be working on over the years to come.

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G. A. Gladstein [00:00] This cassette package represents a milestone in the history of the development of the ideas of two outstanding psychologists, the Schinner and Karl R. Rogers. As indicated in the accompanying pamphlet, the dialogue included here remains as their most thorough exploration of their respective points of view. I think you will find their ideas as challenging today as they were in 1962. Listening to these tapes should also give you some feeling for the excitement we experienced in participating in that dialogue. The first cassette begins with their opening statements. At this time, then, we shall turn to the first presentation. You recall, according to your program, that we are allowing approximately 15 minutes first for Dr. Rogers and then for Dr. Schinner to give a brief review of the controversy as they see it. It gives me then great satisfaction to present to you Dr. Karl R. Rogers.

Carl Rogers [01:28] Thank you, Dr. Gladstein. It's good to be here, good to see Fred Schinner again. Good to look forward to the chance of having an opportunity to pursue and depth some of our common interests and common differences. I also look out over this audience, which I expected to be a very small audience, and I'm tempted to say, who are you? But I trust that we will learn as we begin to get questions and contributions from you. I'd like to try to summarize briefly some of the important elements which underlie our dialogue as they seem to me. I think there's a fresh current in our culture, a fresh breeze that's blowing through the world that's exhibiting itself in many ways and speaking through many voices. It's expressed in a growing interest in existentialism and in the existentialist part of

G. A. Gladstein [02:37] you.

Carl Rogers [02:38] It's evident in ways that may seem odd to some of you, such as the interest in Zen Buddhism. It shows itself in the concern of the self and psychology and in the interest in a phenomenological approach to psychological problems. Even on the political scene, it is evident, I believe, and the absurd to one new country after another arising out of a colonial past. It is exhibited in the mass law as termed the new third force in the American psychology, the development of self-theories, the concern with the existential person, the discussions of being and becoming as over against the two older forces, the positivistic behaviorism part of you and the Freudian part of you. Man has long felt himself to be forth a new declaration of independence. He is discarding the alibis of unfreedom. He is choosing himself, endeavoring to become himself. Not a puppet, not a slave, not a copy of some model, but his own unique individual self. He is saying in no uncertain terms, I am, I exist. I choose myself in life. I choose the meaning of death. I find myself very sympathetic to this trend because it is so deeply in line of the experience I have had in working with clients in therapy. As one therapist has said, the essence of therapy is the client's movement from feeling unfree and controlled by others toward the frightening but rewarding sense of freedom to map out and choose his new personality. I myself and one of the papers that some of you have read have described the therapeutic development as a self-initiated process of learning to be free. This learning is composed of movement from as well as movement toward. From being persons driven by inner forces they do not understand, fearful and distrustful of these deeper feelings and of themselves, living by values they have taken from others, they move significantly. They move to being persons who accept and even enjoy their own feelings, who value and trust the deeper layers of their nature to find strength in being their own uniqueness, who live by values that they experience. This learning, this movement enables them to live as more individuated, more creative, more responsive and more responsible persons. Clients are, as I have tried to indicate, often sharply aware of such directions in themselves as they move with fearfulness toward being freely themselves. But how can I talk about freedom when as a behavioral scientist I conduct research on the assumption that the sequences of cause and effect operate quite as much in the psychological as in the physical world? What possible definition of freedom can there be in a modern world? Let me try to tell you what it means to me, again quoting from one of these papers. In the first place the freedom which my clients experience is essentially an inner thing, something which exists in the living person, quite aside from any outward choice of alternatives which we so often think of as constituting freedom. I'm speaking of the kind of freedom which, frankly, vividly described in his experience of the concentration camp when everything possessions, identity, choice of alternatives was taken from the prisoners. But even months and years in such an environment showed only, and I quote, that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one's own attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's own way. It is this inner, subjective, existential freedom which I have observed. It is the realization in my clients that I can live myself here and now by my own choice. It is the quality of courage which enables a person to step into the uncertainty of the unknown as he chooses himself. It is the discovery of meaning from within oneself, meaning which comes from listening sensitively and openly to the complexities of what one is experiencing. It is the burden of being responsible for the self one chooses to be. It is the recognition by the person that he is an emerging process, not a static in product. The individual who is thus deeply and courageously thinking his own thoughts, becoming his own uniqueness, responsibly choosing himself, may be fortunate in having hundreds of objective outer alternatives in which to choose or he may be unfortunate in having none but his freedom exists regardless. So we are, first of all, speaking of something which exists within the individual, of something phenomenological rather than objective but nonetheless to be prized. The second point in differential misexperience of freedom is that it exists not as a contradiction to the picture of the psychological universe as a sequence of cause and effect but as a complement to such a universe. Freedom rightly understood is a fulfillment by the person of the ordered sequence of his life. As Martin Boeber put it, the free man believes in destiny and believes that it stands in need of him. He moves out voluntarily, freely, responsibly, to play his significant part in a world whose determined events move through him and through his spontaneous choice and will. This is the experience of one client after another as he moves in therapy to turn an acceptance of the realities of the world outside and inside himself and also moves start becoming a responsible agent in this real world. As I've indicated before, this significant human freedom exists alongside the complete determinism of modern science as a paradox. It exists in our human experience with as much reality as do the facts of science and we cannot wisely disregard it. It's one of the great contributions of our century that we are beginning to realize that man's moods, attitudes, actions, his adaptations as well as his male adaptations can be understood in the same lawful terms as the events of the physical world. Viewed from this objective perspective, it seems probable that we will increasingly be able to understand man's actions in terms of laws, which will be similar to the scientific laws discovered in the natural sciences. It is this that leads to the possibility of being able to control human behavior. It's this that leads to the issue of this discussion. There seems no doubt that the behavioral sciences will move steadily in the direction of making man an object to himself. A complex sequence of events no different in kind from the complex chain of equations by which various chemical substances interact to form new substances or to release energy. But no matter how completely man comes to understand himself as a determined phenomenon, the product of past elements and forces, and the determined cause of future events and behaviors, he can never live as an object. He can only live subjectively. Some of the most pathetic individuals I know are those who are continually attempting to understand and predict their behavior objectively. Each action is meaningful to them only as the predetermined effect of preceding causes and their whole life becomes an unhappy caricature of the centipede, self-consciously watching his feet. In my experience, some of the failures in psychoanalytic therapy sometimes exhibit this over-intellectualized objectivity toward themselves. But the person who is developing his full potential is able to accept the subjective aspect of himself and to live subjectively. When he is angry, he is angry, not merely an exhibition of the effects of adrenaline. When he loves, he is loving and not merely a perfected turtle of object. He moves in self-selected directions, he chooses responsibly, he is a person who thinks and feels and experiences, he is not merely an object in whom these events occur. We cannot, without great peril, deny this subjective element in ourselves. It precedes our scientific activities, it's more all-encompassing than scientific knowledge. It is an essential part of being human, of being a person, and no present or future development of the behavioral sciences can ever contradict this basic fact. Yet I am very well aware that the experimentalist, positivist, behaviorist, stream of thought and psychology, conductor skin air is the most able exponent of that trend, hold very different views. For example, here are some of the words and concepts that I have used, which are totally or almost totally, without meaning, in the behaviorist frame of reference. Freedom, for example, is a term with no meaning. Choice, in the sense that I have used it, has no meaning. Subjectivity is, I believe, regarded as a very little importance. Purpose, self-direction, value or value choice, none of these have any meaning. This personal responsibility, as a concept, has no meaning. The democratic philosophy of human nature, Dr. Skinner has pointed out, has been a useful resource of the revolutionist in the past, but is now very probably out of date. So it's clear that some of the most basic concepts of this new third-force in psychology, have no meaning at all for the behaviorist group. I trust that this dialogue, today and tomorrow, may help us to clear up any misunderstandings of such differences, and also to clarify our differences for real differences do exist. In summary, I would say that to the extent that a behaviorist point of view in psychology is leading us toward a disregard of the person, or toward treating persons primarily as manipulable objects, or toward control of the person, shaping up his behavior without his participant choice, or toward minimizing the significance of the subjective, then I question it very deeply. My experience would lead me to say that, to that extent, it's going against one of the strongest undercurrents of modern life, and is taking us down a pathway with destructive consequences.

G. A. Gladstein [15:53] At this point, we will ask Dr. Beatts Skinner, Harvard University, to present his own brief review of the controversy as he sees Dr. Skinner.

B. F. Skinner [16:12] Thank you very much for the success time, Carl Rogers. I always make the same mistake. When debating the Carl Rogers, I always assume that he will make no effort to influence the audience, and then I ask for follow-in, and speak as I'm speaking now, to group of people who are very far from free to accept my views. In fact, I was just reminded of a story that I once heard about Carl Rogers, and I'll tell it now hoping to confirm or have him deny it. I suppose it isn't possible, at least I'm sure it is grown in this dimension. The story I heard is as follows. Carl Rogers was never much of a duck hunter, but he was persuaded to find one occasion to go duck hunting. He and some friends went into a blind and sat through a dreary cold early dawn, and no ducks arrived until the very end of the time when shooting was possible. Finally, one lone duck came in, and his friends allowed him to shoot, and he did. At the same time, along the shore, a few hundred yards away, another man shot at the same duck. The duck fell, caught. Dr. Rogers died out of the blind and started toward the duck. The other man got out of the blind, and his blind started toward the same duck. They arrived at the same moment. Dr. Rogers turned to him, and said, you feel that this is your duck. The reason I was reminded of that story was that the end of the day is that Dr. Rogers brought the duck home. I shall do my best to prevent a similar failure. We do pray on a good many things, and I like to feel that perhaps I have had some influence on Dr. Rogers because from time to time he has conceded certain friends. He has agreed that human behavior has been controlled and is probably coming to be controlled with greater success as the science of behavior evolves. Now, the controllability of behavior is an old story, of course. Historians have always been delighted when they could prove an influence of some kind of biographical event on a hero. Biographers take the same line. The social sciences have certainly brought further evidence of its mystical nature, and I believe that an experimental analysis of the behavior of an individual organism has now essentially clinched the point. I don't believe you could ever prove that all the behavior of a human organism is controlled, but the assumption is, I think, more and more plausible, at least as a working assumption, before a science, and I believe also, as a working assumption, for more general considerations regarding human affairs in general. Now, Dr. Rogers in conceding this much has tended to narrow the notion of control. In the paper that I refer to, he cites as examples of recent advances in controlling behavior, the evidence that under certain social conditions may be led to make judgments which are contrary to the evidence of his senses. In other experiments, it is shown that a person may change his opinion without being aware of what is influenced him to do so. He is trying to satisfy electrical stimulation as an all-compelling kind of gratification that might very well be used to control behavior, and, of course, the effects of drugs, producing vivid hallucinations, changes in disposition, personality, that be cited by Dr. Rogers. Now, the control may mean much more than this. These particular examples are examples in surreptitious control, control where the control is not aware that he is being controlled, or they are special examples of powerful control. Now, what I am talking about when I say the control of human behavior is any contribution which is made toward determining a man's action. It does not need to be surreptitious, it does not mean that the man may not be fully aware of what is being done to him, and it does not mean that it would be 100% successful. I am talking about such control as is achieved in economics with various weight systems, the ordinary, whether ineffective ones, or special incentive wages, and so on. One has only to examine other nations, other cultures, to appreciate the extent to which, in America, our economic system does energize people, makes them productive, makes them enterprising, and undertaking new kinds of things. I mean by control the various police and military forces which government use to keep people working within certain illegal frameworks. I mean by control the various techniques which are used in education, to bring about what we call the acquisition of knowledge, or traits of character, and so on. Now, the fact that occasionally an employee doesn't go to work for the goal, or occasionally a man becomes a hobo and stops working all together, or the fact that a student plays hooky, or that someone breaks a law or escapes from jail, this does not mean to me that these are not very powerful controlling influences. The exceptions are to be expected, because in no one of these cases are the variables which are manipulated, the only variables and hence the control is not 100%. So I hope that when we're talking here about control, we will speak more generally, and not them at this, to conceal control. Although there are special problems involved there, I admit, and would not also hope to deal only with 100% effective control. Now, that is one thing that I wanted to state in these early remarks. I think it will come up again in the discussions. Another one has to do with the implications of the notion that human behavior is controlled, and that's for the moment let's talk about complete control. Another one of my valued opponents in this line of thinking is Joseph Wood Crouch, whose book The Major of Man published, I think in 1954, is largely an attack on world and two, my utopian novel, and also on other works of mind. He has recently returned to the attack in an article in the Saturday Review of Literature, in which suddenly I find myself class with the existentialists. But being cited by the Crouch has imbalizing what he calls the dead end of the tendency represented by Darwin and Marx, and he excites me as denying categorically and absolutely that man has any control over his destiny that he has any power to choose or determine. And he goes on to document this by saying that I write in my book science and human behavior, the inner man, who is held responsible for the behavior of the external biological organism, is only a pre-scientific substitute for the kinds of causes which are discovered in the course of a scientific analysis, and all these causes lie outside the end of the video. And he goes on from this dead end. The fact that man is rather succumbed for the moment completely controlled by his genetic and environmental history does not in any sense mean that he cannot control his own destiny. He has already been doing this both in the field of genetics and in the field of the environment, because from the very beginning of civilization or culture or man as we know him, man has been working upon the very genetic and environmental forces which are responsible for him. And the geneticists today are beginning to talk quite openly about the possibility of improvements in man through genetic measures. And just yesterday, evidently according to Morning Paper, Professor Huxley has come out again in favor of sperm banks or special donor fathership so that in the world of the future the father will be proud not that the child is of his own blood, but that he has the best blood that money can buy. And the environmental control is already here and has been here for thousands of years. Man is largely responsible for the environment in which men live. He is certainly responsible for this very pleasant environment here this afternoon in every detail. We live more and more in a man-made world and he has been a world which man has worked out largely because of his bearing on his behavior. It is reduced the need to escape from extremes of temperature and serlon. We tend to be reasonably comfortable, well fed and can then devote ourselves to things which are more important. This is a contribution of a purely physical technology. But the social technology, the cultural technology which has gone along with this, is even more important. What man has done is to create for himself a world in which he is governed, in which he is employed or which he can hire, in which he can gain necessary wealth through borrowing or stealing or something that kind, he has built a world in which he is able to behave in ways which would otherwise be impossible. And in this sense he has controlled himself. If it is true that human behavior is 100% the product of a genetic and environmental history, it is nevertheless true that man has created and can modify that genetic and environmental history and in that sense he can control himself. Now that is not a pun. I am not playing on words here. Very often it is true that the man who builds the environment, whether it is a physical world or a cultural world, he is not the man who is controlled by it. But that is often the case. And as I have analyzed elsewhere, the techniques of self-control, which we can extract from religious ethical moral works of the past, can be analyzed in terms of a manipulation of an environment, will be resolved that the man who is thus manipulated the environment will behave in a way which will cause a mess trouble or gain him greater achievements. So that we do control ourselves even in the world in which human behavior is totally controlled because we modify that behavior. Now this may seem, again, even if we don't regard it as a play on words, it may seem logically impossible. But the point is that we do this not because even then we step outside any causal stream or outside the stream of history, but because it happens to be in man's nature to take steps of this story. And this brings me to a third thing that we will certainly be dealing with again and again, I am sure, in this debate, that is the so-called choice of values. Why do we, in controlling man, controlling one direction and not in another? How do we decide in advance how we want to control? This comes up in the case of education. Suppose you have a very powerful educational technique, but we do teach. The psychology can tell you the techniques, can it tell you what ought to be taught? So now, this is our own field of value judgment, but I don't think that it may necessarily be put outside the realm of science. So as far as I'm concerned, there is only one science, there is only one way of knowing that it may be in the hands of scientists or in others, but it comes to the same thing. And I don't know of any special wisdom, which is available when science must stop and turn the choice of values over to others. As I see the question of values, they concern some characteristics of human behavior, which have led to various kinds of exploration in a design of culture. You can explain some activities of man in the case of physical technology by appealing to the immediate results. Early people hunt and fish for food because in hunting and fishing, you are reinforced immediately with something edible. Later, culture develops methods of storing food, drying, preserving, freezing. They develop methods of agriculture where something must be done in the early spring and you eat only in late August or September, perhaps in Taiwan. Slowly, a culture builds a capacity to do things because of more and more remote consequences. Now, this is also true in the case of the cultural technology which man has worked out. A strong man able to quit anyone else in a battle will steal, will take from others, will force them to labor for him and so on. This becomes an early primitive kind of governmental structure. And we explain it in terms of the immediately enforcement of this strong man who is capable of exerting that kind of power. Later, a government which becomes more sensible in its long-term consequences will work out ways of controlling which will not resort to brute force. And we'll have a greater survival value in the long run because such governments will make better use of the people governed. As you can trace in physical technology, the becoming important of more and more remote consequences, so you can trace this in cultural technology. And I think this brings us to what is my way of thinking, the crucial issue. Dr. Rogers has referred to the suggestion that there are three ways of looking at human behavior. The problem or the positive behavior is, or that will happen to name for it which emphasizes the self whether the individual becomes an interest in the self as a source of wisdom, source of strength in offering conduct. David Bacon, very interesting book on Troy's sources, health notice that the Protestant Reformation and the Jewish aesthetic mystical movement, and Troy Trumdellater, in his psychoanalysis, are exemplified in a kind of revolt against external control. This is the conflict between psychoanalysis and governmental operations. For example, is the general turning to the individual to find salvation. This is the theme before for the part of the Reformation that one can seek once God within himself and so on. And Troy carries this out hoping to find within the individual the source of a pattern of life which is not imposed from outside. Now, I don't think that is a correct way of stating the case, and I think it can be modified in a way which fits my purpose very well. The change is not from an external control of the individual to internal control. It is a change from coercive punitive control to other techniques of control which are related in the long run, if you won't be surprised to hear me say, the positive reinforcement. There are ways in which you can control people so that you influence what they want to do, and there are ways in which you can control them so that they are forced to do what they do not want to do. Now, a shift from a legalistic coercive system to individual freedom, this is all the theory of democracy too, appears to take the good behavior of the individual out of the hands of the police and turn it over to the individual himself. I suggest, as a subject for future discussion here, that it will turn out that the inner control, which is then discovered as an alternative to the external, is nothing but the product of another kind of external control which has been concerned with getting individuals to want to behave in certain ways rather than in coercion and to behave in those ways because of an external threat. As I see the trend of the evolution of culture, it is away from the rather immediate, punitive, successful ways of controlling people to go as more remote techniques which are based upon a knowledge of human behavior, require a very sensitive understanding of these techniques which in the long run exert a much more powerful control. And the control which I believe is more likely to build a stronger group because it releases resources, and here I would agree with Dr. Rogers of the individual which are quite lost under aggressive control. So those are the three things I want to mention. We do agree that the behavior is controlled, but I want to interpret that broadly. We, I hope, agree that even on an assumption of complete determinism, man is and has been free to determine his destiny by the design of the world which determines him, and that the slow evolution of cultural practices could never well be working toward the releasing of potentialories of the individual without necessarily thereby leaving it in the last analysis to the individual to determine his own behavior.

Carl Rogers [36:03] If you see just that I started off since he admitted the last words, I think first I'd like to clear up this duck story. There's a great deal of truth in that story except for the punchline. Instead of saying you feel it's you shot the duck, the reserve instead to proceed you very highly regarded in scientific circles, we flipped a coin and that proved that I had shot the duck. As I listen to Dr. Skinner's remarks I felt as I often have when I have bred his material that there is so much on which we are in real agreement that it's puzzling to know why would 500 people turn out to see what the differences are. And I think I picked that seriously that although we do seem to be in agreement on a great many scores, you know what I suspect there are some real differences which are not entirely verbal. I don't believe you people would all be interested if you didn't feel there was something more at stake here other than slight semantic differences. I'm not sure yet that I can really pin down what those differences are. I think one feeling I had as he spoke is that the scientific view is the whole world for him. It seemed to me. It isn't that it is one very very useful way in which we perceive the world. It is the whole world. I noticed he had no comment on the paradox that to me has considerable meaning. I hope he will comment on that. There is one story I want to tell but also bear on that same issue I believe. For more than a year now I wanted to ask Dr. Skinner about this. We were both at a conference in Boston a little more than a year ago I think. I thought it was me of 61. I don't know. It was quite a while ago. It was published in summer of 61. He had given his paper on the design of cultures and then had commented on that. After hearing his comments I directed these remarks to him. I'll read this from the tape recorded discussion. I said from what I understood Dr. Skinner to say it is his understanding that though he might have thought he chose to come to this meeting, he thought he had a purpose in giving this speech. Such thoughts are really illusory. He actually made certain marks on paper and emitted certain sounds here simply because his genetic makeup and his past environment had apparently conditioned his behavior in such a way that it was rewarding to make these sounds. And that he as a person doesn't enter into this. In fact if I get his thinking correctly from his strictly scientific point of view, he as a person perhaps doesn't exist. I thought I would draw him out on the subjective side if I was there but to my amazement he said he wouldn't go into the question of whether he had any choice in the matter and added I do accept your characterization of my own presence here. I wondered ever since. I really would like you to know more clearly. I think that gets close to a hundred of some of the differences between us.

B. F. Skinner [40:05] I think it gets very close. There is this strange feeling that if you deny the individual freedom or deny the interpretation of the individual based upon freedom and personal responsibility, that somehow the individual vanishes. Well this is not at all the conclusion that one could arrive at as I indicated very briefly and stating one of what I thought would be a recurring theme. I think you can make the assumption that each of us is completely determined to do what he is now doing and is going to do by his own genetic and environmental history. I say this to my class at the end of the term. I give a course in human behavior with a fairly large number of students and many of them become very anxious about this. In fact I just this year have learned two strange things about my course at Harvard. One that it sends more students to courses in the Divinity School and any other undergraduate course. And also that it sends more to the health service. There is a special syndrome that it's all recognized when it turns out. Now I try to reassure my students and I think in the long run obviously they go on to the health service or the Divinity School after it. I haven't been successful in this but I think in general I am in pointing out to them that each of them is an absolutely useful. And absolutely unique locust through which certain lines of course pass each one of you represents an absolutely unique genetic combination of factors in the evolution of the human race. Each of you represents an absolutely unique combination of environmental forces. Your family and your child at school you pass through the various books you read, the various governmental and economic forces under which you lived and so on. Now I can visualize the growth of a more and more successful human being as a biological organism and a more and more successful culture or society as a cultural organization. Or as an organism which has proceeded via the ordinary principles of evolution and the eventual selection of the more and more powerful version when diversity turns up which gives me a reasonable sense of my own individuality. And I think for a good reason for telling anyone else that he is himself in individual and has possibly very important contributions to make. Now I don't do this to exorbit my students. That would be quite inconsistent of me to exhort them except insofar as I can prove that my own history has suggested that I might exhort in order to produce certain effects. I don't believe in exhorting. I don't believe in the notion of personal responsibility in a legal sense. I think it disappears when you resort to non-versive techniques of control. This is an issue which in our earlier debate I brought up that when people are held responsible for their acts in the sense that they can be justly punished for doing something the consequences of which they foresaw, then you have a meaning to the notion of responsibility. But when they have been induced to behave in other ways without aversive consequences entering into the picture there is no meaning to the conception of personal responsibility. But there is never any question of the uniqueness of the individual or of his possible importance in the evolution of a future culture. I don't think anything we have now is by any means the last word.

Carl Rogers [44:08] It kind of like to come back to the first part of that because one of the things I have thought about is what meaningly and wonder would it have to a person so like a freedom writer to tell him that he is the locus of a number of unique forces which have conditioned him to move southward, have conditioned him to sit in certain places which are illegal, has been operated, conditioned and rewarded for behaviors which would bring him in conflict with the law. He finds it rewarding to emit certain sounds when he is beaten etc. I mean I recognize the picture of behavior that you are giving as a picture that seems to me to be in line with our general and current knowledge of people who are viewed from the outside but I notice you steer very clear always of even taking a look at the person from the inside. When I say I think of trying to explain to a freedom writer his actions in those terms, I don't believe that this makes something quite meaningless out of something which socially has meaning.

B. F. Skinner [45:44] Does this make any sense to you know like there are two points here you might ask the question of supposing I could convince this freedom writer that I was right would he then stop being a freedom writer. I think you are getting at that the one thing on to that it is his conception of himself as someone who can do something to bring about an important change for which he will then be able to take a modest credit and so on. People certain people at least will admire him for having done this and so on. Now I think he does do this because of a heritage which has come to him from his own culture regarding the necessity for undertaking a certain kind of martyrdom undergoing punitive treatment in order to bring about some other state of affairs. If he has been through a culture which goes in for this he will do it there are many culture which would never produce freedom writers at all. Apart from whether he would then stop there is the other issue as to whether it is correct to say that he is doing this for reasons which are important to him beyond his training. The converse of this is what happens to the link went or the alcoholic when he has seized upon this justification who say well I am sorry I know I am an old drunk but I really am ill shouldn't complain you shouldn't criticize me I need treatment. Now up to a certain point society has control drunk in this by shaming the town drunk by teaching children either to laugh at these people it is still good comedy to put on a drunk act in a play or to have them blame these people to point out how their family suffer and so on. This is an effort to control through punishment. Now a modern view of this is that not I think if that is wrong it just doesn't work and the better view would be to try to find other ways of creating an alcoholic and the alcoholic may seize upon this to escape from the censure and blame. Well he said more or less entitled to do that in the sense that you have left yourself open to this when your shift from one technique of control through punishment to another which will let us say in that case it might very well be medical but it could be through positive educational measures. When you shift there is a transitional period in which people do seem to be at those ends they are lost the old system isn't working the new system hasn't taken control either in both cases you have a form of control but I think you have in the long run a better one if you could work out a positive educational treatment for alcoholism. This would involve a great deal of cultural engineering it would be very difficult I myself think that any government worth its salt should prohibit any advertising which makes the consumption of alcoholic beverages attractive or honorable or distinguished and so on. I'm not saying we should keep people from buying alcoholic beverages that didn't work but I think you ought to be able to keep advertisers from making the drenching of alcoholic beverages beautiful and glamorous and so on. This is a thought in a kind of design of a culture and if you could eliminate all of that with a positive educational program I think you could treat the alcoholic. So he would no longer need to be shamed or thrown in jail or punished or threatened with a damn nation whatever the versus control is and I would myself prefer a culture which works that way not because possibly because of my own preference for non-aversive techniques but because in the long run such a culture would be more effective. In such a culture there would be no moral struggle there would be no need for exerting one's personal responsibility.

Carl Rogers [49:49] There was a listen to that the message I'm getting from it and I'd be glad to be corrected if it's not right is that you saying I'll talk at any length about how one influences or controls behavior from the outside but any comments on whether man's subjective view of himself has any importance whatsoever that I don't wish to get into. And I guess what I'm saying and what I was trying to indicate when I talked about the freedom writer is that if we take only the objective external perspective on man if this is kind of a modern Calvinism as the way it strikes me where the clock was all wound up. Originally and it now runs inevitably through its conclusion and if we say that's the total picture of man there is nothing more to be said about this freedom writer or any other person other than that he is quite inevitably doing exactly what he was conditioned to do and that he himself as a person has no part in this. If that is given as our total picture of man then to me that's insufficient that's inadequate it gives a picture of man as meaningless I think it gives a picture of the universe as meaningless. And I guess the reason why I can't help but have some feeling about this is that if it doesn't for a moment check with what I learn with people from the inside in other words in one sense I find myself certainly in 90% or more agreement with all you say about people when you're talking about them from the outside but I notice you are never willing to get at them from the inside.

B. F. Skinner [52:23] This could be a point of which we will simply go on disagreeing I don't want to question the reality of the evidence that you're pointing to and I don't question it because I surprise many people by talking about my own feelings. Who knows what you're going to reveal I always come back to this is our now falling back from my experience as a scientist I always come back to the discovery repeated discovery that when I give up trying to account for something with an inner entity some sort and try very awkwardly at first to deal with external entities which might be responsible for it. I go through a period when a thing is awkward and obviously I'm talking around the simple statement and so on and yet in the long run it comes out. I went a long time using the concept of drive for example and talking about behavior was I think the last of the fictions that I just possessed myself up in my history as a theoretician. It was awfully awkward to say instead of saying that this rat has a high hunger drive to say well this rat is 80% of his body weight or he's been deprived of food for 24 or 48 hours something like that. It seems so simple there's something called hunger and there it is actually in practice it is extremely valuable to insist upon the conditions which generate this drive and this is positiveism of course but I think it's a very valuable practice. If I could just give you another example on this I think we're both trying to understand each other here. I'm doing a book at present time I don't mind my getting an ad in. I'm doing a book and the technology of teaching which will not be along this position on teaching machines at all but an analysis of the processes of instruction from this point of view. There are certain chapters in there which I think would be of interest because they seem to me to represent a search for the external correlates of the kinds of character traits that we have always assigned to the inner man. Now you can dispose I think of knowledge and skills usually those are I think fictions of knowledge of something is only evident when you can talk intelligently about it and so on and I prefer to talk about the behavior talking about things than about knowledge but to take such things as the enjoyment of literature for example or an interest in what you're doing or a dedication or industry or preservation against the fatigue of excessive work and so on. Or courage doing something in the face of aversive consequences. These things are very easily assigned to personality traits which seem to come with the baby and people who have them can do these things and people who don't who don't have them don't do them. The dedicated scientist who is in his laboratory 15 hours a day and so on he seems to have something zeal dedication which many people don't have and we give up we assume that a great many people could never be absorbed in the subject to that extent. Now you can show I think with reasonable certainty on the basis of evidence available now that the extent to which a person enjoys music or art or literature books or the extent to which a person continues to work with a high level of interest in a given field that these things can be traced to lucky histories of reinforcement. For example just take enjoying books usually a school wants to boast of the level of its students and so they make the students read books form before they ought to read them and no one has ever made any reasonable effort to schedule a set of books so that having got a successful result from reading one page and another page and so on you continue to read and you get periodic reflections from this which keep you going. Now if that is done properly I'm sure you could build in any individual an extraordinary capacity for enjoying himself with books and the same is true of music and so on. In the case of dedication of scientific zeal if you want to teach science in a sense of teaching someone to want to be a scientist this is quite different from teaching him how to use apparatus in a laboratory course. You want to schedule discoveries so that he has the experience of making a discovery the first day when he tries it maybe two or three days later he makes another and then ten days later he makes another one and we know how to stretch this schedule out so that eventually you've got either on the one hand a pigeon that bats is against a key at 10,000 times a day for three or several years or a scientist who bats his brains out on the walls of his laboratory 16 hours a day. 16 hours a day for this many years now I can't take a far away and say well in that case I can show you the schedule they may seem ridiculous to interpret fairer day in terms of pigeons but I can show you people who are reinforced by gambling enterprises on the same schedule who are committed. Now if you've ever seen a room full of women playing bingo I don't know why it isn't women play bingo but they have terrific dedication of a thought which American industry would love to be able to command with ordinary wage systems but the variable ratio schedule in the bingo game is enough to build this extraordinary he'll sit there four or five cards and listen to numbers and looking very keenly by the hour. Now this is is this something that they're born with no it is something which is got into them because of their history reinforcement and I would take these words such as enjoyment courage as examples of what you would find in the individual that I am trying to find outside.

Carl Rogers [58:54] Well that's very good statement I think of the possibilities and potentialities of human control of their coming to problems which all of us will face in the consequences of which we'll all face. I have I think two comments on what you've just said one has to do with the fact that in your talking about your desire to find the external causes of behavior is behavior is viewed externally. You talked in terms of I've heard many people use for it is as though for every external cause that we can find then you can drop a previous erroneous internal cause which you formerly positive. I would like to make it clear that's not what I'm talking about at all I think that that is a part of the advance of science that things that performally dealt with as though they were caused by little homuncular within the individual are various positive internal causes we do find other types of causation for such behavior. The thing that I would want to stress and that seems to me has an importance which you give it not at all is the fact that and does live a subjective life quite as well as being a when viewed from a scientific perspective a sequence of cause and effect. I wondered when you said you often spoke about your feelings I wondered why perhaps it is that you haven't yet found the cause of those or something but it seems to me there are other reasons for speaking of our feelings it seems to me that man's a subjective life has a significance as a different perspective on life which stands quite separately and paradoxically in relationship to our view of the image. It seems to me as one molecule in a vast chain of cause and effect and I think that one might say well but that's only just different way of looking at it really makes no difference no I think that's not true at all I believe that when the subjective life does seem to have significance then we adopt different courses different courses of action then we do if we regard it as having no significance at all. And there I'd like to turn to your very good remarks about learning machines I think that's what they ought to be called and teaching machines.

B. F. Skinner [61:56] I might interrupt the computer people use to talk about a machine which learns machine which modifies itself and it's because of its own experience and I think that they have the right and the call it a learning machine. In French you can use the same word for learn and teach but you can't in English and so I think that machine will call them teaching machines.

Carl Rogers [62:17] It seems to me that depending on whether we give subjectivity any significance we might use program learning in quite different ways well his mathematics are inadequate if he could go to a do a program of mathematics at that point to learn what he needs to know this would be optimal. If he needs to know more about optics and at that time there are programs along that line he can take another program learn that sort of thing. All of it coming at a time when his interest is maximal his need is maximal I'm sure the learning would be quick and would be efficient. I think it can lead to the very best of what I would think of as a student-centered type of teaching and learning. Select some slightly more debatable examples. Suppose that he does wish to improve in his appreciation of art. Well he could easily take a program in art appreciation which would lead him very much to understand the principles of it. He could take a program which would lead him to understand and appreciate some of the things that the abstract painters are trying to achieve. My mind that would be excellent because then he would be faced within himself with the choice of his own values his own decisions his own personal appreciation and where he stood in regard to items of that sort. Or even in the political field I think I can think of nothing more really educational and if there was a good program of the principles and benefits of the communist way of life and a good program on the principles and benefits of a more democratic approach. And if a student had to take both so that then what he would be faced with would be internal subjective concern conflict difference which he would have to straighten out within himself. That's the kind of thing that I think I mean when I say that placing some importance on the subjective leads to a different approach than simply shaping up a person's behavior for example.

B. F. Skinner [64:46] I think perhaps I ought to take some time to state how one views experience and this inner life from the point of view of a behavioral science. I don't deny for a moment that each of us has a small part of the universe in close within his skin with which he has specially good connections. You can have your toothache but I can't have it and this will go for great many other physiological conditions now in spite of a libel often urged against me I don't think the organism is empty. I'm sure that all sorts of things go on inside the only thing I'm concerned with is not having to wait until the physiologists have figured all of that out to move forward and I'm sure you would take the same line there. But what is the nature of self observation in that case now if there are things that go on inside you with which you have a special connection it but you might then say well those are the things that you will know that no one else can know about you. But we know them. I've analyzed this problem in my book on verbal behavior and also in that old operation is in favor on the ways in which a verbal community can teach the individual to know himself. Now I can teach a child color if he has color vision by getting him to say red blue green and so on at appropriate times when I'm holding up red blue green is something that I have color vision also or at least I have these labeled. So that or I can analyze them with a spectrograph or something in case I know something about the stimulus and I can say to him right or wrong right or wrong as he learns the names of the colors but I can't teach him the names of his emotions in the same way I can say now there you see that's difference and this is embarrassment. I may guess correctly that he's feeling different and use the word different and he may then use it. What I mean by correct is that the way I use it is very difficult and many people have pointed this out to set up any common vocabulary for the description of inner events and this would include not only emotional but sensory events experiential events. The observation of your own behavioral tendencies the probability that you will behave in a given way today or tomorrow what you've done in the past reporting on your behavior. So that this although people do come to watch things going on inside them while they are being stimulated while they are acting in various ways this always seems to me follows the action or follows the stimulation. It's always something exposed factor and I would argue that the inner events which seem so important to us are not essential to action and probably do not in any important case precede action. When I talk about these inner things as fiction you use the word erroneous I wouldn't call them errors I think they are dispensable verbal tools that we could get rid of and profit from being rid of. So when I talk about these people say yes but I can feel my hunger I can feel my anxiety I can feel my to meditate and so on. Well can you Freud I think made an important contribution in the notion of the unconscious now the unconscious to me is not bothered by the notion of the unconscious. So far as I'm concerned conscious and unconscious behavior are all the same the only distinction between the case of conscious behavior you know what you're doing or why you did it in case of unconscious you don't. And other is this exposed factor thing can happen in the case of conscious act it doesn't happen in the case of unconscious before I think showed clearly that the kinds of variables which influence conscious behavior can also be proved to have been responsible for unconscious behavior. So that he freed the causal nature of experience from the need for observation that is what happens to you will affect your behavior whether you know it or not. When you do know what you say is conscious when you don't know it you say you're not conscious Freud's evidence isn't conclusive to everyone but I think we would accept general principle that there are things we do we don't know we're doing or we don't know we've done them or we don't know we're going to do it. There are reasons for acting that we don't know about there are others we know now if this is the case then experience will always be something which follows action or at least a disposition to act and will not have any causal status and I would always want to look beyond experience to whatever it is which gives rise to the experience. Your references to education take the line of course which Rousseau first portrayed so beautifully in that marvelous book a meal was John Dury and William James and others were advocating at the end of last century that you want the student to be interested if you can make him interested then he will learn. You suggested that someone might want to build a telescope and would then turn to the proper programs to learn about optics. I'm concerned with his wanting to build a telescope if this means to you something inside him which is moving him to build a telescope then the teaching machine would only apply to showing him how to do this but I would want to trace his wanting to build a telescope back to earlier events outside him. And which he came into contact with telescopes or pictures of telescopes or books about them and stone and so on. The student who wants to learn more about art you say you say it's all right to use program instruction to teach the student what he wants to know about that I want to teach him to want to know more about art and I think that can be done. I think this is not something which arises spontaneously within him something which comes from his own past history.

Carl Rogers [71:05] I certainly feel all kinds of cognitive remarks I could make about what you're saying but the thing that suddenly strikes me is that perhaps I could communicate best to you and to the audience by a story that may seem to have known. Relevance but I think he's a great relevant to this discussion just a very short time ago. One of the clients for the human working was trying to tell me how he had always been able to cope with authority and all kinds of difficult situations by just drawing into a nothingness. This was kind of a new learning for him to realize that he had just pulled in and become blank whenever anyone made too many demands on him and so on. As I listened to all of what he was saying it was much more confused than I've put it. I said to him I guess the way I'm getting that is that really you had kind of a private joke against the world no one could possibly defeat you. You could just pull in and this was your little joke and he listened for a moment and thought a moment and then he began to chuckle and then he broke into really uncontrollable laughter and he was so embarrassed because he wanted to stop. And I think both of us couldn't help but realize that he was for the first time really openly enjoying the joke he had been playing on the world for many years. Now where did he be and well for me it fits in in a number of ways to be sure we're both of us talking and I'm talking and I speak about that incident with him about behavior which had its roots in the past. No question about that. I'm talking about I guess the thing that first set off this in mind that you're saying we really couldn't teach a person what to call a feeling in a sense that's what part of therapy is and that's what this was a fairly vivid example of. He certainly had never thought of himself as playing a joke on life or a joke on the people who tried to control him and yet when that was put in those times it suddenly rang all kinds of inner balls and he realized that is it and he broke out as I say lashing up the joke you know which hand in life. Now I don't know what it just by telling a small incident of that kind I can also communicate the fact that the explanation of that purely from the outside even though it could be made adequate and complete is not a complete story of that kind of inner learning which took place in him. And I think here I'm sure we're both being influenced by our own past experience where probably you've not had the opportunity to really know what goes on inside the pigeon and wrap in the same kind of way that I've had a chance to know what goes on within the human being but I think that because of that difference in past experience. You stress one dimension only and it seems to me both dimensions are significant.

B. F. Skinner [75:02] Well let me report my reactions to that story. The phenomenon of escaping from would be controllers is of course very characteristic. The student plays trowent with education had its own work for this truancy which incidentally comes from an old word meaning wretched. Religion has its apostasy. Governments have its escapees its own version of apostasy. Economics have strikes where people refuse to work although paid or consumer strikes refuse to buy goods at a too high price and so on. These are reactions to inept control and you do this with respect not only to the organized controllers as I've mentioned but to the general ethical control in the sense of the people. Exerted by the group of which you are a member. The hermit is an escapee from a social life. The beat neck is a different type of escapee. The inner drawn in with drawn kind of first is that too. Now you evidently are working witherson who has resorted to this kind of reaction to control. If he himself first for years the words pulled in and became blank without any direction. This would indicate to me that he was at least characterizing his own behavior in his rather metaphorical way. Perhaps you don't want this to be a metaphor but I do. I think pulling in I don't know what you do. You're still as large as you were before but you may be becoming historically blind for the environment or just not going to notice things. You are certainly pulling in your world in that you're cutting off reactions to it. Now the first step in this person's history then would be that he had reacted this way and presumably got him into trouble. That's why he was coming to see you. Now perhaps you for the first time indicated to him or in talking with you he indicated to himself that he was indeed getting away from control by this gesture. He may never have seen why he was doing this to harm it might not realize that he likes the life of a hermit because nobody's criticizing him or something of that sort. Now he gets an insight if you like into the actual negative reinforcement which is leading him to behave in this way. That would be the second step. The first, the actual escape from control. The second, the seeing of the days is escape. He may have very well escaped without knowing that he's doing it. Now he sees he's doing it. Now I can have the count for the laughter. It might be the suddenness of the real days. I can't account for laughter anyway. So this person bothers me. That aside of this case, it had occurred. I thought it would not inevitably occur in someone who had suddenly realized that he was retreating from society and in doing so, escaping from his influence. Some of this might have been known to this individual before he came to you. I'm sure that if he talked with you, he saw more of what he was doing and saw the reason why he was doing it. So that is to make them in substance of the game and self understanding such a case.

Carl Rogers [78:37] Well, I don't know whether this gets anywhere in the intellectual discussion. It really fascinates me your reaction to this of not wishing to understand any human experience except in highly structured intellectualistic terms. That was particularly intrigued by your reaction to his phrase pulling in because actually must have been as large, gestory pulled in as he was before. True enough. Yet how different that is from the kind of things that have been meaningful in my own experience. When a client begins to talk in terms of analogies and fantasies, I realize he's really beginning to get somewhere. The person who is able to speak in really fantasy terms, allegorical terms, terms that are not related to the strict structure of everyday life. This tends to mean that he is thinking significantly and feeling significantly about the deeper meanings of his own life. This person who talks about pulling in and about the blankness that he experienced, I'm sure both of those could be shown to be behaviorally meaningless terms. But as terms descriptive of his own subjective orientation to life, they're extremely meaningful. Somehow in these last few years I felt more keenly than I have before, personally, what the difference may be between us, that you are saying all of life or any particular incident from life can be neatly packaged, analyzed and so forth. In terms of strictly intellectual terms, which have nothing to do with meaning, which are straight descriptions of outward events. And I guess I feel that's great if you can do it, but I don't believe it. I feel at a point of view that is that narrow, runs the same risk as the kind of students who used to see so many of it at Chicago, who had committed their whole lives to the feeling that I don't have to feel, I don't have to choose, everything can be worked out rationally. My life is just going to be lived on a completely rational basis, and that's fine except it doesn't work.

B. F. Skinner [81:29] I thought I had agreed as to the existence of these experiences. What I'm objecting to is the assumption of causal efficacy. I know that you shouldn't be held responsible for Freudian psychology, but I'd like to know that. I think this thing I want to point out is true with Freud because of the elaborate metaphor which he used to deal with the relation between these intermetal events and the external therapy which he claimed to achieve. I don't believe, and I've talked with good analysts who were young. I don't believe that any evidence is available to establish the temporal sequence between being cured and recalling a traumatic experience. That maybe as the Freudians would have it, on the analogy of excising a tumor, that getting the traumatic experience out of the unconscious works secure. But it could also be the case that the cure permits the patient to recognize and recall the traumatic experience. So that you are not at all sure that you have excised a cause, a cause of trouble, and hence brought about therapy. Now I think, as I say, I'm not burdening you with that, but I do think, I do feel, as in our discussion this afternoon, that you are wanting to order events in such a way that an understanding of one's inner experience. The inner experience comes before the overt, as you would say, consequences of this. You said that when a client begins to talk in terms of analogies or to stark reporting fantasies, then he begins to get somewhere. Now I assume that this getting somewhere means that he does now begin to understand himself, perhaps works out better ways of dealing with the world. If you will permit me to suppose that getting somewhere is capable of a rational description. Then I think that the issue between us is whether or not one's rational understanding of where he stands in the world follows from irrational or, and don't mean it in a pejorative sense, but fantasy glimpses of his own experience. Or rather, the experiences do not, as a matter of fact, come after some glimpses of the rational fact. In my example of the pulling in that took that line, I suggested that the first thing that happened to this client was to understand that in drawing into himself as he put it, he was indeed escaping from unpleasant aspects of the world around him. He might have done this with drawing and been able to see that he was doing it without knowing that the main important consequence was that he was freeing himself from averse stimulation. Then I would have said in that case too that any metaphor he might use in connection with the joke perhaps, which in this case was suggested to him, that this would come afterward rather than before an actual understanding of external events. Now, external events, I don't mean sheer behavior, I mean behavior in relation to controlling variables. And he now saw that he was turning away from important things in the environment because in doing so, he reduced the net averse stimulation in his life. I think they're going to have to either read it, disagree on this point or try to clear it up further. Whether, I'm raising the question of the relative importance of these experiences, I think not their existence.

Carl Rogers [85:37] I think two one other point that perhaps could be carried away is that I don't believe in any fundamental way. We differ about the approach one would take to trying to resolve a scientific question. For example, I am much interested in what does really produce change in psychotherapy, have certainly played with all kinds of hypotheses, including psychotherapy being possibly operant-conditioning, all kinds of different hypotheses. And though we would both agree, this would be an empirical fact. And then you could set up the studies, which probably would gradually throw light on what that is. And what the causes of change might be, I don't believe we differ to the kind of approach we would take in getting a scientific answer to a particular puzzle. I don't mean to make a large issue of this because I think this would get us a stray, but it is my own hypothesis that experience precedes insight. And I get it, you were saying the other way around, that is, I think when this person burst out an uncontrollable laughter, he was really appreciating and experiencing the satisfaction of tricking all his controllers to use your terminology. And that as a consequence of that experience, he now later on would be able to put into words that kind of insight. Again, that's an empirical fact. It could be the other way around. One other comment, too, that I would like to make is that it seems to me that you're still believing that when I speak of subjective experiences, inner experiences and so on, that I'm talking about them as a cause of something external. In other words, that I've sort of brought in some outside little force to operate. That isn't the meaning I give to it. The subjective experiencing of man in my estimation is a preceding dimension, that it is a dimension which precedes any of our scientific desire, scientific activities, scientific behavior. It is, in my estimation, a more primitive fact than our scientific behavior. But I don't bring it in as a little gadget to produce causal explanations. That's not true. I'm thinking of this as a significant dimension of life, which is, I say, is more primitive, more basic, is the aspect of life to which we turn to see whether we regard one approach to science as better than another, as a matter of fact, or whether we regard this or that as better. And that as a part of our subjective life and experience, we have gradually developed the most marvelously complex set of rules against deceiving ourselves, and we call that science. And I have a great deal of respect for that, and I think we move significantly along scientific lines, but I think it will be unfortunate if that narrower perspective of science. Science blinds us to the fact that we are also, and most basically, subjective beings. And I think we move significantly along scientific lines, but I think it will be unfortunate if that narrower perspective of science blinds us to the fact that we are also, and most basically, subjective beings.

B. F. Skinner [89:49] Well, I think this is going to remain a difference. You will have some very powerful and important authorities on your side. It has been a terrible revival of interest in the personal aspects. I have spent many an hour trying to explain to him how one might deal with the question of whether the green he sees is not the red I see and so on, and he went to his grave, not knowing the answer to that and being very much worried about it. If you very highly put on your book on personal science, I think this is a wrong tack. I don't think science is the experience of scientists at all. I think it is a corpus of procedures and practices. I should hate to think that physics is in any sense what goes on in the mind of a physicist. It is what physicists have done and what they can do. And a series of marks which belong to conventional languages which permit other people to do things, including to talk about them quantitatively and so on. If experience seems very immediate and valuable and important, I think this is another consequence of the fact that I pointed out that each of us has a gift of the universe inside his skin and he is a good touch with it. If I teach a child the meaning of the word toothache, I have got to know when the child has a toothache. If I am a dentist and I am coping around in a child jumps and so on, I say, now there you are, that is a toothache. Or if the child comes in and does this and is jealous, woman and so on, you have a toothache. Now the evidence of the dentist is the sight of a tooth with a certain cavity and a bit of steel striking it. The sight of what I see is and against a jaw. Those are the mediating stimuli that enable me to teach the child the meaning of the word toothache. But the child is getting a very powerful stimulus from the tooth itself and forever after that is what the child means by toothache. This is so very much more important than the external criteria that the community has used to teach him this term. Now where there are powerful stimuli of that sort, they naturally take control of the word. What the word describes in the child is the actual painful stimulus and not a hand with the jaw. In the case of human behavior and in the case of a lot of other things where we have to work with a great variety of external stimuli, work no very strong internal counterparts, the terms continue to refer to what is evident to the community. This is, I think, generally true of the language which describes our own behavior. We learn this when it is overt brought enough and scope so that people can say, yes, you are now lifting your hand, you are now saying the word now and so on. But later you can lift your hand without moving a muscle and you can say a word to yourself moving only very small muscles for perhaps not at all. And you will describe this, you say, yes, I just a moment ago I said something to myself and I can close my eyes and see this room reasonably well now and I'm perfectly frank and telling you that I'm hearing that. Something is going on which is going on when my eyes were open and I can report on that but this becomes less impressive as something different from what happens with my eyes open. So that I feel in general that while those who deal with experience are likely to make a great deal of the interstimulation that those of us who deal with behavior are much more likely to talk about the common elements available to the verbal community as well as the individual. So naturally I want to minimize the ache in the tooth ache and deal with an operational definition of tooth ache. Now that means maybe awfully silly because tooth aches are really know about them and they're very important and powerful. But operational definition is describing one's own behavior, one's moods and so on. I think they're quite different and I would prefer myself to remain in general at the level of behavior without denying for a moment that something is going on when I am angry with someone which I can react to as I react to a tooth ache. Although I would still want to define anger in terms of the damage committed to bond others and so on. I want a behavioral definition of anger although I grant that in many cases reasonable consistency would be obtained and asking one to describe right and dull pressures in his chest as they did in the old days.

Carl Rogers [94:51] But I guess that desire for a behavioral description of anger would scarcely apply when you were angry.

B. F. Skinner [95:03] I would not have when I was young now as a scientist and would very much. I wouldn't have known how to describe the behavior when I was a child and I would have picked up the word anger and would tie it on to a certain marked but not too consistent stimulus. I generated by my autonomic nervous system among other things. Now I would definitely want to define anger in such a way that I could describe my angry acts or see anger in my acts when this was absolutely anaesthetic. If I have said anything today because he would hurt you then if I have not seen this I lack scientific insight and not a knowledge of my feelings. I confess that I have not felt angry toward you at any time of the day. I think someone could prove to me that I have used an example or a slight figure to speak to something as a dirty day. Now that would be an objective behavior definition of anger as I would put more faith in anyone's proof that I have been angry toward you than I would have any evidence from my own inner feelings.

Carl Rogers [96:13] Well, that's exceedingly interesting. I guess there I don't understand the left. I am trying to make sense of that and I'm not quite sure whether you're saying when you experience anger now what you feel is or what your subjective process is. I'm having some autonomic reactions directed towards so and so is it really that is what you know.

B. F. Skinner [96:49] In general, certain kinds of behavior patterns are accompanied by autonomic discharge. It's not always emotional, strong exercise. This thing that we call anger which I would want to define as a predisposition to harm or damage and so on. It's a behavioral definition. Yes, I am sure often accompanied by stimulation which is relatively consistent and so that I might without moving at all and without being aware of any actual impulse to act in any way report that I feel angry perhaps you might give me an injection but rather know something like that. On the other hand, I think that the one thing that Freud has done is to make us examine our acts not to discover our feelings but we didn't have any of them unconscious. But to discover the consequences which were influential in determining our behavior and if I would take to be a behavioral analysis of an emotion all unconscious behaviors got to be that by definition because you don't have any conscious counterpart.

Carl Rogers [97:50] You don't have to know whatsoever. I'm really trying very hard to find out whether you are aware of living subjectively and it seems to me you've said things on both sides of that and I really don't feel quite sure or you'll think every hope so.

B. F. Skinner [98:06] So if you mean by this that I have learned to observe certain states of my own body perhaps to discuss some with some consistency and connection with my behaviors and so on report to you that I enjoy listening to Wagner and what I'm doing when I'm listening to it and so on. Yes, there this I do. I do it. I live a very emotional life. I suppose in that sense. But the thing that interests me about my emotions is not that I expect to go on enjoying life that way. The thing that I'm concerned with is my emotion in the sense of my disposition to act this way or that with respect to various states of affairs and I have many times gone back and looked at something I wrote and then shot to discover the emotionally noted words in this. I was not aware of it and I can't believe now that I felt that way about anybody and by feeling that I mean it that I was inclined to damage people this way. If this is a discovery of any stimulation in here or wherever it is, I don't know where it is. People's authorities have different over the years. I think it's a very trivial thing for me to discover that I am angry in that sense. I think it's very important to me to discover whether or not my behavior with respect to people at large is angry behavior. And that seems to me to be practically unconnected with what's going on inside me. Now I can enjoy being angry at someone. I can enjoy lots of better emotions and anger and I hope to go on doing so. In this sense I live a life of experience, of course. I would share all those feelings with you because I think I too live a life of feelings and sometimes regret them and often enjoy them and so on.

Carl Rogers [100:06] Part of what I've been trying to say certainly is that subjective feeling life, which to be sure, then if we can step outside of ourselves and look at it, but the subjective feeling life itself is an exceedingly important part of being human. And I see no reason for being apologetic in regard to it. I feel that it gives dimension and perspective to our more objective views to leave that for a moment because before we get completely beyond it, I'd like to go back to some of your comments about science which interested me a great deal. And if I understood that correctly, you really do see scientific knowledge as a corpus of external fact which kind of exists regardless of you, me, the physicists or anyone else sort of out here in semantic space. I think that one of the efforts of science can't help but be to achieve such a body of truth which is separate from any individual and so on. And yet it seems to me that the actual pursuit of science is a highly personal thing governed by subjective decisions in which subjective choices determine what we will study, determine the methods we use, determine the kind of meanings that we draw from it. Now, when enough people draw similar meanings from similar experiences, we say that seems to be a pretty well verified scientific fact, but I still think it rests on a subjective base. One thing that is always interested me, I don't think I've ever tried to put it in the words and I'm not quite sure how this will come out, is that as I watch clients who move a good deal in therapy, it seems to me that as they approach a better adjustment, they have in a sense learned to live a subjective science. I don't know whether this will seem like a complete contradiction in terms, but what I mean by that is that as the person becomes more open to what is going on within himself, he has better data on which to act, his hypotheses are more likely to be confirmed by his experience. He is in a curious way living out the very best of science on an internal subjective basis in regard to the events going on within him, the hypotheses he draws from those and the consequent behaviors upon which he acts, that's something that has always intrigued me.

B. F. Skinner [102:59] We were getting along famously there for a minute or two, I was admitting that I enjoyed my experiences and you were enjoying yours. That was fine until you start making them responsible for choices and decisions. Now you start making them do something, you say, they don't do anything, they're the result of doing something. I think when a person is making a decision, he is undoubtedly working on himself. But through the environment or through an internalization of action which was first learned in the environment, and that the both afterward feel the rightness of a choice or decision perhaps, but this is something which follows. If I were to teach someone how to make decisions, I would not, naturally, try to teach him this inner life, I would teach him the external mathematical statistical, whatever it would be, procedures you go through in arriving at the most likely decision in a given set of circumstances. Now what is happening when you make a lightning decision, I don't think you or I know that, either as he has inner or external data that happens so fast that not likely to follow it. I would insist on my distinction about the causal efficacy, I don't mean for a moment that a person who has arrived at a decision about his own life doesn't then feel a decision. I feel to describe and feel what he's now going to do and so on, but I would want to go as far as possible and asking whether or not the essential ingredients or not, the environment and his self-controlling, self-managing manipulations of the environment.

Carl Rogers [104:43] I feel various responses to that, but you were kind enough to give me the first statement this afternoon and I see by the clock that time is really up, so I'll give you the last bird in the discussion today. Thank you very much.

B. F. Skinner [105:10] Dr. Rott has kindly offered to let me start first this time since I let him do that yesterday. I hope this is symbolic of a continuing effort to deal fairly with each other in this protracted interview. I want to make two points in my opening remarks this morning. One I want to respond to Dr. Taminan's hardly veiled hint that we ought to start talking about education pretty soon and I want also to try to make progress in coming to some understanding with Dr. Rogers about the techniques which we separately aspires in arriving at, but I'm sure are very similar goals. It seems to me that the main issue which developed yesterday concern the question of inner experience and its place in human behavior. The conference has been very well designed, I think, to permit some kind of intellectual progress to go on. I'm going to try to state my case as clearly as I can and hope that after Dr. Rogers has made his ring remarks we can attempt to see whether there is a basic disagreement here or whether we are in some sense talking about the same thing. I want to examine three cases from the analysis of education which have to do with supposed inner events relevant to what is necessarily an external process of instruction. Now I don't hope that Dr. Rogers responsible for any one of these, but I have to regard him as a color traveler in the sense that the points I'm going to bring up seem to me to exemplify an effort to account for a behavior by isolating the originating event as something to do with inner experience. I want to take the three educational problems of teaching knowledge, verbal knowledge or skill, teaching thinking and teaching some of the personality traits which I did mention in passing yesterday. The first one of these has to do with the meaning of verbal behavior. I've written a rather long and I'm told very difficult but which attempts to account for verbal behavior on the part of the speaker and responses to verbal stimuli in the part of the listener without invoking the notion of meaning or the earlier notion of idea or proposition. These three terms, the older notion of the meaning of a proposition, the idea expressed in words or the more recent one information conveyed by a remark. These are all seem to me to make a fundamental mistake in supposing that there is some kind of cognitive activity which is not itself verbal which happens before verbal behavior and the verbal behavior becomes simply the symptom or symbol words being the same thing actually of the inner activity. Now, to take a non verbal example first, there is the old joke of the difference between a man racing for a train and the man training for a race. Physiologically they're both doing the same thing. How do they differ? Now, if you believe in meaning, something which characterizes behavior and I suppose someone like Tom and would have done so, then you would have to suppose that their behaviors are not identical. They may be physiologically but one of them is possessing the meaning of catching a train and the other one is possessing the meaning of improving himself or a future race. Actually, I look for that difference not in the behavior but I think is the same in both cases, it could be at least, but in the variables which are responsible for the behavior. In one case, there is a different history and what Tom will call a different purpose involved. Now, purpose is another, one of these inner things which, as a matter of fact Dr. Rogers mentioned, has something which had no meaning or a behavioristic analysis. I think in a sense it has a very great meaning and I have tried to suggest that by apologizing for the frequency in which I talk about reinforcement by pointing out that it is nothing more than an other way of talking about purpose. The only difference being that it identifies the characteristic moment at which an event is important. In the evolution of behavior, if you say a spider is building a web in order to catch flies, so that the spider will survive and perpetuate its kind, it looks as if the future catching a flies in the web has something to do with the building of the web. Now, actually I think a biologist would agree that that is the wrong order of events and that the purpose of the web flies in the past, that spiders which have in the past built effective web have found a supply of food which has meant that they have survived well the behavior and it is an inherited behavior pattern and quite sure in that case, which was responsible for that supply of food. So in the biological evolutionary scheme of things, what seems to be the future purpose of an event is actually a reference to past instances. And this is true in the case of operant behavior also because what I am doing now in order to have an effect on you can hardly be determined by the effect which I have not yet had. But it is determined by the effects I have had in the past which have shaped my verbal behavior in various ways and that you are of course going to shape my behavior in the next 5 or 10 minutes. I am verbally willing to accept the point of the joke about the rat who points out that he has me well controlled. I think that any science is eventually shaped as a human activity by its subject matter. The man designing a cyclotron designs it precisely so that certain events will happen in it in a given way and if he does not do that, this cyclotron will be discarded and someone else will survive. So these feelings that you have that the meaning of what you are doing, the purpose of what you are doing is very important are genuine enough. If I ask some man what are you running for is I am running the catch of train. This does not mean to me that he is aware of his purpose in anything except the sense that he is aware of the conditions under which he is running and of course the condition which will bring that running to an end. He observes this as a purpose in his past and in analyzing the teaching of verbal knowledge I think it is very important to understand that you are always concerned with the teaching of behavior and not the ideas expressed in the behavior. Logically there is no such thing as a proposition apart from all the ways in which the proposition can be expressed but that is a pretty logical statement that makes my sense either. What you do to teach a given idea in depth is to teach it in many ways of speaking and that is the closest you will ever get to an idea apart from verbal behavior. Some set of conditions which are responsible for a whole cluster of verbal responses and the difference between root, learning and teaching insightfully is very often just that. If you teach a thing not as a memorized single verbal response but as a cluster of responses related to the same variables. Now the second example where people have sought something inside the storage in order to explain his behavior and therefore to my mind, misinterpreted the object of education is an example that I will go right back and take the scene in Plato's Meno. In which its awkwardity is it retends to teach the slave boy the thug which is golden fear. Now Plato was a devil of the inner life and felt as a matter of fact that the soul knows the truth and that learning is merely remembering, recollecting, recollecting perhaps in the sense of reassembling but suggesting that the process of education is only bringing out something which is latent in the stilt. This is still a strong philosophy in education today. Let's examine that case. Socrates wants to prove this point that any human organism knows a very difficult proposition, the doubling of the square. He goes a boy in and goes through a ritualistic procedure which is highly so critic in its essence. First of all constructs a square and says to the boy this is a square isn't it the boy says yes. If I do this a device in the two parts doesn't it the boy says yes and so on and he goes on this way. And this example is still cited today as proof of a way of teaching the insightful understanding of mathematical theorem with the general pattern of drawing the solution out of the student. Now I want to the trouble once of having the boy's comments copied out of that passage in the Meno. And when you put them together they run exactly one minute I don't have my the sheet with me I didn't know this case would come up. The whole set of responses of the boy goes something like this. Yes certainly Socrates quite right Socrates now of course not Socrates yes you're undoubtedly right Socrates and so on. And when it gets through there is no effort made to show whether the boy can go through this again and I'm probably sure he could not. He has done nothing but agreed to Socrates. The one of this is one of the great frauds of educational literature. It is still cited as an example of how one can draw true out from the inside the occurrence of the student. This is still the theory back of many current mathematics curricular programs. You must get the student excited you must get him to discover for himself. And the implication is that you don't know until you have discovery for yourself. That's something you've discovered yourself you will remember better. Well I have no doubt that in the hands of a good teacher this kind of Socrates technique can stimulate interest curiosity and perhaps even effort and industry on the part of the student. But when you analyze what is happening in that case it comes back to the behavioral manipulations that I've been talking about. There's never been never any demonstration that I would subscribe to. That we do all possess you could in ourselves in some way in form and that we can be led to discovery for ourselves. Men discovered geometry you could I suppose brought together a long history of discovery put it in a book. It was a difficult thing to suppose we must do it all over again before we know geometry is I think a very inefficient way to approach education. I've seen a seventh grade teacher trying to teach grammar to a class in just this way. Now the Greek discovered grammar too and it was a great discovery and it must have taken a great deal of time. Well I a seventh grade class must go through all of that again in its own. I don't know but this teacher was starting he had a sentence written on the board. He was trying to get the students to say that's the thing word and that's an action word. The boys who spoke up and said noun and verb or shush they were told that mustn't use those words. Let's find out about this for ourselves. And for a long class period the students struggled toward the recognition of two types of words which turn out then to be called nouns and verbs. Now this may have some motivating effect although I can think of much better ways of motivating children. I think there is nothing about grammar that you cannot understand unless you've discovered it for yourself. Now a third example will be some of the character traits that I talked about yesterday as examples again of behavior which we like to attribute to something inside the organism. I mentioned the enjoyment of art, music, literature, one's interest in what one does and so on. A someone brought up at night the question of emotional conditioning and I'll take one example which involves that. There are some children who can take punishment without crying, racing to be particularly brave, who can take novel experiences without panicking. Now how can we bring this about? Is there something called courage which is born into some of us and not into others so that we must give up on this? Or could anyone be given these traits of character? Rousseau and the book I've already mentioned they've made which is a remarkable treatise on human behavior. I will be fundamentally wrong but nevertheless a most ingenious book for its time. Rousseau suggests ways in which you could teach children to take strongly a verse in stimuli without emotional reactions. He begins with the idea of the cold bath water which will make a baby cry. He says begin on the first day with water at body temperature and then reduce the temperature every day. And he says use the thermometer, we're going to be scientific about this. You bring the temperature down one degree every day and eventually you're plopping the baby in white water and the baby takes this perfectly well is not disturbed by it at all. You may not call it an emotion that is the ability to take something which an ordinary child has not been through that forced into history would not be able to take. It might be timid, it might be croven, cowardly, all his life. But Rousseau also took the case of a much more emotional example. He tells about the story of Hector Nandramaki and the baby who was frightened by his father's war helmet as he says farewell to him. And he raises a question of why it is that small children can be frightened by ugly masks or faces. And he suggests that you construct a whole series of masks going from a very pleasant face to a perfectly terrifying face by very small steps. Do you first of all work with a baby one day where the pleasant face on and then you slowly move into this and he's never been disturbed at any time by this very frightening spectacle but is now not emotionally disturbed by it. Now, I believe that we have seriously neglected the emotional training in our educational systems. People object violently to that scene in world until in which the children are supposed to wear lallypops around their necks but not to touch them with their tongues during the day and so on. But I would like to see a little more moral and ethical self-control taught. This can be done, I'm sure, so that everyone will be a brave man, a brave woman who will be able to take necessary painful stimuli without flinching and so on, who will not be much disturbed by what otherwise would be terribly emotional circumstances. This would include periods of failure, periods of frustration, periods of otherwise unhappiness. Now, I've taken these three examples, the meaning of a verbal proposition, the thinking through of a problem in say mathematics and a character trait. These are all areas in which the national tendency used to suppose that this individual who is marked by this possesses something inside himself which is very important. The person who knows it, he's got it in here. He can talk about it, yes, but when he isn't talking about it, it's in here. Well, I'm sure it's in here, too, in some physiological condition. And I'm sure that the person knows very often whether it's in there or not, but he's got it in there because it's been put in. Knowledge has been implanted, not drawn out. Many people to misunderstand the meaning of the word educate, ducaring, drawing something out from inside the student. Knowledge has implanted in our job as educators, yes, to implant the behavior or to shape the behavior or to build it up and strengthen it. Well, and to try to find it already in the student and draw it out. I don't deny for a moment the existence of these things which one can see when one looks at oneself and reports on whether he's a fraud or not, whether he is getting the point of his problem or not, whether he sees the point of an explanation of the theorem and so on. I'm sure this goes on. The question between us is not one of the existence of the inner events, but their status as explanatory, efficacious, causes of the over-behavior which seems to me to be the business of education to set up. One other big point here, when you put a student into a difficult situation, one which might frighten him, but it doesn't because he controls himself, one which might puzzle him, but it doesn't because he solves the problem and so on, one which might show him up to be entering, but it doesn't because he comes through with the answer. When you're doing this sacred swim technique, creating a situation which a child or a student must be knowledgeable, insightful, and brave, you'll leave it up to the individual to solve his own instructional problems, and that has been the regular trend in education. On the other hand, and when he does solve them in the rare case, you admire him. You admire Abraham Lincoln for getting an education, although no one taught him. You don't admire Franklin Roosevelt for getting an education, however, because Harvard taught him. There is nothing to admire, but if the educational system is powerful enough to produce these results in everyone, the only point of admiring is to make up for the deficiencies of your education. I would prefer a world with which everyone got an education without trying very hard. If we don't have that world, I will share in your admiration for a man who gets an education against great odds. But the difference is that the reasons for admiring will disappear in an effective world. We'll miss that, but it's something we've got to learn to get along without.

Carl Rogers [124:01] I just came and told me that he got up early this morning. I didn't know he got up that early. And so did I. I feel when I got to all that he has been saying, I'm not quite sure who he is he's talking to, but somehow he's not talking to me. I mean, that's so often and probably our differences are quite real and quite deep. It's very difficult to prevent communication from sliding off center and talking past each other. I really have no particular response to what he has just said because they say I really don't feel that he is talking to the kind of issues I feel instead I'm compelled or feel impelled to give a speech of mine too. Probably the real reconciliation, the real making of this into a dialogue, make him later in this hour, or perhaps it can only occur in you. I'm not sure we'll have to see. I thought about yesterday's session. I felt that because the topic was one of control of behavior, my own remarks tended really necessarily to be critical and anti. That's not too characteristic of me. I'm more a person who affirms than who criticizes. And so I felt a little unhappy about that. And I thought that perhaps to offset that, I'd like to make a few remarks about the design of a culture to use Dr. Skinner's good phrase as I see it. Also, I will bring in the matter of education that I'd like to bring it in within that context. I think what part of my purpose in doing this is to indicate that when one does place a value on the subjective aspects of experience, then when one designs a culture, one takes different directions, then if one does not value that. The thing that specifically got me to thinking about this was Wendell Johnson's very good challenge to us and to you that perhaps one of the first things we should do was to point out the differences between pigeons and persons. That somehow had real meaning to me. I think that persons do have a capacity for awareness. We have this rich capacity for symbolization, which to my mind is probably synonymous with awareness. We have a capacity for a rich subjective living. We have a capacity for something I like to think of as an organismic valuing process. That is that we are able to test objects and events in terms of our own experiencing as to the values they have for us in enhancing us or being destructive in our experience. Those are a few of the capacities which persons have. I think most of those pigeons have relatively little capacity for except the last and I might learn from them. I'd like to talk a little bit about designing a culture which will maximize the truly human qualities and attempt to build a culture for persons not for pigeons. I'd start out on this, basing my remarks on some of the research that we've done in psychotherapy. Because I am to some degree a scientist, I was a little amused last night to think of myself only as an overwhelmed practitioner. I have had some experience with the scientific self as well. I think that some of the studies that have been completed in the realm of psychotherapy indicate that we know something of the kind of psychological climate which would promote and maximize the most truly human qualities. We've begun to specify some of the elements of that psychological climate. We know that when a person is prized as a person, valued as a person, this helps. We know that when the personal meanings which he finds within his own experience are deeply understood by another so that they are confirmed in him, this too is a quality of the psychological climate which can release in human qualities. We know that when he comes into a genuine subjective encounter with other real persons, this too is an element which helps to release. I think that in the kind of culture I would be in favor of designing that parents and teachers and others could be helped by trying to establish such conditions in the life situation of the persons with whom they deal. Now we will certainly expect and wish to discover more of the elements which would have that kind of releasing qualities. Our goal in such studies and in such research would be to find the conditions which would increase the capacity for a personal choice, increase the capacity for self-direction, increase the capacity for spontaneity and creativity, for independence, for flexibility, will increase the tendency which Donald Johnson described so well last night as being turned personal scientific living, that is living in terms of scientific principles within one's own personal and subjective life. I suppose that you could say that in short we would by establishing these conditions tend to bring about in individuals the likelihood that these persons could not be shaped up by controllers. I think again part of the panel discussion last night was quite accurate in my view and that to respect. Now a word or two about the application of those ideas to the educational situation. I feel that I have a number of occasions endeavor to try to establish those conditions as a learning climate for students. And I haven't always been successful. I feel that there's a good deal we do not know about the kinds of conditions that really do release freedom in people. And yet, when one has been able to set the psychological climate which enables individuals to become more free in choosing their purposes, more self-directing toward their goals, if they tend to feel a greater reliance on their own initiative, the results are sufficiently exciting and sufficiently compelling from an achievement point of view that one can't rest, quietly without trying to advance that field further. It is I think that we are talking here of something which can be empirically measured and studied. That the kind of educational climate which I would hope would be created in this culture we might design for persons would be such as to enhance and promote self-directed learning. It doesn't mean going back to have to struggle step by step through all of the Greeks learning centuries ago. It means following through one's current purposes using all of the modern resources available. But it doesn't mean doing that on a self-chosen, self-directed, self-initiated basis. I think that kind of an education would not achieve static goals which we could define in advance. What it would achieve would be the development of changing persons with a greater degree of self-confidence in directing themselves. To my mind, this is something that the modern world very badly needs. Quite another way of talking about what I'm describing is that as I see some of these developments, the whole philosophy of democracy and its stress upon self-determination and so on, has thus far made very slight progress in the world. We have established it a little bit in the political realm and it has begun to show slight pervasiveness in other areas. But the thing I'm talking about is extending the philosophy of democracy down to individual life, individual learning, group and family living and so on, where it would be not only the worth of the individual, but his capacity and right for self-determination and choice which would be important. Obviously the kind of thing I'm talking about would not produce a closed society. No one could possibly plan this in advance as a closed book. But it would produce would be an open changing kind of society. Change and the process of change would be built into it. This too I think is valuable. By developing a society in which parents and teachers and all of those in positions of leadership whether governmental or otherwise were skilled in providing the conditions which make for personal growth, we would have a society in which very well and individual self-actualization would take place. We would have individual persons developing uniquely with a sense of personal freedom and freely seeking solutions each one to do the problems that were real to him, as well as seeking solutions to the problems of his society. In this kind of a culture which I'm talking about, every citizen would be a responsible planner. Every citizen would be a member of the elite. Every citizen would be a phrasher, not just one somewhere in the background. Thus the likelihood of a society being a living, changing flow of intelligent encounter with the problems faced in the world would be greatly enhanced. We would have initiated a process of continuing and self-directed change not a community with static goals established by one person or established by an elite. I think it would be very clear that to me the most important task of the behavioral sciences is to discover and to endeavor to establish the conditions which release variability, release creative behavior, and self-directedness, thus making the individual less predictable and less likely to be controlled. And I think that this is just as feasible a goal for the behavioral sciences as to establish a planned control. Well, end of speech.

Questioner 1 [136:15] The Skinner opened up on.

Carl Rogers [136:20] One of the stories that I've heard, I don't know whether it's true, but if it isn't, that should or could be true, is that one of the people who was early investigating the operant conditioning of verbal behavior made a very convincing presentation of this to his students and they conducted research and showed that you could condition the verbal behavior of individuals and so on. So his students thought it would be fun to operantly condition him. So he had a certain gesture that he tended to use somewhat and they all agreed, okay, when he uses that gesture, we'll nod or smile or look, especially attentive. We'll rewarding for that behavior, we will condition his behavior to increase the gesture. And so they did that and it worked. More and more, he began to use this particular gesture that they were rewarding. So that when they felt they had him sufficiently conditioned, they told him about their low experiment, and he all had a good laugh together. Now, the point that for me is crucial,

G. A. Gladstein [137:26] is that once the instructor realized that he was being manipulated by these rewards,

Carl Rogers [137:31] they would no longer operate as rewards. They won't look precisely how he would perceive them, probably as being a little bit appreciating of himself. At any rate, it's perfectly clear that though all of the external behaviors might remain exactly the same, they might decide to go on, operantly conditioning is just you. But the rewards would no longer be effective. Why, because of a change in the subjective perception of the instructor, as to what constitutes a reward, and no longer with this head nodding and smiling and so on, be perceived as a reward? Well, it's that kind of thing that I think we need to include in our world of science.

B. F. Skinner [138:17] First, let me clear up that anecdote. There are actually two cases blended together here. In one of them, I shaped the behavior of a psychiatrist, who was participating in a round table, and it was, I thought, talking a little too much for good communication. Perhaps a step of paper down the table to a friend of mine, saying, watch Dr. X's left hand, I'm going to shape a chopping response. It doesn't happen that Dr. X was a cross-table for me and talked mainly at me, and he did tend to adjust your great deal. So I simply looked to one side, so at the corner of my eye, I could see pretty much his general posture. Whenever his left arm was up, I looked at him, but dead hand, and whenever his left hand went down, I nodded. Within five minutes, he was... The note came back. Let's see if it extinguished. I must confess I wasn't able to. The other story, which I think is in part of this apocryphal story you just heard, is that I, sometime ago, gave a series of lectures at Midwestern College, and a professor at the college who had read Joseph Wood Crouch and other similar authors was in a rage that I had been asked to speak. And they opened up the week that I was in residence there by telling his class that I was a mess, and that so long as I stayed in an ivory tower all would be well, but if I ever showed any signs of having a practical effect, he would be in favor of calling out the firing squad. My disturbance in his class resented this a little, and did plan this particular trick. They agreed that they would first of all reinforce him for coming over and standing on the right hand corner of the platform, and when they had achieved that, they would then reinforce him for going back and facing the blackboard. They did this just by all being very dead, and until he moved not directly, and then they began to smile, agreeing with him, and very soon he was teetering on the corner of the platform. They had a signal went out, that was enough of that. These teeters were quiet, but they were all dead in the pan. When they turned back, told the boy, and turned, looked at those, they were all nodding again. And they told me, I wasn't there, they told me, did he finish the lecture, facing the blackboard, talking over the show? Now, in media case, to my knowledge, as the controlled person, in that case, ever learned what happened, and I should not like to think of the consequences, because it is certainly true that, once you discover that these characteristic social reinforcers have been used for a purpose, they don't build your resistance against them. The back slapping Dale Carnegie fellow was out to make you his friend and influence you. It doesn't go very far if you have read Dale Carnegie also. But it is not true that the reinforcers don't work, and I don't know anyone who has not been to some extent reinforced by flattery, even though you know the interior purposes of the Flatterer. The gambler, the other logical gambler knows all too well. Buying his gambling at least, I need books scheduled to reinforce him. He's the victim of his barrelbaratio schedule. They cannot, for that reason, stop it. The social reinforcement of a poor smile and so on can be destroyed if you discover that the person who your case is out to control it, because that does deviate of the reinforcer. But when the reinforcer has his stability, as money has, you, I know very well that it's being used to control you and still suffer control. I want to tell another. What would I talk to that after that coming on that?

Carl Rogers [142:20] Because I think that it's extremely interesting to think through this issue, that a clearly a human behavior, which is effective only when it can be or mostly effective, only when the operation of that theory can be concealed from those and whom it is operating, that seems to me to be a relatively unsatisfactory theory of human behavior. For example, the persons involved in tool became aware of the planning and so on that had gone into it. And if to that extent it would destroy the effectiveness of many of the reinforcers, then somehow that's not a very complete or effective theory of behavior. This has been one of the things that has perplexed me and I'm interested that you skin air grease on that. On the other hand, in another field, it has always interested me that there is some periods of psychotherapy, for example. George Kelly's procedures in therapy being one which, operating effectively only as the client is quite unaware of the theory that the therapist is acting upon and the principal is trying to promote. Now, it has seemed to me to be of interest that in the kind of approach that makes sense to me in therapy, the more the individual notice of the climate I would like to create, the principles that seem to me to be operative, the more intelligently he can participate in the experience of therapy. And it seems to me the same thing would be true in the culture that I was trying to describe, that the more the individual realized the basic principles we were after, the more he realized that theory of what was happening, the more intelligent and probabilism or enthusiastic would be his participation in that culture. I must say that for me that is one reason for feeling that it is a more potent or widely usable theory, that it is not destroyed by people becoming aware of what's happening.

B. F. Skinner [144:35] I'm afraid I didn't make my point. The reason that discovering that someone is flattering you instantly, leads to a counter-controlling action on your part, is not that there's anything wrong with an ocean of reinforcement, but that particular reinforcer has been devalued. If I am paying subjectively, would you say, no, I wouldn't. Actually, a piece of money, a dollar bill, has reinforcing effects, power, value, because it is exchangeable at this paper. It could lay for immediately reinforcing goods at one kind or another. Now, if the money devalues, if that bill becomes worthless, it will no longer reinforce. But that doesn't raise any objection to its reinforcing effect. When it heads this particular value and the thing which deep values it, is that it is no longer exchangeable before our primary reinforcers. I don't know of any case in which knowledge of the process of reinforcement does destroy its effect. If someone is insincere in his compliments, the effect is destroyed, just as the effect of money as a reinforcer is destroyed in an excessive inflation. I myself work for a living, although I know perfectly well that I'm being reinforced with money. I came out here, and getting reinforced is still came. I'm very delighted to be here. If you're trying to reduce and throw your weight, you're highly aware of the reinforcing effects of various food stuffs and so on. Although you may be successful in counter-conquering on this, you don't deny that these are reinforcing, and if you don't watch it, they will strengthen certain behaviors of ingestion to the point that which you'll be damaged. This is a common misunderstanding that if you know you're being worked on, it won't work. If you know that the money that's being used to pay you is bad money, it won't work. But that comes about by an extinction of the conditioning process, which made it a conditionary enforcer in the first place.

Carl Rogers [146:43] I'm interested in your statement that to the extent that the individual realizes this reinforcer is offered insincerely or something like that, that it will change in value for him. If this brings me to something that is a very real healing reaction that I would like to express, I have a high respect for your sincerity. You seem to me to be a genuinely sincere person, yet as I watch the way in which your theories are described as working in practice, I get a very different feeling. I was quite perplexed last night to sense the way I was reacting to Professor Tesla's reading of this excerpt from Aldon II. It's been quite a while since I've read Aldon II. There's a really good company as a fresh thing. And I was genuinely surprised at the revulsion I felt, and I tried to puzzle out afterward why, because what was being described were these group therapy devotional type exercises which certainly were innocuous enough in themselves. And I think I realized that the reason I have the reaction I did was that it seems to me that in the world as you would like to see it, nothing is really genuine. Everything has a pseudo quality to it. It is partly, I think, because of your devaluation of the subjective, everything real is something different from what it seems to be. That is, for the people in these devotional type exercises, these expressions of loyalty to the code and so on, I assume that for them those would be experienced subjectively as a real devotion. But only phrasier knows and knew that they were planned that way, that these were not real, that they're nothing but a piece of human engineering designed to keep people in line with the code. And I realized that if an individual in Aldon II ever realized that, the least he would do I think would be to stop going to those exercises. So, as I sense the whole society is based on the notion of surreptitious control and it made me wonder how long a real Aldon II would last. And if what I hear is correct, this is no idle question because I have heard that you're really trying to get funds to establish a Aldon II. I would like to throw this in that in spite of your sincerity which I really trust, it seems to me that the hypothetical worlds you construct are basically insincere.

B. F. Skinner [149:46] They're not what they seem to be, they're not genuine. First, I'm glad that you give me an opportunity to comment on Dr. Tesla's comments, and roll them too, though we're not designed to warm the cocktails of the heart of an author. But I actually planned it that way. There are two things about that book which have to be taken into account, I think, in discussing Frazier. Professor Tesla raised the question of the difficulty of critic has and identifying the author with a particular character. One thing he can do is to ask the author. I am here to say that when I wrote the book, I was in great doubts about Frazier. I think the book is mainly a struggle between two aspects of my own personality, represented by Boris and Frazier. But when I had given Frazier as a fictional character the chance to say things, I didn't dare say myself, it all seemed to me to make sense, and I am now a confirmed Frazier.

G. A. Gladstein [150:54] No.

B. F. Skinner [150:56] This, however, doesn't make that particular passage a strong passage for two reasons. The first place Frazier makes this point. I've made him deliberately an unpleasant person, and there's a scene in which this whole question is argued out. The whole point here is, as Frazier says, that a person who may, through a scientific analysis, work out a better way of life, may not himself be able to lead that life. He may not himself be the kind of admirable person that particular culture can not produce, because he himself is not a product of it. And his photos have all the things to the contrary. One can arrive at good cultural practices without being able to absorb them himself. Frazier has what you might call negative charisma. All great leaders have had charisma. There's personal force. Jesus have charisma, we say Paul have charisma. The other leaders have had our less admirable charisma. They were effective as people. But Frazier is not effective as a person. In fact, Frazier tells the point of that out. No one knows who he is or no one knows his part in founding the community. He tries to get a couple of architects to come and explain something to his small group, and they go off swimming instead and sell run. He is not a leader in that sense, currently at all. And this was deliberately put into the book. So the his description of their Sunday services was meant to be cynical, meant to arouse the reader to a critical attitude. I wrote the book to alert people to the possibilities of utopia. The main problem that someone pointed out is that it was back quite a long time, very critical thinking about utopia. The problem today is not whether they're possible, but how to prevent them. This can be serious. Dr. Roberts has said, I am, I believe, sincere about this. I'm very much concerned about the possible misuse of the behavioral technology. The other piece in that passage is weak. The attributed last night, the brought in the various values, which Frazier lists, I had to write a book. Describing an experiment, and I had to guess at the result of a ten-year run. The point of the book is that all cultures are experimental, or should they either experimental whether they're designed to be or not because they were eventually disappeared, they are not strong, but that a properly designed culture should. Design itself has an experiment so that it can be tested, it can change as occasion dictates. And I had to guess at the values, which would have emerged at the end of ten years, and they turned out to be middle-class values. I'm verbally aware of that. I'm aware of my middle-class state, my middle-class training, and naturally I would go for things like health, wisdom, wealth, comfort, productivity, creativity, and so on. But the passage in which those are discussed directly, I think, presents them in a better light. To begin with, you have to settle on some plan for a community. And so to begin with, I prefer health to illness. I prefer wisdom to ignorance and so on. And I think we could all agree on that without overlooking the fact that there are times when one must decide whether to value health above wisdom and so on. You start a design based upon some of these principles. I don't really think that they are values in a philosophical sense. You have to design for something. You plan for something. And to begin with, you would choose what seems best in our way of life. But under the conditions of an experimental community, you might very well find these things changing. The thing I worry about is that we will be too successful, not in regimenting people, but in making them too rambunctious and hard to handle. I'm not sure we'll ever start an experimental community. But if I do, one of the things that should be most challenging will be the total ecological control of the child from birth for the first five or six years. Those are the great wasted years in our present culture. These sensitive organisms during that period are capable of fantastic achievements and all arrive at the age of five or six badly messed up. Now that can be done in a different way. It will be done with total control at the beginning on the part of the environment that will certainly engender techniques of self-management and self-control so that the environment can relax as the child grows and the child will be on his own. I quite agree with Dr. Rodgers that we need to release the inner freedom of the individual, meaning by that freedom from explicit and particularly opposite external controls. So he does. Talk to himself, go over plans, reveal himself as an individual and so on. And I want to teach him how to do this. These techniques of self-management can be taught and should be taught at a tender age. In the sense that Professor Tesla was hoping that the child's psychiatrist last night would say that six was too early to arrive at ethical maternity. And I'm delighted to say that my colleague is a psychological and psychiatric science has backed me up. There's no reason why a child at the age of six cannot have arrived at a very effective system of ethical self-management. And I think that is true. It's not too early. We don't know what is too early. That's one of the awful things about one of these inner forces that I'm sure Dr. Rodgers would discard his rapidly as I, the whole notion of readiness. The child can't learn to read until he's ready to read. And so on. This is one of the worst of the inhibiting inner experiential, fictional, hypothetical limitations on human behavior. Omar Moore, the Yale University, has three-and-a-half year-old children typing on the electric typewriter's complete sentences using correct fingering. And these are not routine learned patterns at all. They are verbal responses to projected sentences on the screen. Three-and-a-half years old. And these are nohobin, middle-class children. They're not geniuses at all. We have no idea what this very intricate human organism is capable of. I want to give Dr. Rodgers a little time to answer what's before we stop. What I hope before the morning is over. That I can also raise the question of how pigeons differ from people.

Carl Rogers [157:28] I feel one of the things that enrich one of the really basic things in which day-to-day skin air I agree is in there be roughly vast and untapped potential. The reality is that the human organism have not been fully released or fully developed. And though we might take somewhat different pathways to that on that score, I think we're in real agreement. I was also intrigued because I haven't been sure how much he would call it control. I would call it influence. How much influence I might have had on Dr. Skinner. I was intrigued that his statement that if you're going to design a culture, if you're going to design a society, you have to choose certain values to start with. I don't know what he means in his terminology by having to choose certain values because it was my whole understanding that it was unprecisely that point that he felt this was not feasible. I would hardly agree though with his statement that we do have to choose. We do have to choose certain values that those precede are attempt to redesign a culture. And I will also hope that we would choose values which in themselves incorporated the whole process of change. This is why I never have been fond of the rather static type of values where they're middle class or otherwise which are incorporated in more than two or in some of Dr. Skinner's ratings. And I'd like to change the topic just a bit to bring in more of the issue that we haven't touched on and that I would like to bring in. This is the feeling I have that we are very likely to settle for much too narrow of view of the behavioral sciences. This I think is one of the real differences between us. I'd like to read very quickly just two statements, one from a psychiatrist and one from a psychologist that put this in a good way. That your dean as a psychiatrist says, unfortunately those who make a fetish of scientific method tend to exclude subjectivity from their data because it is not quote scientific. For my part I cannot believe that any study of man which excludes the subjective can be a science at all that best it is only a partial science. I should think that a science must include all the data of experience and when life problems are the subject matter then the data of subjectivity must bulk exceedingly large. Origin, big and tall in California puts it in terms that are a little too drastic to suit my face but still are meaningful. He said the behaviors have shown us the true nature of neurosis and not in what they have taught but in how they have redefined man to avoid real danger of adopting much too narrowly perspective. When we turn the tools of our science to the study of man and I hope that as we try to design cultures as we endeavor to improve education as we endeavor to release these potentialities in the individual we can have a science which takes a look at the whole range of data and at the wholeness of the human being. That is one thing that I have felt increasingly through this discussion I wanted to say. I would just make one mark before we break it.

B. F. Skinner [161:20] I do not, I believe that exclude anything from my considerations. I thought that I had several times acknowledged the existence of events within the individual with which that individual has especially intimate contact. I confessed to having feelings and so on. I confessed to their importance in my life. As a scientist I raised a question on whether they are something which preceded and determined my action or are always something by way of an observation of my own behavior after the fact or possibly before the fact if what I am actually observing are the conditions which are to be responsive. I think we are arriving at two fairly satisfactory conditions here. We have identified I think some basic differences. In the other hand I think that I have brought it greatly from this. You asked who I was talking to and felt that I was not talking to you in my opening remarks. You and I ought to be able to analyze the verbal behavior better than that. It seems to me that I am interested in more than anyone else. I think in the nature of verbal contact. I have written a book about it and I have been interested in it too. I don't believe any more than yet or in the communication of ideas back and forth, the implanting of opinions, attitudes and so on. These I think are not effective ways of talking about verbal behavior. I didn't come out here to tell you anything in the ordinary sense of communicating or to be told anything in that sense. I came out here to participate in certain amounts of verbal behavior as I might have come out here to play football or something like that. I would hope to go away and change from this and I think I am change. Although I may not know through what extent. There is a story about Bertrand Stein which is relevant here I think. Bertrand Stein and Alice B. Talkless were companion or having dinner one night with Robert Hutchins when he was president of Chicago. Mortimer Havler was there and other from the Lex and there was a very reliable discussion. When he became to close, Alice B. Talkless went up to Mortimer Havler and said, Bertrand Stein has said things here to might it will take her months to understand.

Carl Rogers [163:58] I look forward to a very good month following this month. Let's take a break.

G. A. Gladstein [164:10] During this next hour we hope to function two ways to help you resolve perhaps some of the questions that you have been faced with. First half hour we will deal with some written questions. Most of them were given to us last evening as a result of the group meetings. As a matter of fact we have synthesized these into about 20. We have this many which were in the hundreds so this posed some problem for us. Out of the 20 we have tried to select ten. Let's hope we get beyond five. I shall indicate the question each of the main participants have a copy of the list and then ask the one to whom it was directed to respond. If the other person would like to respond, he may certainly do so. The first one is this. Directed to Dr. Rogers is a subjective feeling of freedom. A sufficient evidence that this freedom is real and that man is not subject to the control of his genetic and environmental conditions.

Carl Rogers [166:00] I think that that indicates some misunderstanding of the point of view I have presented because as I have said I feel in thorough agreement with Dr. Skinner. That viewed from the external scientific objective perspective man is determined by his genetic and cultural influences. I have also said that in an entirely different dimension such things as freedom and choice are extremely real. I think I would remind you of the example I gave of Victor Frankl in the concentration camp. It would have been very interesting to try to tell him that the freedom of choice which he felt remained to himself was completely unreal. He knew it was real because he saw people who did not exercise that who felt they really were completely controlled. I like flies for the ones who had the best chance of survival for those who still retain the concept that I am a person I choose. For me this is an entirely different dimension which is not easily reconcilable to the deterministic point of view. I look at it as being similar to the situation in physics where you can prove that the wave theory of light is supported by evidence. So is the corpuscular theory. The two of them are contradictory. They are not at the present state of knowledge reconcilable but I think one would only be narrowing his perception of physics to deny one of those and accept only the other. It is in the same sense that is why I keep using the term paradox that I regard these two dimensions as both real although they exist in a paradoxical relationship. Have you skinned or do you have a response?

B. F. Skinner [167:54] Yes, there are areas in the world where people have very little of this conception of self or of personal worth. And it is very difficult for us coming from our culture to deal with them or to understand what is involved or why they are not more active in their own behalf. I would trace this difference not to a genetic difference or nothing to do with the basic structure of the organisms in these two parts of the world but rather to what we call literature of democracy. When you are trying to overthrow the despotic control of a ruler, your only strength is likely to be found in the people themselves. The literature of democracy has provided a long history in which the individual has been assured that he is the ultimate source of power which is true that he himself can rise against someone who would control him. By organizing with others who have similar intonations, he can become a powerful force and in some sense he can rule himself or at least he can consent to being ruled by someone who rules more in line with his own interests. That was, as I see it, a discovery of a theory of democracy and I don't mean Greek or Roman democracy which was that of an elite. This was a discovery of the importance of the common man and of the fact that you could bring us to his attention and convert him into a person who was able to take political and usually revolutionary military activity and overthrow other kinds of control. We have this in our culture, we do teach our children that they themselves are the final measure that life is designed for them and that if they are not getting what they want they can do something about it. And this carried over brother feebly it would seem to concentration camps and to prisoner of war camps for example in Korea and to the Chinese. There seems to be some evidence that the democratic way of life is suffering is not being transmitted by our culture well and I think I can see the reasons for this. It is in conflict with certain scientific facts about personal freedom and initiative and I'm interested in trying to work out a philosophy which will do just as much for the individual but which will not take on the expression turned with inner initiating activity which has served their purpose and I think are now outmoded.

G. A. Gladstein [170:33] The second question directed mainly to Dr. Skinner. You spoke of your preference for studying observable behaviors rather than less observable areas such as personality traits. Do you regard the study and measurement of these behaviors as sufficient for the science of human behavior or do you feel you must then move up the abstraction ladder and somehow relate observable behaviors to broader concepts such as personality?

B. F. Skinner [171:16] I'm aware of the oversimplification of the operand situation as an experimental situation. All early science is oversimplified because you can't do anything until you develop techniques which will permit you to handle simple relations once you have those you can handle more complex. In current work in the field of operating conditioning we deal with very elaborate samples or segments of behavior and we could I think set up a reasonable analogy to some of the problems we've been discussing at this conference. However I'll hold my remarks on the difference between pigeons and people until later. The question about personality is not whether it is an area to be studied but whether it is a useful concept. It is one of these inner terms. I think it has been a dangerous one. If you say that a juvenile delinquent is suffering from a disordered personality and then you want to explain the disordered personality you will have to get back to the individual's earlier history and perhaps possibly genetic factors but very much more likely is cultural conditioning. And once you've got back there I think you can use those facts to explain the juvenile delinquency itself rather than going through the middle term of personality. As I see it, personality is an explanatory fiction which does at times seem to offer the chances of talking about broader patterns of behavior, greater constellations of behavior than are conveniently handled in terms of behavior itself. And it may serve some heuristic purpose at this stage in our knowledge. Although I would always caution the person interested in personality that he must eventually get back to what it is that as you say expresses a personality and that once this has analyzed effectively you will come up with an alternative way of dealing with these problems to be much more satisfactory when you come to do anything about this. You would want to relate problem behavior to the various conditions which influence behavior without calling it the expression of a problem-ridden personality. I see no advantage in the other term except a temporary one in permitting you to talk about what seemed like pretty big issues and not too awkward away. I think the saving and awkwardness is paid for at a very great price.

G. A. Gladstein [173:41] Dr. Roger, do you want to respond to that?

Carl Rogers [173:44] I might comment just very briefly. Every time a question has to do with scientific procedure, Dr. Skinner and I find ourselves in a great deal of agreement. I think too that from the perspective of science it is observable behavior that we are both interested in. For example, in trying to study the process of change as it occurs in psychotherapy, we have been spending a great deal of time in trying to analyze out the observable behaviors which are indicative of change and to study those observable behaviors. I think that insofar as theory is concerned that as our science maturs, more and more theories will be the reconciliation and integration of large bodies of observed data rather than taking off into outer space and being primarily constructions of fantasy.

G. A. Gladstein [174:39] The next question is directed to both and of a little different vein. Is this just another philosophical discussion about free will versus determinism, if not, how does it differ?

B. F. Skinner [174:58] I think it is not just another philosophical discussion because we are both concerned with very important practical consequences. I am concerned with arriving at a conception of the individual which is one we accept, find useful, find dignified and worthwhile, yet which is in mind with and compatible with the approach of a natural science or a social science to human behavior. I feel the time has come when this issue must be taken out of the realm of philosophical discussion and deliberately faced. If we are still, as we are in political science, in literary criticism and areas, many areas dealing with human behavior is still likely to be dealing with a conception of men which allows a great deal of pre-play for to preach individual as spontaneous changes of course and so on, we are going to get into trouble. We must make palatable and I hope worthwhile a different kind of picture of man and while the issue of determinism is certainly raised here, I should hope that what we have said here will go well beyond what is usually said in late evening discussions of that topic in dormitories.

Carl Rogers [176:18] I would certainly agree that this doesn't seem to me either to be a philosophical discussion about free will versus feminism. I think for one thing, both of us agree that when viewed from a scientific perspective, man's behavior does appear to be determined and that the whole realm of the behavioral sciences is interested in studying those sequences of cause and effect. I think I have tried to indicate that our science should be broad enough to include a concern with and an interest in the subjective as well as the purely external behaviors. Then I have also indicated as I did a moment ago in response to the other question that I believe that we need recognition of the fact that a scientific perspective is not all of life and in my estimation is not a sufficient basis for a total philosophy of life or of persons. So that to me is what the discussion has been about.

G. A. Gladstein [177:24] The next question is more of a practically oriented type and I assume primarily for Dr. Rogers, although Dr. Skinny might want to respond also. Can a high school counselor use both conditioning principles and for Algerian psychotherapy with equal effectiveness?

Carl Rogers [177:47] I think that a high school counselor or any counselor is obligated to be continually searching for what is effective in producing constructive personality change. Fortunately, this question is one that in the long run will yield itself to empirical investigation. So far there have been few investigations along that line and none that I know of with high school students. But one that is remotely related was a study by two men who endeavored to use three different types of therapy with alcoholics in an institution. And one of those was a learning theory type of approach, not an operant conditioning approach, but a learning theory type of approach. Another was an analytic approach, the third was a client centered type of approach. And there the results were studied objectively in terms of tests, in terms of return to the hospital for alcoholism and so on. It was always been a research that has been of a good deal of interest to me because the group carrying it on started out with the personal bias, and it's almost impossible in such a situation to escape some personal bias, that it would be the learning theory approach that would be most helpful. And as it turned out, that was the least helpful, in fact, showed objective evidence of having done some damage to these individuals. The one that turned out to be most effective was the client centered approach, that I don't adopt that as final conclusion or anything of that sort. That was one study, we need to have many studies of what actually is effective in producing constructive change.

B. F. Skinner [179:34] I'm not at all surprised that a learning theory approach could go wrong because I've seen so many of them so badly designed that I wouldn't recognize them. I would want to know the details before I would confess to any anxiety about this particular case.

Carl Rogers [179:50] It could make you less anxious. This was Murray's learning theory, and he did serve as consultant on it, so it was put in terms of for realistic as he was concerned. Yeah, but that still doesn't raise your views.

B. F. Skinner [180:02] The word counseling here bothers me, I obviously like not the authority of this table and not the field, and I'm not at all happy about trying to conjure up some use of operative conditioning principles with respect to a student on one side of the table and the counselor on the other. I would guess that a lot needs to be done before our counselor could safely work in simply the field of reinforcement in helping people in those circumstances. I would say that the counselor, who was interested in the mental health, they'll be called it of a school system, my better spend his time not at that table at all, but looking into how the children are handled in the school, how they come to school, how their schedules are arranged, what things they get out of school, what problems arise, because of the teachers, which they are matched up and so on. I would say a more preventive therapy approach, I suppose, in this case, I'm sure that Dr. Rogers is interested in how does I am, too. But I don't feel that these problems must wait for a transplantation across a counseling table, or at least certainly not, on the counseling account. I wouldn't feel that the application to education, of the principles that I find productive and useful, would be much more concerned with the social design of the educational system than dealing with its special effects on individual students.

G. A. Gladstein [181:39] The following question is directed to both, what is the role of a quote of conduct, unquote, or quote, religion, unquote, in a culture as you view it?

Carl Rogers [181:57] I have tried to give a good deal of thought to the question of the way in which people arrive at their values. To me, thinking along that line is relevant to this question. I'm afraid code of conduct is a phrase that would not have much meaning to me in the kind of culture I was trying to describe briefly this morning. On the other hand, the kind of evaluating process, which seems to be characteristic of psychologically mature people in our culture, I would hope would be characteristic of individuals in the sort of culture I would like to see established. And I'm not sure that I can communicate that briefly, but I will try. It seems to me that the person who is psychologically mature tends to be open to the various aspects of his experience, is open to the external aspects, the demands of society, the likelihood of smooth or turbulent interpersonal relationships, the legal demands, the demands of the physical environment and so on. He's also open to and sensitive to the feeling reactions and personal meanings, which exist in his own experiencing, which grow out of his own past learnings. And out of that, it seems to me every new object, every new event is evaluated by him in his own experiencing as either making for his own welfare or not making for his own welfare. It is that the most sensitive, valuing process in existence exists, I believe, in the psychologically mature person, and that when he is engaged in this valuing process in the interaction of his environment and so on, that this is not a selfish kind of valuing, even though he could be sure of values things as to whether they make for his own actualization or not. But it is an essentially social kind of valuing process, simply because of the nature of the human animal, who turns out to be a highly social animal at heart. So that I would not be inclined to discuss a code of conduct, I would not be inclined to discuss a religion in this society and this culture I was trying to describe. But I would be much concerned that individuals were able, sensitively and openly, to be their own evaluators of the experiences and events in which they were involved.

B. F. Skinner [184:59] I see the question has bearing on the whole issue of the evolution of cultural practices. When a group of people start living together, they begin to affect each other, they are part of the environments of each other. A strong man may, for example, dispoil all the others because of his own personal strength, but the others quickly, or quickly in terms of evolutionary time, may very well counter-control by organizing and by calling it wrong to use force. Later, someone becomes clever and uses his wits and decimes other people. This needs perhaps even a strong man. This is rare rabbit deceiving, rare wolf and rare fox. Rare fox also comes into it on the side of a sharpie. But then it is decided that it is wrong to misrepresent, it's wrong to deceive. I don't mean it's decided in a sense anybody sits down and comes to that conclusion. You just start punishing in various group ways, people who use force to deceive others and so on. Now that can all go on without codification. And I'm sure that the jurors practice the principles in the Ten Commandments before they were codified. The value of the codification here that it clarifies the practices of the group makes it possible for the individual to conform more regularly. It's an instructional kind of thing. You see that as you turn away from cultural technology to physical technology. Early physical techniques, such as had to be taught by an artist and to an apprentice, often were put in the form of rules of what we would take to be in the case of cultures, maxims or proverbs. For example, in the Middle Ages, the blacksmith bringing a boy in to operate the bellows which kept his forage going to talk to boy as little poem which goes as follows. Up high, down low, up fast, down slow, and that's the way to blow. Now actually what is involved here is the proper operation of a bellows. You must take the full excursion, up high, down low. On the way up, nothing is happening. So it's up fast, down slow. Otherwise you blow to the fire of fire actually. So that if you once learned just a little poem, you become an expert bellows boy. You can just up high, down low, up fast, down slow. As Mark pointed out in his history, science and mechanics, that early scientific laws are probably this sort. They are statements of effective behavior or they guide effective behavior. And there is no mystery to the fact that the great codifiers, the great law givers have always been highly honored. The Romans fight a great role in civilization in codifying laws which undoubtedly were practiced before they were ever codified. And I think there is something to be gained from codification. You can teach precept instead of practice. And I think we gave up a great deal when we decided that we have to teach ethical and moral principles only by practice and not by precept. I see no reason why as you teach science by precept, you can't teach ethics by precept too. And you can do it if you can control the motivation of the student and generally these turning, this turning to practice instead of precept has been a service for motivation for the student rather than for effective instruction. Now, the difference between a moral code of that sort and a religion is to me simply a difference in the implied or expressed sanctions involved. If you simply say that if you behave in this way, people will like you, you'll get along, everyone will be better off. That is a naturalistic religion. It is pointing to the consequences which make a cultural practice worthwhile. If you say in other hand that the code has been revealed by a prophet, it is the word of God as the sanctions lie in another world. And if you follow the code, you will be rewarded by that. If it may have all rewards heaven and if you don't, you will be punished by that. If it may have all negative reinforcement hell, then you are working in the field of religion. But no doubt in my mind that these have been effective sanctions and may continue to be so. The naturalistic approaches to argue that man does not need that kind of supernatural sanction and that it is possible to add up your humanistic ethics. It is something which remains to be demonstrated, but for all of this question of the codification seems to me to be a cultural invention, a cultural design which terrifies the controlling forces which the group exercises over the behavior of the individual.

Carl Rogers [190:01] To make one small facetious comment that perhaps the trouble with meetings of this sort and with any attempt to settle issues between individuals or groups is that we don't follow that bellows motto. Instead, we should up slowly in order to gradually take in and really understand what is being said, but usually we up fast. We should down slow in order to only thoughtfully express ourselves what usually happens is we down fast and out comes a great gush of air.

B. F. Skinner [190:35] May I find out, however, that what those into the fire is cold air.

G. A. Gladstein [191:05] Our next question is again directed to both in an applied area. How do Rodgers and Skinner perceive the problem of parental control and influences on child rearing practices? How would they handle a child from birth to age six?

B. F. Skinner [191:33] Don't fall over yourselves, please. In two minutes I assume. I don't want to sit up here and imply that I'm available to answer all questions you may ask. I haven't the biggest idea how the average American home can arrange those conditions which I am fairly sure I can specify to raise happy, well informed, skillful, creative, productive tribe. I think I failed in my own case as a parent and I'd rather subscribe to Frazier's statement that home is not the place to rear children.

Carl Rogers [192:16] I guess my comments would apply to whoever rears them whether in or out of the home like Dr. Skinner I would agree that this is what I think should be done, not what I have been able to do. But it seems to me that the kind of psychological climate which promotes growth and development is the same whether we're talking about therapy or the school or home. And I believe that we are making genuinely solid scientific progress in learning the elements and attitudes which compose a psychological climate which does make for the most constructive, most solid individual and personal development. The kinds of attitudes that I think are shown to be useful in therapy and I suspect would show up as being useful and promising at home are those that mentioned in some of the papers you have and so on. I think the evidence indicates that people who are real who are not afraid of exhibiting themselves in terms of the feelings they're actually experiencing those are more constructive individuals in human relationships than those who are putting up a facade. I think that a climate in which the individual is prized whether we're talking about a small child or a therapy client helps to create a useful climate for growing persons. I think that when an individual finds that his inner life of meanings is really understood by another person so that he doesn't live in an existential isolation. This too seems to be of assistance in making him a human being in helping him to grow and develop and I suspect that those attitudes would be useful in child rearing. Then I have an odd notion about the kind of limitations that would be most helpful in the rearing of a child so often we think of that in terms of what can the child be permitted to do, what can't he be permitted to do and so on. I would like to see as much as possible of that very necessary limitation of behavior grow out of confrontation of feelings. I've often said that the mother who was all worn out and says to her child at night, well I don't think you've been getting enough sleep lately. I think the best that you went to bed an hour early tonight is in for trouble. She's not being genuine. She gets resistance, etc. If she could be honest about what she is feeling that I am simply too tired tonight to put up with you for another minute. You're going to bed. I can't stand you any longer. This would be a far more healthy kind of relationship. The child still will be unhappy about going to bed but he's unhappy because of the real reason and this can exist as a real aspect of the relationship between them. Also it has a reciprocal effect on the mother that having really expressed her feeling of I've had it, she then realizes she has other feelings too and she's going to put that child to bed more tenderly than she would had she gone under the facade. My notion of the best in limitations on child behavior is when the child's feelings are in real contact with the parent's feelings and out of that comes some realistic limitation of behavior that is over the long run mutually acceptable. In given instances it may be more acceptable to one than to the other but over the long run you arrive at a realistic relationship of feelings that is mutually acceptable and which helps the person to live in a human world of feelings because he has had to react to and adjust to the real feelings of another person and to do that in terms of his own real feelings.

G. A. Gladstein [196:36] I think at this point we have come to the second part of our question period. Some of the questions which we could not answer that were submitted to us in writing perhaps some of you would be willing to raise in person. I suggest that perhaps we start on my immediate left and swing around the room. Any questions on immediate left? Yes ma'am. The question is as I understand it in an ideal community where we reduce all tensions would we also reduce the existence of a genius or of like individual.

B. F. Skinner [197:19] I take it best directed at me. Freud faced the same question after having shown that great works of genius were essentially neurotic then proposed cure neuroses which would indicate that he has something against genius or at least works of genius. But he had an answer and I think it is a perfectly good one that people are geniuses against whatever background they may be living in and in a world where there are many neuroses some of these will be really fine neuroses and we will call them works of art or works of genius. But in a world in which people are living a more orderly life a more successful life it will there will be works of genius also because of the capacity of man to do great things but they will be rather different. There won't be an art based upon neurotic tendencies there won't be a literature feels with personal conflicts if there are no personal conflicts. An example of this imagine the case in which children's stories a fireman is portrayed as an heroic person as an appropriate example to use today and dilute. It's very important if you have buildings that are likely to burn down to have brave firemen but now you invent fireproof buildings and get rid of all the ones that are not fireproof there's no longer any need for a brave fireman. This means it in the world of the future all of those things you love to read about as a child will not exist and something will be missing. The same thing is true a much more important way with respect to war. Now poets are awfully good at glorifying anything that happens to need glorifying. In the past war has been inevitable I hope it is not in the future but we have covered this up and learned to enjoy it by making heroes out of warriors. And a great part of the literature of the world is dealt with heroic warriors. But now if we do achieve a world which is at peace and this is so complete that we can't imagine the world of war we will not be interested in the literature having to do with heroes who kill other people in battle. And I should suppose that the works of Sayodostoevsky would be relatively meaningless in a world in which no one had any fantastic need to confess and imagine sin or something of this kind. Personally I would settle for that I would sacrifice the works of Dostoevsky to reach such a world and I don't for a moment imagine the people are going to be any less creative, any less imaginative or any less geniuses because their subject matter is going to be of a different nature. There are a few cases in point of people who have been very productive artistically and it doesn't seem to have been mainly a question of working off neuroses. Johann Sebastian Bach had 19 children and they can include something from that about his father's. And yet he could not help writing music. I just get that he was still composing music. That's a Freudian answer and I would use it myself. I'm sure that there are activities in which the genius which is a man will manifest itself and that it is not dealing with neurotic topics so much the better.

Carl Rogers [200:37] And I would agree with that last sentence but in general I would take a slightly different approach to this question. In the kind of culture I tried to talk about briefly this morning I hope I didn't give the impression that there would be no tension. I think that the kind of tension that would exist that just gave a very minute example of and talking about the mother and child. There are always tensions in interpersonal relations. There are also tensions in all of us as we face new and more demanding tasks in life. And I think that out of those constructive tensions which are less than the completely destructive tensions which can also occur. Out of those constructive tensions in life there will be loads of creativity and plenty of genius in my estimation.

G. A. Gladstein [201:27] Question in this part of the audience? Yes. As I get the question is perhaps we have not given due notice to the power of positive reinforcement and is Roger's concept of sub-actualization tied in with this.

B. F. Skinner [201:47] I don't think for a moment positive reinforcement is the only process which can be used in the design of a culture. It happens to be I think a very important one but a total analysis of the various main springs of human action seem to be relevant to any phase of human behavior. And I won't say that I would improve Dr. Roger's practices by reinterpreting what he does in my own term but I think I could do that. I'm sure we are both dealing with the human organism as given by the genetic human process and to the extent that we are successful we have discovered important characteristics of that organism. I would like to see the human being actualize himself, reach his fullest potentiality and I'm sure that when we once get any glimpse of that is going to be a very surprising thing.

Carl Rogers [202:43] I don't know that I get this question with sufficient clarity to come in on it too helpfully but I think I would say that reinforcement is surely a positive tool. I think that in developing the potential of the individual we have often thought only of external reinforcements. I think that the nature of the human organism is such that many things are discovered to be internally rewarding. For example, I think we do not have to reward the child for curious and exploratory behavior. That is something which organismically he finds satisfying. I think that that would be true of a number of the life activities of the individual who is moving toward the development of his potentialities.

G. A. Gladstein [203:36] Question of this area? Yes, way back then. Because I understand the question that perhaps the two sets of values of Rogers and Skinner are about the same and in particular for Dr. Skinner, does the way that he trains his own students differ from how one might deal in psychotherapy?

B. F. Skinner [204:00] Well, I don't know that I am any happier about the way I train my students and I am the way that I raise my own children that I don't have too much control over the education environment either, although I am trying to do more about that perhaps. I do agree with the bundle Johnson last night in supposing that there is something called rational behavior which is usually exemplified in science and that you want to get a patient in therapy, I suppose, to see the world about him in his own problems in rational rather than irrational terms. I think perhaps Dr. Rogers would hold that there are emotional or experiential elements here that will be rather different from the scientific process. But insofar as it is helpful to respond to the world in a rational way, then I would suppose that good education is a kind of at least preventive therapy if it could not be used also for therapy after trouble at a risen. I have spent quite a lot of time analyzing superstitious behavior in other forms of irrational behavior. I think you control that the techniques of science are designed to protect us against some of this and to that extent they are useful cultural practices. And I am sure that a therapist is doing something of the same sort in clarifying influences which have had a deleterious effect and bringing the individual more strictly under the control of the environment as it actually is.

Carl Rogers [205:38] I welcome being reminded of that article of Dr. Skinner's Indian American Psychologist, which was a very inspiring article on the processes of science as he had experienced them in his own career. This is the one you are talking about, isn't it? I hadn't quite thought of that in relationship to this discussion. As I remember that article, Dr. Skinner there gives a very vivid picture of the scientific life as process. And this is exactly the kind of thing which I have been trying to describe as the good life from any angle, that far from knowing where he was going to come out, he had to live in process and had to let learnings emerge as they emerged. And they shaped his new behavior and so on. Somehow this makes me feel a great deal better about Dr. Skinner to realize that in his own life, in his own life he values that emerging unpredictable process. And I guess what I have been trying to say about the kind of culture I would want to design and the kind of outcomes I see in therapy, when therapy is successful, it leads to exactly that kind of thing that the individual becomes an ongoing process of life in which the outcome is not set. There are not static goals. You don't even know whether you will come out happy. You are living this on a day by day basis, endeavoring to be open to all of your experiences with another real aspect in that article of endeavoring to be open to all aspects of what had occurred in order to burn from them. This I think is a very good example, very closely related to Wendell Johnson's notion of the personal life as being essentially the living of a scientific approach. On this we could really get together because to me this sense of life as a process which can only be existentially lived if it is to be meaningful, that makes all kinds of sense. Makes to me much more sense than saying here is where we should come out and we must plan it that way.

B. F. Skinner [207:51] This may be a historic moment I think I have been changed by that argument. The point of that article was actually to criticize the codification of science by methodologists, statisticians, design and experiment people who have been very little experience with science as it is practice, try to tell you how the scientist works. I think it is a great mistake that we teach our young psychologists science in the form of statistics because this has very little to do with actual scientific practice. However I am not going to concede everything because I am interested in teaching scientific practice as such and I should suppose that with skillful planning one could make sure that more people would be the product of lucky histories of this sort. I am sure I have a great deal of luck which is not only directed me in profitable directions but is kept me going by the very lucky schedule of reinforcement which I have experienced. But I think this ought to be viewed as a very important factor in building scientific dedication and some of it can be arranged although I quite agree that you cannot foresee all of the courses going to take. I am now beginning to understand what you mean by becoming.

Carl Rogers [209:20] This is very meaningful to me because I quite share your feeling that I too would want to teach a scientific approach and so on. I do want to stress again the fact that the kind of professional living and the experiencing of a professional scientific life which you were describing in that article comes, as you say, very, very close to what I am talking about when I talk about a person in process of becoming. This would be most gratifying to find that we do strike some each similarity on that score.

G. A. Gladstein [209:58] I think we have time for one last question this section. As I get the question is on these internal factors or variables Dr Skinner has indicated that one can always identify external causes and what would lead one not to conclude that one could start with these as the possible originating causes.

B. F. Skinner [210:22] I think the question is mainly concerned with the practice of science. I quite agree that the whole causal stream goes on back indefinitely that there must be some reason why the environment is as it is at the moment of influence as an individual and so on. I question these things mainly because of their historical connotations of mentalism, of non-physical mediators or manipulators of physical events which I don't think is a useful approach at all. If you take these inner events to be eventually when the physiologists get around to it, discoverable as such, then I don't deny that if something happens to me as a child and today my inability to deal openly with a colleague reflects the anxiety that the results from my having been punished for fighting my brother or something like that. If something has lasted in me, if that is a correct connection, something has survived in me from punishment for sibling rivalry 50 years of gall, my inability to deal openly with a figurative brother in the group today. Something has survived is there. The question is the dimensions of this and my objection to these inner experiential, if not mentalistic events is that they don't. Very adequately report what change must have been made in me 50 years ago, nor do they offer very much help in predicting what is now happening to me as a result of that event 50 years ago. As opposed to you say that what I was punished for repeatedly striking my brother until I reached the point where I didn't strike him but I always felt anxious because I was on the point of striking him that I have an anxiety and that is persistent at the present time and it makes it impossible for me to be open with my friends today or something like that. What does the word anxiety do here? You can say well you can feel anxious but that's true and if I have been punished for striking someone and am now inclined to strike and this generates physiological changes into me which I have been report as anxiety. But the word anxiety is not carrying the history of that punishment very accurately and it certainly is not giving many details to the prediction of what I cannot or can do at the present time. I'm not questioning that something has happened in the individual which is inside him and I don't question the fact that someday and I think rather the distant future and neurologist physiologist will tell us what that is. I am criticizing the purely verbal use of these concepts to present time because I think they damage our case by making us believe we know more than we do know and by mischaracterizing what are often important variables.

Carl Rogers [213:21] On this score I would find myself in real general agreement with Dr. Skinner. I feel that there has been much too much use made of internal events as though we knew them descriptively and then we used them as explanations of causes of other events and this long range inference for you reach a mile for an inference has never appealed to me and I don't really believe it as a justifiable part of science. I think that one of the young men who is working with us as a post-actorial fellow here to go Alan Bergen has written a couple of papers. I like both the content but I particularly like the title there under the general title of tardy science of subjective experience and what he is doing is pointing out the progress we are making in determining objective cues of inner subjective events which will bring us closer to being able to study objectively some of the internal meanings and subjective experiences which I think we all of us can do agree are no doubt in fact operating in our behavior question is how close can we get to them in studying them. I would also point out that this interest in trying to get more objective cues to the subjective aspects of experience is related to but by no means the same as the stress on the importance of the subjective in life which I have stressed earlier.

G. A. Gladstein [215:06] I'm then to Dr Skinner as presenting his closing statements first.

B. F. Skinner [215:16] I want to take up this question of planning and whether it in any way injures the product planned. It is very important I think to keep in mind the fact that any culture at any time is a kind of behavioral experiment. Every child born into American life today will come under certain very powerful cultural practices. I have an education which makes the most of the capacities of the genetic stuff of American life if we have ethical religious and moral practices which keep people behaving with respect to each other in ways which reduce their need to defend themselves against attack and worries and that kind and so on. Then America is strong and we will continue to develop better practices and we will make a very important contribution to the practices of the future which of course none of us can perceive at the present time. These things work in a way something like biological evolution but not entirely. In cultural evolution you have a Lamarckian practice. Someone hipped upon a cultural practice, a new way of handling children in kindergarten, a new way of paying wages. There are thousands of these little cultural designs and inventions. Some of them survive because they contribute to the strength of the group, others disappear because they produce trouble. In this way we advance through codification or otherwise we build a corpus of cultural practices which is to be tested whether we like it or not in the crucible of survival. If Russia or China or some other drug culture is going to advance more rapidly than whether we like it or not we shall have to take second place. I don't think that for a moment with Russia here ago not at all impressed by the way in which they energize the human behavior of their people, not impressed by their standards of a good life or anything that sort. But I still don't think we can rest on our laurels and I think it behooves us to examine culture. Now this is one that occurs a new state because if you simply hit upon a cultural invention as an accident or because of the personal idiosyncrasies of someone it may turn out to be a very good practice. Whether it's good or not has very little to do with its origins or where it came from. The person who is perhaps quite unintelligent might hit upon a better way of rearing his children and would be copied by others and become an established practice for a long time. The origins are not important the survival effects are but at some point in the history of this evolutionary process something new emerges. And this is the growth of science as a way of dealing with nature and the eventual application of science to human behavior. And when that has come about when the techniques of science have been well developed and brought to bear on the problem of human behavior then we are in a better position to see the relation between cultural practices and the resulting strong or weak behavior of the individual who has been submitted to them. And then we can design we can plan practices because of predicted effects which will be important to us and they will be important to us just in the same way in which the accidental practices are important to us and they will survive or disappear in the same way also. So that at some point with the development of the science of behavior man is able to accelerate the evolution of cultures by designing practices instead of allowing them just to arise through accident in one way or another. This is also true in genetic evolution we are now able to some extent to change the germplasm we've been able a long time to by selection of parents to change genetic structures it can produce mutations and the chemists are not far off I'm sure from making weather specific changes in chromosomes and so on. At that point something new will have occurred in the evolution of the organism as a biological entity and already something new has occurred in the evolution of cultures as evolving and surviving entities so that we can by using intelligence and the scientific method improve our culture. Now this can be interpreted however as meddling as doing something about other people as trying to control other people and of course the word control is as someone point out last night a value charged word we have all been controlled for purposes of exploitation. We've been controlled through techniques which are a verse in themselves and so on so we have had and developed a philosophy which is opposed to control and even opposed to planning. Now I think this is silly I think if we try to insist that human cultures not be planned we suppose a door on a remarkable opportunity which may never come to us again. To refer to another critic of Walden to Joseph Wood Crouch who would attack the book violently just because of his plan let me suggest the following situation to you. Mr. Crouch prefers the southwest and wanders around out there as I thought of an amateur naturalist. Suppose in his wanderings he came to a mesa and climbed up and discovered a tribe of Indians living there under conditions which are exactly comparable to Walden too. The educational system prepares them for the life they're going to meet. The children are well cared for, happy, productive. They have economic practices which give them all a simple but abundant good life. They have what they need to eat, clothes, those themselves. They have artistic activities and so on. Music flourishes and all of this. Wood and Crouch come down out of that mountain and jumping to the world by fools we are this is it. Here is a way of life that is acceptable to me because it is maximizing all of the potential is the people who are living in it. But then some Indian following him down out of the mesa taps him on the shoulder and says there's just one thing I forgot to tell you an old Indian named Skinner planted this way. That would destroy the whole thing. That someone had caught this out rather than that it had been the product of an accidental evolution of cultures would make it absolutely worthless because that old Indian would have had all sorts of despotic tyrannical motives. And even though he's dead now perhaps or no one knows who he is, he will have been controlling people. These people will be living a life which he planned. Now if we are so silly as to allow our reactions to past patterns of control to interfere with our free exercise of science and the design of culture then we are going to get exactly what we are going to get somebody else will not be that silly and they will be the people who will contribute to the world of the future.

Carl Rogers [223:36] I've forgotten who it was that we marked last night that we would be really discovering the learnings in this meeting for weeks and months afterwards. I certainly feel that's very true. I find it very difficult to come up with any really concluding remarks. I think I would like to say I've acquired an increasing respect for Dr. Skinner, the person. His sincerity, gentleness, his whip, his wide scholarly interests. The honesty with which he is trying to face the implications of the directions in which the behavioral sciences are taking us. I certainly have learned deeply from him both in the past and during these meetings. I have often felt and would like to say that I think he is the one person in the behavioral stream of psychology who has really had a highly significant impact on our society and our culture and I respect his work. I think that there do remain some profound differences between us, though I think definitely less than when these discussions commenced. But I suspect that the deeper differences will not be reconciled by us, they will be reconciled by you and by other people. I think that I thought might come up for mention in this discussion that it hasn't so far is that I don't know whether Dr. Skinner is aware of this, but a former student of his and a former student of mine are working together on developing a programmed instruction for the improvement of interpersonal relationships. So that in sort of the second generation, it seems possible that there will be significant tensions as there are between the two who are working on that but nevertheless working tard a reconciliation. I see very large areas of agreement between us which I won't particularly try to specify. One is the fact that many of these remarks that Dr. Skinner has just made do point tard the fact that a behavioral science is going to have a or may at least have a very significant part in designing our culture and the profound question remains of what kind of a part it will play. We certainly have real agreement on the rules of science and in regard to the human being when he's looked at through a scientific perspective. I think that from this perspective we both see behavior as determined, we both see the possibility of establishing preconditions which lead to desired effects and which do in essence lead to the basis for a design of culture. But there is a real difference in regard to the way science is viewed by us. As I see it, Skinner sees himself and the world and the individual in his Waldem too as nothing but automated figures moving inexorably in their preordained path. I hold this perspective as a fruitful one in my work as a scientist but not as a total worldview and as inadequate as a viewpoint tard all of man. I think it's obvious all through our discussions that one of our sharpest differences is in regard to the place of the subjective. To me words like freedom have deep experiential meaning and reality and significance and I hope that I've helped indicate that when we do believe in individual freedom and choice as a paradoxical reality in a determined world then we take different steps and different directions and have a different kind of regard for the human individual then we do if we do not hold that view. I believe that this is one point on which we really differ although I have been surprised that several of the things I have heard Dr. Skinner say and feel now that I'm a little unsure to just where he does stand. With real conviction on point yesterday he said I believe I was so shaken by this I've forgotten just what it was he believed. When he mentioned that if we were to design a culture it would be necessary to choose the values which we wish to establish. When this morning a few moments ago he spoke of working out a philosophy which would be appropriate. To me a philosophy is the meaning of experience that seems to me to be quite contradictory to some of the things he said so I'm not sure that any rate it has come through clearly that he has and lives a subjective life in which belief and freedom operate. But it also seems to me that he attaches secondary or little importance to the subjective life for others and doesn't consider it very seriously in his design of a culture. In this respect I think I do differ rather deeply. Another difference that has interested me through this discussion is that I believe Dr. Skinner doesn't discriminate at all between control and influence to me those seem quite discriminable. But to me it's important whether the person with whom we are dealing has a participative choice and if I understand him correctly this seems to him to be quite secondary and not particularly important. Take for example our own impact on this audience I would not see it as comparable to shaping up the behavior of pigeons to play ping pong. And yet if I get his viewpoint correctly to him these two would be basically identical. Now the thing which for me differentiates it from dealing with pigeon behavior is that one of the things I prize about this meeting is that you are free to choose subjectively what you wish to accept and reject of what we are saying. One of the things that I would value not only for this meeting but for any kind of culture I would hope to have any part in designing is that it would be full of experiences like this where people would be faced with the difficulty and reality of choice. Or you are exposed to differing facts viewpoints opinions and so on and must within yourself choose the stance that you are going to take in regard to such issues. To me I would want that to be and regarded as being one of the essential bases for maximizing the human potential is to make continually available the opportunity and the necessity of choice. Another point in which perhaps we differ and here again I am a bit puzzled is in regard to the value of genuineness. I have come to feel particularly in my work in therapy that one of the most important values in human relationships is the quality of genuineness of one person being in real and genuine contact with another. An individual being as completely as he is able to be the feelings which he is experiencing at that moment and in a culture that I would have any part in designing I would hope that the leaders would be, or you may not like, would be transparent that they would not be concealing that they would be people who would be willing to expose their views, attitudes, feelings to the individuals with whom they would be. There is no question in my mind about the personal genuineness of Dr. Skinner but I get puzzled when he talks about designing cultures because there it seems as though to over simplify and perhaps be a little extreme it seems as though nothing is for real. It is the behaviors which are induced are for other purposes not for themselves. I think I understand that in that he feels that since all human relationships are simply manipulations whether we know it or not then the quality of genuineness doesn't have much significance. I think I can understand that but it doesn't square with my experience. Then another difference that I would recognize is over our willingness to control and here again this difference between control and influence comes up. I myself would certainly hope to be able to feel that often at times I am able both in dealing with individuals and the groups to try to establish conditions which free and release and make for spontaneity so that I do help to establish preconditions which bring about certain consequences. My experience is in doing that have been such as to give me a great deal of confidence in the basic characteristics of the human individual when he is free. So that my whole aim would be to provide conditions for optimal release and growth rather than being primarily interested in control. There is one helpful, hopeful and ironic thing that I would like to mention. That is that for a man who believes that the words value and choice and purpose really retain very little of their ordinary meaning in a scientific world. There is just no question but what Dr. Skinner's work has stirred up will continue to stir up enormous controversy over choice of values and purpose and the directions that we choose to go. In this sense I guess I feel he is really on my side because that is exactly what I would like to do too. That is the way I see the purpose of this meeting that we have tried to expose various points of view, various possible purposes, various values in regard to education in regard to the design of the future culture and that the choice of those values is going to be something we all will be working on over the years to come.

They weren't really arguing about free will. They were arguing about who may shape a person.

Rogers protected the person who experiences choice, meaning, and genuine contact from being treated as an object of technique. Skinner protected deliberate design from leaving people to punishment, accident, and inherited habits. They broke down because Rogers heard control as manipulation, while Skinner heard freedom as a refusal to study causes.

What neither of them said Legitimacy of influence. It would have shifted them to who can see, consent to, and revise the conditions shaping them.

Carl Rogers

Is protecting

Lived personhood inside science.

Without it, science can become brilliant technique used on objects.

How Carl knows: Through therapy, lived experience, self-reflection, and openness to evidence.
The developmental read: Holds freedom and causation together, but under pressure turns Skinner’s design into erasure.
Blind spot: Can't see that his own growth climates are also designed influence.
Smallest move that would help: Admit that genuineness, empathy, and self-directed learning are deliberately arranged influences that can still protect freedom.

B. F. Skinner

Is protecting

Effective humane design.

Without it, freedom can mean lucky histories and old punishments left untouched.

How B. knows: Through observable behavior, histories, reinforcement patterns, and experiments.
The developmental read: Tracks causes across culture, but keeps turning lived meaning into another cause to manage.
Blind spot: Can't see that consent and meaning help make human design legitimate.
Smallest move that would help: Treat what people feel and consent to as part of good design, not merely effects to explain.

The tension underneath

Both poles are real. Both speakers slid into their downsides.

Carl’s pole

Subjective freedom

Protects Lived choice, responsibility, and meaning

Overdone Choice romanticized; conditioning ignored

How Carl held it: In both upside and downside: preserves lived agency; sometimes treats determinism as erasure.

Holding both

Design environments people can understand, question, and help revise while those environments build self-direction.

B.’s pole

Behavioral determinism

Protects Lawful conditions and non-punitive design

Overdone Agency reduced to after-the-fact reports

How B. held it: In both upside and downside: de-stigmatizes control but narrows freedom to self-management.

On the facts

Both overreached, in different ways.

Skinner was sharper on definitions and causal claims, but overextended control into cultural design. Rogers protected the ethical stakes, but overstated Skinner as hollow, insincere, or person-erasing.

Carl5 flagged, 1 serious

B.5 flagged, 0 serious

Verdicts are the analysis’s judgement and are not independently sourced.

See every flagged claim →

The conversation

A hard dialogue, not a fight.

Skinner set terms with definitions; Rogers asked what they left out.

It began as debate, deepened into conflict, then briefly opened.

Carl was playing discourse: Lived meaning and participation; wants science to keep the person in view.
B. was playing dialogue: Causes and tested design; wants clearer control to improve culture.

Where they met

Scientific life is open becoming.

Carl: On this we could really get together

B.: I am now beginning to understand what you mean by becoming.

They found Skinner’s own scientific practice near Rogers’s process of becoming.

A sentence that might have worked

When B. says the control of human behavior , Carl hears You want to manipulate people without choice. The same point, in words the other could hear:

I mean influence already present in wages, laws, schools, families, and culture, made less punitive and more intelligent.

More translations in the Synthesis →

The question that could have moved them

What would show that the influences building skill and ethics also increase people’s ability to notice, evaluate, and help revise those influences?

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The speakers

What each one argued, how each one thinks, and where each stood on every tension.

Carl Rogers

4.0Multi-perspective

centre of gravity in this debate

What do these labels mean? →

B. F. Skinner

3.5Multi-variable→ 4.0 Multi-perspective

centre of gravity in this debate, and its reach

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

Rogers argues that behavioral science is valid but incomplete when it treats persons only from the outside. He protects freedom, genuineness, and lived meaning as realities that must shape therapy, education, and cultural design.

Good-Faith Summary

Skinner argues that behavior is always shaped, so the responsible task is to understand and arrange that shaping more intelligently. He protects effective design, public evidence, and alternatives to punishment, blame, and accidental culture.

Developmental profile

How each speaker’s moments split by stage, line by line: the wider a colour, the more of their moments sat at that stage. Hover or tap a name to see one speaker at a time; tap a bar for the counts and the full analysis’s own rating.

Note: These analyses rate the performance, not the person. They are not claims about the participants’ inner development, but about how they express that development within the specific context and container of this debate.

What do the lines and names mean? →

Polarities

The side each speaker took in each tension, and the developmental centre of the side they defended.

Carl Rogers’s side

B. F. Skinner’s side

4.0Multi-perspectiveSubjective freedom

Behavioral determinism3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveInner experience

Observable behavior3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveSelf-directed learning

Programmed instruction3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveOpen becoming

Planned outcomes3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveOrganismic valuing

Codified conduct3.5Multi-variable

The Tell

He repeatedly returns to lived subjectivity whenever behavioral control risks becoming the whole picture.

The Tell

He repeatedly converts purposes, traits, and feelings into controlling variables.

Carl Rogers

4.0Multi-perspective

centre of gravity in this debate

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

The Tell

He repeatedly returns to lived subjectivity whenever behavioral control risks becoming the whole picture.

B. F. Skinner

3.5Multi-variable→ 4.0 Multi-perspective

centre of gravity in this debate, and its reach

What do these labels mean? →

Good-Faith Summary

The Tell

He repeatedly converts purposes, traits, and feelings into controlling variables.

Developmental profile

What do the lines and names mean? →

Polarities

The side each speaker took in each tension, and the developmental centre of the side they defended.

Carl Rogers’s side

B. F. Skinner’s side

4.0Multi-perspectiveSubjective freedom

Behavioral determinism3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveInner experience

Observable behavior3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveSelf-directed learning

Programmed instruction3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveOpen becoming

Planned outcomes3.5Multi-variable

4.0Multi-perspectiveOrganismic valuing

Codified conduct3.5Multi-variable

The full analysis

Six sections, with the evidence behind every finding.

Every debate has a surface argument and a deeper one. This section maps both — what each speaker is explicitly claiming, what they're actually trying to protect, and where their real disagreement lives. Start here to understand what's actually at stake before the analysis begins.

Carl Rogers

Carl Rogers argues that a science of human behavior must never lose sight of the person as lived from within. His central claim is not that science is false or that behavior is not lawfully influenced; he repeatedly grants that “viewed from the external scientific objective perspective man is determined by his genetic and cultural influences” [166:11]. His deeper claim is that this perspective is not the whole truth of human existence. Freedom, choice, responsibility, subjective meaning, and organismic valuing are, for Rogers, not causal “little gadgets” inserted into a scientific explanation but dimensions of lived personhood that precede and contextualize scientific activity itself. He wants a behavioral science broad enough to study observable behavior while also honoring the fact that human beings “can never live as an object” and “can only live subjectively” [11:18].

The emotional and motivational stakes for Rogers are high because he is protecting the reality of the person against reduction to an object of technique. He fears a future in which therapy, education, and culture become exercises in shaping people without their participant choice. He is not mainly afraid of science; he is afraid of a narrowed science becoming a total worldview and licensing manipulation under the name of knowledge. He also fears being misunderstood as anti-empirical, which is why he repeatedly stresses that questions about psychotherapy, learning, and change should be studied empirically. His dominant narrative metaphor is a “fresh breeze” or “declaration of independence”: human beings moving from being controlled, fearful, and externally valuing toward becoming self-trusting, creative, responsible, and open to experience.

The strongest version of Rogers’s argument is that behavioral science should seek the conditions that release self-direction rather than the techniques that merely produce compliance. He wants education and therapy organized around climates of genuineness, empathic understanding, and valuing, because these conditions allow persons to become more open to experience and more able to choose intelligently. There is a real tension in his position: he accepts deterministic explanation and even speaks of establishing “preconditions which bring about certain consequences,” yet he sharply resists calling this control. His operational position is therefore not “no influence,” but “influence that is transparent, participatory, and oriented toward greater freedom.” At times he overstates Skinner’s view as implying that people are “nothing but automated figures,” but his best argument is that a lawful science of behavior becomes ethically dangerous when it forgets that its subjects are also centers of meaning.

B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner argues that human behavior is controlled by genetic and environmental histories, and that the central practical question is not whether control exists but how intelligently, humanely, and effectively it is arranged. For him, “control” does not mean secret coercion or total success; it means “any contribution which is made toward determining a man’s action” [20:57]. He insists that all cultures already control behavior through economics, education, law, religion, family life, and social approval. A science of behavior does not introduce control into a previously free world; it makes existing control more visible and potentially more humane. His worldview assumes that appeals to inner agents, free will, personality traits, readiness, and spontaneous values often obstruct clearer analysis of the variables actually producing behavior.

The motivational stakes for Skinner are also significant. He is protecting the possibility of effective cultural design against what he sees as sentimental, punitive, or pre-scientific explanations. He wants to replace blame, shame, exhortation, and moralistic punishment with non-aversive techniques that build capacities reliably. He fears that reverence for “freedom” and “personal responsibility” will preserve ineffective institutions and prevent deliberate improvement in education, child-rearing, and social organization. He also fears being caricatured as denying individuality or inner life, and repeatedly clarifies that he does not deny private events or feelings; he denies their status as originating causes. His dominant metaphor is culture as an evolving experiment: practices survive, fail, and can now be deliberately designed rather than left to accident.

The strongest version of Skinner’s argument is that all cultures shape people, so refusing to plan does not protect freedom; it merely leaves control to accident, tradition, exploitation, or coercion. If behavioral science can help create environments that produce curiosity, ethical self-management, courage, skill, and creativity without punishment, then deliberate design may be more liberating than the unplanned controls it replaces. There are tensions in his position. He says value choice need not be handed over to “special wisdom” outside science, yet he also admits that one must “design for something” and begins with preferences such as health over illness and wisdom over ignorance. He says inner experience exists and matters in his life, but his explanatory framework consistently strips it of causal and normative authority. His operational position is therefore not merely scientific humility; it is a strong program for redesigning culture around behavioral control while hoping that such control will eventually produce self-management.

Good arguments can still contain weak evidence, logical slippage, or rhetorical moves that substitute for reasoning. This section examines each speaker's argumentative integrity — not to declare a winner, but to identify where the strongest and weakest links are in each case.

Claims flagged in this section Verdicts are the analysis’s judgement and are not independently sourced.
Who	Claim	Verdict
Carl	Skinner treats science as all reality.the scientific view is the whole world for himSkinner repeatedly says he does not deny inner events or feelings.	Overstated
Carl	Skinner erases the person.nothing but automated figures moving inexorably in their preordained pathIt misses Skinner’s changing environments, self-management, and individuality.	Distorted
Carl	Reinforcement works only when hidden.only when the operation of that theory can be concealedApproval may lose force when manipulative, but money and food still work knowingly.	Overstated
Carl	Skinner’s designed worlds are insincere.the hypothetical worlds you construct are basically insincereIt risks treating designed social practice itself as pseudo-genuine.	Overstated
Carl	Learning-theory therapy harmed alcoholics.showed objective evidence of having done some damageNo methods are given; Rogers presents it as one study, not final proof.	Unverified
B.	Behavioral control is settled.has now essentially clinched the pointHe immediately admits complete human control cannot be proved.	Overstated
B.	Science is the only knowledge.there is only one science, there is only one way of knowingHis own cultural plans rely on values science does not fully justify.	Contested
B.	Scientific dedication follows reinforcement schedules.a scientist who bats his brains outThe analogy skips meaning, identity, discipline, and institutions.	Overstated
B.	Training can make everyone brave.everyone will be a brave man, a brave womanThe debate gives a hope, not evidence adequate to everyone.	Overstated
B.	Six-year-olds can reach ethical self-management.a child at the age of sixThe claim is speculative and not supported in the transcript.	Overstated

Carl Rogers

Coherence strengths: Rogers’s strongest intellectual virtue is that he does not deny the scientific usefulness of determinism. He explicitly accepts cause-and-effect inquiry into behavior and repeatedly distinguishes scientific explanation from lived subjectivity rather than simply rejecting one in favor of the other. His use of “paradox” is coherent: he treats freedom and determinism as different perspectives on the same human being, not as simple empirical competitors. He is also careful, at important moments, to mark empirical questions as empirical. For example, when discussing whether experience precedes insight in therapy, he says, “Again, that’s an empirical fact. It could be the other way around” [87:07]. That kind of concession shows genuine openness to investigation.

Weaknesses and logical issues: Rogers sometimes overstates Skinner’s view by converting Skinner’s methodological refusal of inner causes into a total denial of meaning or personhood. His claim that “the scientific view is the whole world for him” [37:41] is interpretively plausible as a critique of Skinner’s rhetoric, but epistemically sloppy as stated because Skinner repeatedly says he does not deny inner events or feelings. Similarly, Rogers’s closing characterization that Skinner sees persons as “nothing but automated figures moving inexorably in their preordained path” [226:44] is a strong rhetorical compression that does not fully capture Skinner’s emphasis on evolving, modifiable environments and self-management.

Rogers also makes some broad claims about reinforcement that overreach from specific cases. His statement that a behavioral theory is weak if it is “effective only when the operation of that theory can be concealed from those and whom it is operating” [142:25] is an epistemically sloppy generalization. The example of social approval losing force when experienced as manipulation is plausible, but it does not establish that reinforcement generally depends on concealment; Skinner correctly notes that money, food, and many social reinforcers can continue to operate even when the person knows they are reinforcers. Rogers’s strongest version would be narrower: some interpersonal reinforcers change meaning when perceived as manipulative, so a science of behavior must include subjective appraisal.

Rogers occasionally moves from ethical concern into characterizing Skinner’s imagined culture as insincere. His claim that Skinner’s “hypothetical worlds” are “basically insincere” [149:31] is not an ad hominem against Skinner personally, since Rogers explicitly affirms Skinner’s sincerity, but it is still a serious charge about the moral texture of Skinnerian design. It is grounded in Rogers’s reading of Walden Two-style cultural engineering, yet it risks treating all designed social practice as pseudo-genuine. His distinction between “control” and “influence” is morally important, but he sometimes frames Skinner as failing to discriminate between them without fully engaging Skinner’s own distinction between coercive control and positive reinforcement.

Rogers uses some empirical claims that cannot be verified from the transcript. His report of a study in which a learning-theory approach with alcoholics “showed objective evidence of having done some damage” [179:08] is presented cautiously as one study rather than final proof, which mitigates the problem. Still, because no methodological details are provided in the transcript, the claim should be treated as unsourced here rather than decisive evidence against behavioral approaches.

Epistemic style: Rogers’s dominant mode of knowing is phenomenological and clinical, joined to empirical science and democratic-humanistic ethics. He trusts lived experience, therapeutic encounter, and the meanings persons discover in themselves. He also values science as a disciplined guard against self-deception, but he treats science as emerging from subjective life rather than as the whole of life. The main gap in his epistemic style is that he says subjective experience is not being introduced as a causal explanation, while at other moments he speaks as though changes in subjective perception directly alter what functions as reward, choice, or action. That is not necessarily incoherent, but it requires more precise articulation than he gives in the debate.

B. F. Skinner

Coherence strengths: Skinner’s argument is highly structured and internally disciplined. He carefully distinguishes control from coercion, concealment, and total effectiveness. His definition of control as any contribution to determining action allows him to include wages, laws, teaching, religious sanctions, and social approval within one analytic frame. He also makes an important distinction between denying the existence of inner events and denying their explanatory priority. His line, “The question between us is not one of the existence of the inner events, but their status as explanatory, efficacious, causes” [122:14], is one of the clearest statements in the debate. He is often more precise than Rogers about what kind of claim is empirical, methodological, or practical.

Weaknesses and logical issues: Skinner sometimes overstates the reach of behavioral explanation. His claim that “an experimental analysis of the behavior of an individual organism has now essentially clinched the point” [18:52] that behavior is controlled is epistemically sloppy as stated. He immediately qualifies that one could never prove all human behavior is controlled, so the more defensible claim is that determinism is a fruitful working assumption. But the stronger “clinched” language exceeds what his evidence in the debate establishes.

Skinner also commits a recurring domain-generalization fallacy, extrapolating from operant conditioning in animals, gambling, or laboratory settings to complex human phenomena such as scientific dedication, art appreciation, courage, and moral self-management. His comparison between a pigeon pecking a key and “a scientist who bats his brains out on the walls of his laboratory 16 hours a day” [57:15] is rhetorically vivid and directionally plausible as a reinforcement analogy, but it is too coarse to carry the explanatory weight he gives it. Likewise, the bingo example at [58:06] usefully illustrates variable-ratio reinforcement, but it does not by itself explain the meaning, discipline, institutional context, or identity-formation involved in scientific vocation.

Skinner sometimes treats Rogers’s appeal to subjectivity as though it must be a claim about inner causal entities, even after Rogers denies that framing. When Rogers argues that subjective life is a “preceding dimension,” Skinner replies, “until you start making them responsible for choices and decisions. Now you start making them do something” [103:12]. This is a partial straw man or at least a frame conversion: Skinner translates an ontological and phenomenological claim into a causal-mechanistic claim, then criticizes it on those terms. This move preserves his framework but does not fully engage Rogers’s point that science itself is nested within lived valuation and meaning.

Some of Skinner’s applied claims are speculative. His statement that ethical self-management could be established very early, and that “there’s no reason why a child at the age of six cannot have arrived at a very effective system of ethical self-management” [156:15], is not supported in the transcript by evidence adequate to the claim. His confidence that emotional training could make “everyone” brave [120:32] similarly overreaches. These are plausible research programs or design hopes, not established conclusions.

Skinner also has a values problem. He says, “there is only one science, there is only one way of knowing” [29:30] and resists handing value choice to non-scientific wisdom. Yet he repeatedly relies on starting preferences: health over illness, wisdom over ignorance, non-aversive control over punitive control, survival of the culture, productivity, creativity, and comfort. He is candid about some of this, but his framework does not fully account for why these should govern cultural design beyond preference, survival value, or effectiveness.

Epistemic style: Skinner’s dominant mode of knowing is operational, behavioral, pragmatic, and evolutionary. He wants claims translated into observable behavior, manipulable variables, histories of reinforcement, and cultural survival consequences. This style is powerful for designing interventions and avoiding vague explanatory fictions. Its limitation is that it tends to treat whatever cannot be operationalized as dispensable, secondary, or misleading. The gap between his claimed scientific neutrality and his actual normative commitments is significant: he is not only describing behavior but advocating a cultural future.

Epistemic Mismatch Note

Rogers treats subjectivity as a basic dimension of personhood and a source of ethical orientation; Skinner treats subjectivity as private stimulation and verbal behavior whose causal role must be handled with suspicion. Rogers hears Skinner’s operationalism as erasure of the person; Skinner hears Rogers’s phenomenology as a relapse into mentalistic explanation. This mismatch is why they often agree on empirical procedure while still feeling that the deepest issue remains unresolved.

Net Assessment

Both speakers are intellectually serious and unusually willing to clarify their positions. Skinner is more operationally precise and more systematic in defining terms, while Rogers is more attentive to the lived and ethical implications of applying behavioral science to persons. Skinner overreaches when he generalizes behavioral control into a near-total cultural program; Rogers overreaches when he portrays that program as necessarily hollow, insincere, or person-erasing.

Polarity: Subjective freedom ↔ Behavioral determinism

Summary: Rogers protects lived choice within determinism; Skinner protects lawful control as the basis for effective cultural design. Integration: Chosen causality Lever: Participatory control

Pole 1 name: Subjective freedom Pole 1 tagline: Lived agency matters Pole 1 protects:

The felt reality of choice, responsibility, and meaning
The person’s participation in interpreting and directing life Pole 1 neglects:
Hidden conditions shaping what feels chosen
The practical need to arrange environments deliberately Pole 1 pathology:
Romanticizing choice while ignoring conditioning
Treating all control as dehumanizing manipulation

Pole 2 name: Behavioral determinism Pole 2 tagline: Causes can liberate Pole 2 protects:

The lawful conditions that shape behavior
Alternatives to blame, punishment, and moralistic exhortation Pole 2 neglects:
The existential reality of choosing from within
The ethical difference between participation and manipulation Pole 2 pathology:
Reducing agency to an after-the-fact report
Designing people without honoring their lived consent

Speaker enactment:

Speaker: Carl Rogers Enacts: Pole 1 Pole Center line: worldview Pole Center: 4.0 Pluralist Pole Center rationale: Rogers defends subjective freedom as a worldview concern about the irreducibility of lived personhood, and he centers it at 4.0 because he repeatedly holds it alongside scientific determinism as a co-real perspective rather than a simple negation of causality. Perspective Structure: 4.0 Oscillating Perspective Structure rationale: He genuinely moves between freedom and determinism and names their paradox, though he sometimes compresses Skinner’s determinism into depersonalization under pressure. Held as: Both — Preserves lived agency yet sometimes converts determinism into erasure [226:44]. Contributes: He insists that freedom remains real as lived experience, not as a scientific exception. Misses:
- Determinants can support rather than negate agency
- Control is not always coercion Cues:
- "He is saying in no uncertain terms, I am, I exist."
- "I regard these two dimensions as both real although they exist in a paradoxical relationship."
Speaker: B. F. Skinner Enacts: Pole 2 Pole Center line: cognitive Pole Center: 3.5 Achiever Pole Center rationale: Skinner defends behavioral determinism primarily as a cognitive-scientific architecture for coordinating genetic history, environment, reinforcement, and cultural design, making the pole center 3.5 rather than a received doctrine or single principle. Perspective Structure: 3.5 Managed Perspective Structure rationale: He manages the tension by distinguishing determinism from fatalism and control from coercion, but he does not fully inhabit Rogers’s lived freedom as an irreducible pole. Held as: Both — De-stigmatizes control but narrows freedom to environmental self-management [27:14]. Contributes: He reframes determinism as the condition for intelligent, non-punitive social design. Misses:
- Lived choice is not merely verbal residue
- Consent changes the meaning of control Cues:
- "I think you can make the assumption that each of us is completely determined to do what he is now doing"
- "So that we do control ourselves even in the world in which human behavior is totally controlled because we modify that behavior."

Mismatch: Rogers hears determinism as depersonalization; Skinner hears freedom language as pre-scientific causation. Mismatch A→B: When Carl Rogers says freedom, B. F. Skinner tends to hear an inner agent escaping causality. Mismatch B→A: When B. F. Skinner says control, Carl Rogers tends to hear manipulation without participant choice. Bridge move: Ask what forms of environmental design increase a person’s experienced and practical capacity for self-direction.

Synthesis: Subjective freedom protects the reality that persons live from within: they deliberate, suffer, discover meanings, and experience themselves as responsible. Behavioral determinism protects the equally real fact that these capacities do not emerge from nowhere; they are shaped by histories, institutions, language, reinforcement, and culture. Rogers’s “paradox” is an attempt to hold both: from outside, lawful sequences; from inside, choice and responsibility. Skinner’s strongest contribution is to say that if behavior is shaped anyway, a humane culture should shape it more intelligently and less punitively. Each pole makes sense because freedom without conditions becomes mystified, while determinism without subjectivity becomes morally thin.

The mismatch arises because each speaker hears the other as threatening what cannot be surrendered. Rogers hears “complete control” as the disappearance of the person; Skinner hears “I choose” as a refusal to examine causes. But Rogers is not primarily claiming exemption from causality, and Skinner is not primarily advocating brute coercion. The integrative question is not whether humans are free or determined in the abstract, but which forms of lawful influence expand the lived and behavioral repertoire through which people can knowingly participate in their own becoming.

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The Crux

This was not a debate in which one speaker clearly had the factual record and the other did not. Skinner was more operationally precise about causal explanation, reinforcement, and the ubiquity of control; Rogers was more precise about the ethical and lived implications of applying those explanations to persons. The real disagreement lay beneath the stated conflict between Subjective freedom ↔ Behavioral determinism and Inner experience ↔ Observable behavior: Rogers feared that a science of control, if treated as a total worldview, would make the person disappear as a center of meaning; Skinner feared that reverence for freedom and inner life would preserve ineffective, punitive, accidental systems that behavioral science could improve.

The missing variable was not “freedom” or “control” alone, because both named those repeatedly. It was the legitimacy of influence: who gets to see, consent to, evaluate, and revise the conditions that shape them. Rogers defended participant choice but did not make it operational enough for Skinner’s framework; Skinner defended designed environments but did not give participant appraisal enough standing to count as more than another behavioral effect. Had legitimacy become the shared object of inquiry, the conversation could have moved from “Are people free or controlled?” to “What forms of control make people more able to understand and co-author the controls shaping them?”

The Higher-Order Reframe

The higher frame is not freedom versus design, but cultures that deliberately produce co-designers. In this frame, a person is neither an uncaused chooser nor a programmable object. A person is a living process whose capacities for choice, self-understanding, discipline, curiosity, and ethical judgment are shaped by environments — and whose maturity includes becoming able to notice, question, and help redesign those environments. Rogers’s deepest concern is preserved because design must remain transparent, participatory, and oriented toward lived authorship. Skinner’s deepest concern is preserved because authorship is not imagined to arise magically; it is built through arranged conditions, practiced skills, and non-punitive supports.

Made by Corey deVos · About this analysis

Debate Analysis

A Dialogue on Education and Control — B. F. Skinner - Carl Rogers (1976)

They weren't really arguing about free will. They were arguing about who may shape a person.

Carl Rogers

B. F. Skinner

Both poles are real. Both speakers slid into their downsides.

Both overreached, in different ways.

A hard dialogue, not a fight.

Scientific life is open becoming.

The speakers

Carl Rogers

B. F. Skinner

Developmental profile

Polarities

Carl Rogers

B. F. Skinner

Developmental profile

Polarities

The full analysis

Carl Rogers

B. F. Skinner

Carl Rogers

B. F. Skinner

Epistemic Mismatch Note

Net Assessment

Polarity: Subjective freedom ↔ Behavioral determinism

The Crux

The Higher-Order Reframe

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