Guy Bruce

Appealing Solutions

Skinner’s most important contribution to the science and engineering of behavior change was his pragmatic preference for methods, explanations, and procedures that allowed more accurate prediction and effective control of behavior change. In "Case History in Scientific Method," he described this preference and how it shaped his adoption of: 1) Within-subject experimental designs; 2) Repeated within and across subject replication to discover functional relations between changes in environmental variables and changes in individual response rates; 3) Precise, universal, absolute, standard and automated measures of environmental variables and response rates; 4) An Inductive approach to discovering useful explanations and procedures; 5) The use of standard charts that allowed him to evaluate the practical significance of changes in individual response rates as a function of his systematic manipulation of environmental variables. This paper will describe how Skinner’s pragmatic philosophy of science shaped the scientific and engineering methods that have allowed us to discover the explanations, procedures, processes, and systems which have produced practically significant behavior change desired by a variety of individual and organizational clients.