72 pages • 2-hour read
Science and Human Behavior
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Individual as a Whole”
Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “‘Self-Control’”
Skinner begins his discussion of self-control by acknowledging the apparent paradox in a behavioral framework that emphasizes external variables: The question of how, if behavior is shaped by the environment, an individual can appear to be determining their own conduct. He reframes self-determination as behavior itself, specifically behavior directed toward manipulating the conditions under which other behavior occurs. In this view, self-control is not evidence of an inner agent but rather a process in which “one response, the controlling response, affects variables in such a way as to change the probability of the other, the controlled response” (231).
Skinner outlines a variety of techniques individuals use to regulate their own behavior, many of which parallel how people control others. Physical methods include restraining oneself, avoiding situations, or limiting access to temptations, such as leaving money at home to avoid overspending. Other methods involve altering stimuli—either removing triggers for unwanted responses, or arranging cues that encourage desirable ones. People may also use deprivation or satiation, such as eating beforehand to diminish the likelihood of overindulgence, or deliberately engaging in a behavior to reduce its strength. Emotional conditions can be manipulated by seeking out or avoiding particular moods, and aversive stimulation may be self-imposed, such as when one sets an alarm clock to enforce waking.
Skinner considers more complex practices like self-reinforcement and self-punishment, though he questions whether these processes operate in the same way as when reinforcement or punishment are administered by others. A distinctive method of self-control is intentionally replacing an undesirable action with another.
The chapter concludes by examining the ultimate source of self-control. While individuals may design elaborate strategies to regulate their behavior, he argues that these strategies are shaped by social contingencies and cultural reinforcement. As Skinner asserts, “society is responsible for the larger part of the behavior of self-control” (240). By shifting the focus away from willpower and responsibility to identifiable behavioral processes, Skinner argues that self-control can be taught and strengthened through the same scientific principles that govern all behavior.
Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary: “Thinking”
Skinner expands, turning to decision-making, recall, problem-solving, and the emergence of ideas. While self-control involves influencing known courses of action, thinking often entails manipulating variables without a predetermined outcome. Decisions are made by arranging conditions that strengthen one alternative over another, such as consulting information to favor one choice. Skinner explains, “deciding […] is not the execution of the act decided upon but the preliminary behavior responsible for it” (244). Decisions are reinforced both by escape from the discomfort of indecision and by the long-term advantage of careful deliberation, though the capacity to deliberate is largely shaped by social training.
Beyond decisions, Skinner examines recall, where individuals strengthen forgotten responses by probing associated contexts or cues. This serves as a bridge to problem-solving, which he defines as “any behavior which, through the manipulation of variables, makes the appearance of a solution more probable” (249). Examples range from puzzles to scientific inquiry, where arranging or amplifying stimuli facilitates the emergence of effective responses. He distinguishes problem-solving from mere trial-and-error, emphasizing systematic manipulation of conditions over accidental discovery.
The discussion culminates in an analysis of originality. Skinner believes that novel responses—whether in art, science, or everyday life—are not the product of inner spontaneity but of environmental contingencies and personal histories. Seemingly creative acts, such as generating a metaphor or an artistic design, are explained as responses shaped by past reinforcement and stimulus induction. Skinner concludes that “originality” lies not in autonomous invention but in novel behavior produced by evolving contingencies within social and natural environments. This functional approach, he argues, demystifies thinking and opens the possibility of teaching and improving methods of thought through scientific principles.
Part 3, Chapter 17 Summary: “Private Events in A Natural Science”
Skinner addresses the long-standing philosophical and scientific challenge of private events—stimuli and responses that occur within the individual’s body and are inaccessible to others. He clarifies that privacy is not a matter of special metaphysical properties but of limited accessibility. This recognition complicates functional analysis, since some variables controlling behavior cannot be directly observed by the scientific community.
Verbal behavior relating to private events, such as saying, “my tooth aches,” is learned through indirect reinforcement. Communities rely on public accompaniments (grimacing, touching the jaw) or metaphorical extensions from shared experiences. However, such strategies are imperfect, leading to inaccuracies and mistrust in self-reports. He argues that self-knowledge itself is socially constructed: “Strangely enough, it is the community which teaches the individual to ‘know himself’” (261).
Next, Skinner distinguishes between types of internal stimulation. Interoceptive stimuli arise from internal organs (hunger pangs, heartbeat), while proprioceptive stimuli involve the position and movement of the body. These, combined with exteroceptive input, form the foundation for what is labeled “emotions” and “bodily sensations.” However, verbal descriptions of private behavior often depend on either private covert responses or on interpreting past public conditions.
A central difficulty emerges in discriminative responses like, “I see a rainbow.” While this seems equivalent to “There is a rainbow,” Skinner emphasizes that the former describes the behavior of seeing, not the external stimulus itself. This distinction becomes critical when individuals report perceptions without external stimuli—hallucinations, conditioned seeing, or imagery. He explains such phenomena through conditioning processes rather than invoking nonphysical “mental images.” For instance, a dinner bell may not only evoke salivation but also “make us see food” as a conditioned response (265-266).
Skinner contrasts this functional approach with the traditional dualistic view that posits two worlds—a physical world and a “conscious experience” of sensations and images. He critiques this as a fictional explanatory device, comparable to what he regards as other outdated notions like instinct or drive, which obscure the real environmental variables at work. Instead, he insists that private events are best understood as part of the same natural processes that govern all behavior.
Finally, he notes that technological advances may gradually erode the boundary between public and private. Covert verbal behavior, for example, can already be detected through subtle physiological measures. While such developments could help bring private events into the domain of science, their importance remains in how they influence behavior—whether or not they can be made fully public.
Part 3, Chapter 18 Summary: “The Self”
Skinner examines the concept of the self, rejecting its traditional role as an inner agent or causal entity. He begins by noting that the “self” is often invoked as an explanatory fiction—an imagined origin of action when external variables are not accounted for. Just as earlier cultures attributed wind to Aeolus or rain to Jupiter, modern psychology has attributed behavior to the autonomous self. In Skinner’s view, such explanations provide comfort but obscure the true environmental causes of behavior. Instead, Skinner argues that the self is best understood as an organized system of responses rather than a distinct inner agent. These systems achieve a sense of unity when tied together by common reinforcers, deprivations, or emotional conditions. Personality traits, then, reflect the ways in which responses cluster around particular environmental occasions, reinforcements, and emotional states.
Relations among these systems can explain apparent conflicts or inconsistencies in conduct. A person may behave piously on Sunday but ruthlessly in business on Monday, not because of contradictory selves but because of the differing contingencies of reinforcement in each context. When these contingencies overlap—such as when business ethics are questioned in a religious setting—conflict between response systems emerges. Freud’s structural model of id, ego, and superego is reinterpreted as a description of competing behavioral repertoires—one organized around primary reinforcers, another around community-shaped controls, and a third negotiating between them.
Self-knowledge, discussed in the preceding chapter, is reframed as one repertoire among many, established through differential reinforcement by the verbal community. However, self-knowledge is often incomplete or absent. Individuals may fail to recognize past actions, ongoing behavior, or the variable influencing their actions. Forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, and unconscious tendencies are thus seen as cases where reinforcement has not established adequate self-descriptive responses. Skinner emphasizes that “self-knowledge is a special repertoire” (289), depending on whether individuals have been given reasons to observe their own behavior.
The analysis extends to repression, which is interpreted as the avoidance of aversive stimulation. Punished behavior generates conditioned aversive cues, and individuals learn to avoid both the behavior and the act of recognizing and reporting it. Rationalization functions similarly, providing socially acceptable explanations that mask the true variables of behavior.
Skinner also turns to symbols and dreams as instances of behavior shaped by reinforcement and punishment. A symbol, as he adapts the Freudian concept, is a response that achieves reinforcement through similarity to another behavior but avoids punishment by differing from it. Dreams, too, are explained as private discriminative behavior occurring in the absence of usual stimuli. They allow the individual to engage in behavior linked to powerful reinforcers—such as sexual contact or aggression—without triggering the aversive consequences that would follow in waking life.
Part 3 Analysis
In Part 3, Skinner turns his attention to some of the most elusive and traditionally “inner” aspects of human life—self-control, private events, and the concept of the self. Where earlier chapters laid the groundwork of behavioral science by defining conditioning and reinforcement, this section extends those principles to areas long thought to lie outside empirical explanation. Skinner challenges dualistic views of mind and behavior, reframing phenomena like willpower, repression, self-awareness, and even dreaming in terms of observable contingencies.
A central focus of this section is Skinner’s redefinition of self-control, adding to his exploration of Behavior as a Product of Environmental Conditioning Rather Than Inner Will. Instead of locating self-regulation in an inner faculty of will, he offers a compact behavioral formulation: “One response, the controlling response, affects variables in such a way as to change the probability of the other, the controlled response” (231). In this way, biting one’s nails may be prevented not by an act of inner strength, but by the competing behavior of putting one’s hands in one’s pockets. By casting self-control as a relationship between behaviors, Skinner strips the concept of its metaphysical overtones and grounds it in contingencies of reinforcement. This idea challenges traditional explanations that posit inner will as a causal agent.
Skinner pushes this point further by placing responsibility for self-control not on the individual but on society, arguing, ”Society is responsible for the larger part of the behavior of self-control” (240). Cultural norms, moral training, and systems of reinforcement provide the scaffolding that shapes what individuals perceive as their own regulation. The individual conscience, then, is not an independent voice but the echo of the community’s contingencies. This has profound ethical implications. If repression results not simply from inner conflict but from punishment by the social environment, then responsibility for the anxieties and distortions produced by repression lies outside the individual. Skinner notes that punishment conditions humans not only to avoid certain acts but also “to the exclusion of knowing about punished behavior” (291). The doctrine of repression, reframed in this way, highlights the cost of social control systems that rely heavily on punishment.
The analysis of private events further illustrates Skinner’s rejection of what he deems explanatory fictions. Rather than granting special causal status to sensations, ideas, or experiences, he situates them within the same framework of stimulus and response as external events. His example of the rainbow demonstrates this notion: “The response, ‘I see a rainbow,’ is, therefore, not equivalent to ‘There is a rainbow” (265). This distinction suggests that even private experiences are behavioral responses, not privileged glimpses of an inner mental world. Similarly, Skinner rejects the notion of an irreducibly private realms of consciousness: “A world of experience which is by definition available only to the individual, wholly without public accompaniment, could never become the discriminative occasion for self-description” (280). Such passages crystallize his broader critique of explanatory constructs that obscure the role of environmental variables.
The theme of The Potential for Social Engineering Through Behavioral Science emerges strongly in Skinner’s treatment of self-knowledge and multiple selves. He argues that self-awareness is not innate but acquired: “Self-knowledge is a special repertoire” (289), established only when communities arrange contingencies that compel individuals to describe their own behavior. In societies that emphasize introspection, this repertoire is highly developed, while in others it may remain minimal. The implication is that the capacity for self-reflection can be deliberately cultivated—or neglected—through social practices. This reasoning suggests that institutions such as therapy, education, or even propaganda can be designed to expand or constrain repertoires of self-observation.
Skinner often relies on everyday examples to render these abstract points more accessible. The figure of the “pious churchgoer on Sunday” who becomes “an aggressive, unscrupulous businessman on Monday” dramatizes the inconsistency of behavior across contexts (286), illustrating how apparent contradictions in “personality” dissolve when understood as products of changing environmental contingencies. Similarly, his discussions of repression, dreaming, and symbolic behavior exemplify how behaviors that appear mysterious or internally driven can be traced to reinforcement histories and social prohibitions. These examples are not merely illustrative; they function as rhetorical devices, grounding his arguments in lived experience and attempting to persuade the reader.
Part 3 serves as a bridge between the foundational science of behavior outlined earlier and the broader applications to culture and society that follow. By tackling the concept of the self, Skinner demonstrates the reach of behavioral science into domains once thought inaccessible to empirical study.
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