air crib experiment

Behavior: A Skinnerian Innovation: Baby in a Box

IN 1945, when Deborah Skinner was eleven months old, she had a rather dubious distinction: she was the most talked-about infant in America—the famous “baby in a box.” The box, or “air crib” as her father called it, was his own invention, a glassed-in, insulated, air-controlled crib that he thought would revolutionize child rearing and, in line with his behaviorist theories, produce happier, healthier children.

One of the major practical problems in raising a young baby, Skinner reasoned, is the simple one of keeping it warm. The infant is usually covered by half a dozen layers of cloth—shirt, nightdress, sheet and blankets—that not only constrict movement and cause rashes, but sometimes even pose the danger of strangulation. Then there is the mother’s labor in dressing and undressing the child, plus the considerable expense of buying and laundering all those clothes and blankets.

To eliminate those troubles, Skinner designed Deborah’s crib with temperature and humidity controls so that she could be warm and naked at the same time. Besides the hoped-for results—Deborah never suffered from a rash, for instance—the crib provided an unexpected fringe benefit: the Skinners discovered that the baby was so sensitive to even the slightest change in temperature that she could be made happy simply by moving the thermostat a notch or two. “We wonder how a comfortable temperature is ever reached with clothing and blankets,” Skinner wrote in a 1945 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. “During the past six months Deborah has not cried at all except for a moment or two when injured or sharply distressed—for example, when inoculated.”

The air in the box was passed through filters, keeping Deborah free from germs and so clean that it was necessary to give her only one bath a week. There was the usual diaper change, but little other laundering; a single, 10-yd.-long sheet was stored on a spool at one end of the compartment and rolled through into a hamper on the other end as it was soiled; it had to be laundered just once a week. The box was partially soundproofed, and a shade could be drawn over the plate-glass window.

Skinner was sensitive to criticism that Deborah was isolated. In his articles and lectures, he took pains to stress that she could watch everything that was taking place in the room about her, and that she was frequently taken out for cuddling and play. To many people, however, the air box sounded and looked like an atrocious human goldfish bowl.

The continuing controversy about the box may have partially offset the good effects Skinner hoped for when he designed it. Says Deborah, who is now an art student in London: “It was spread around that because of the box I had become psychotic, had to be institutionalized, and had even attempted suicide. My father was very concerned about these rumors, as was I. He thinks they may have affected me. After college, I had a typical half-year of depression, the sort of identity crisis that everybody I’ve ever known has gone through. At this point my father brought up the idea that I don’t have enough faith in myself, and that the rumors may have had something to do with this.”

In fact, Deborah, a slightly shy and earnest but nonpsychotic young woman of 27, seems to have, survived the rumors rather well. Her 21 years in the box, she thinks, did her only good. “It wasn’t really a psychological experiment,” she says, “but what you might call a happiness-through-health experiment. I think I was a very happy baby. Most of the criticisms of the box are by people who don’t understand what it was.”

Though something like 1,000 of the air cribs are in use today, Skinner’s idea has not caught on with very many parents and has yet to revolutionize child rearing.

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Skinner Box: What Is an Operant Conditioning Chamber?

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

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On This Page:

The Skinner box is a chamber that isolates the subject from the external environment and has a behavior indicator such as a lever or a button.

When the animal pushes the button or lever, the box is able to deliver a positive reinforcement of the behavior (such as food) or a punishment (such as noise), or a token conditioner (such as a light) that is correlated with either the positive reinforcement or punishment.

• The Skinner box, otherwise known as an operant conditioning chamber, is a laboratory apparatus used to study animal behavior within a compressed time frame.
• Underlying the development of the Skinner box was the concept of operant conditioning, a type of learning that occurs as a consequence of a behavior.
• The Skinner Box has been wrongly confused with the Skinner air crib, with detrimental public consequences for Skinner.
• Commentators have drawn parallels between the Skinner box and modern advertising and game design, citing their addictive qualities and systematized rewards.

How Does It Work?

The Skinner Box is a chamber, often small, that is used to conduct operant conditioning research with animals. Within this chamber, there is usually a lever or key that an individual animal can operate to obtain a food or water source within the chamber as a reinforcer.

The chamber is connected to electronic equipment that records the animal’s lever pressing or key pecking, allowing for the precise quantification of behavior.

Before the works of Skinner, the namesake of the Skinner box, instrumental learning was typically studied using a maze or puzzle box.

Learning in these settings is well-suited to examining discrete trials or episodes of behavior instead of a continuous stream of behavior.

The Skinner box, meanwhile, was designed as an experimental environment better suited to examine the more natural flow of behavior in animals.

The design of the Skinner Box varies heavily depending on the type of animal enclosed within it and experimental variables.

Nonetheless, it includes, at minimum, at least one lever, bar, or key that an animal can manipulate. Besides the reinforcer and tracker, a skinner box can include other variables, such as lights, sounds, or images. In some cases, the floor of the chamber may even be electrified (Boulay, 2019).

The design of the Skinner box is intended to keep an animal from experiencing other stimuli, allowing researchers to carefully study behavior in a very controlled environment.

This allows researchers to, for example, determine which schedule of reinforcement — or relation of rewards and punishment to the reinforcer — leads to the highest rate of response in the animal being studied (Boulay, 2019).

The Reinforcer

The reinforcer is the part of the Skinner box that provides, naturally, reinforcement for an action. For instance, a lever may provide a pellet of food when pressed a certain number of times. This lever is the reinforcer (Boulay, 2019).

The Tracker/Quantifier

The tracker, meanwhile, provides quantitative data regarding the reinforcer. For example, the tracker may count the number of times that a lever is pressed or the number of electric shocks or pellets dispensed (Boulay, 2019).

Partial Reinforcement Schedules

Partial reinforcement occurs when reinforcement is only given under particular circumstances. For example, a pellet or shock may only be dispensed after a pigeon has pressed a lever a certain number of times.

There are several types of partial reinforcement schedules (Boulay, 2019):

• Fixed-ratio schedules , where an animal receives a pellet after pushing the trigger a certain number of times.
• Variable-ratio schedules , where animals receive reinforcement after a random number of responses.
• Fixed-interval schedules , where animals are given a pellet after a designated period of time has elapsed, such as every 5 minutes.
• Variable-interval schedules , where animals receive a reinforcer at random.

Once data has been obtained from the Skinner box, researchers can look at the rate of response depending on the schedule.

The Skinner Box in Research

Modified versions of the operant conditioning chamber, or Skinner box, are still widely used in research settings today.

Skinner developed his theory of operant conditioning by identifying four different types of punishment or reward.

To test the effect of these outcomes, he constructed a device called the “Skinner Box,” a cage in which a rat could be placed, with a small lever (which the rat would be trained to press), a chute that would release pellets of food, and a floor which could be electrified.

For example, a hungry rat was placed in a cage. Every time he activated the lever, a food pellet fell into the food dispenser (positive reinforcement). The rats quickly learned to go straight to the lever after a few times of being put in the box.

This suggests that positive reinforcement increases the likelihood of the behavior being repeated.

In another experiment, a rat was placed in a cage in which they were subjected to an uncomfortable electrical current (see diagram above).

As they moved around the cage, the rat hit the lever, which immediately switched off the electrical current (negative reinforcement). The rats quickly learned to go straight to the lever after a few times of being put in the box.

This suggests that negative reinforcement increases the likelihood of the behavior being repeated.

The device allowed Skinner to deliver each of his four potential outcomes, which are:

• Positive Reinforcement : a direct reward for performing a certain behavior. For instance, the rat could be rewarded with a pellet of food for pushing the lever.
• Positive Punishment : a direct negative outcome following a particular behavior. Once the rat had been taught to press the lever, for instance, Skinner trained it to cease this behavior by electrifying the floor each time the lever was pressed.
• Negative Reinforcement : the removal of an unpleasant situation when a particular behavior is performed (thus producing a sense of relief). For instance, a mild electric current was passed through the floor of the cage and was removed when a desired behavior was formed.
• Negative Punishment : involves taking away a reward or removing a pleasant situation. In the Skinner box, for instance, the rat could be trained to stop pressing the lever by releasing food pellets at regular intervals and then withholding them when the lever was pressed.

Commercial Applications

The application of operant and classical conditioning and the corresponding idea of the Skinner Box in commercial settings is widespread, particularly with regard to advertising and video games.

Advertisers use a number of techniques based on operant conditioning to influence consumer behavior, such as variable-ratio reinforcement schedule (the so-called “slot machine effect”), which encourages viewers to keep watching a particular channel in the hope of seeing a desirable outcome (e.g., winning a prize) (Vu, 2017).

Similarly, video game designers often employ Skinnerian principles in order to keep players engaged in gameplay.

For instance, many games make use of variable-ratio schedules of reinforcement, whereby players are given rewards (e.g., points, new levels) at random intervals.

This encourages players to keep playing in the hope of receiving a reward. In addition, many games make use of Skinner’s principle of shaping, whereby players are gradually given more difficult tasks as they master the easy ones. This encourages players to persevere in the face of frustration in order to see results.

There are a number of potential problems with using operant conditioning principles in commercial settings.

First, advertisers and video game designers may inadvertently create addictive behaviors in consumers.

Second, operant conditioning is a relatively short-term phenomenon; that is, it only affects behavior while reinforcement is being given.

Once reinforcement is removed (e.g., the TV channel is changed, the game is turned off), the desired behavior is likely to disappear as well.

As such, operant conditioning techniques may backfire, leading to addiction without driving the game-playing experiences developers hoped for (Vu, 2017).

Skinner Box Myths

In 1945, B. F. Skinner invented the air crib, a metal crib with walls and a ceiling made of removable safety glass.

The front pane of the crib was also made of safety glass, and the entire structure was meant to sit on legs so that it could be moved around easily.

The air crib was designed to create a climate-controlled, healthier environment for infants. The air crib was not commercially successful, but it did receive some attention from the media.

In particular, Time magazine ran a story about the air crib in 1947, which described it as a “baby tender” that would “give infant care a new scientific basis.” (Joyce & Fay, 2010).

The general lack of publicity around Skinner’s air crib, however, resulted in the perpetuation of the myth that Skinner’s air crib was a Skinner Box and that the infants placed in the crib were being conditioned.

In reality, the air crib was nothing more than a simple bassinet with some features that were meant to make it easier for parents to care for their infants.

There is no evidence that Skinner ever used the air crib to condition children, and in fact, he later said that it was never his intention to do so.

One famous myth surrounding the Skinner Crib was that Skinner’s daughter, Deborah Skinner, was Raised in a Skinner Box.

According to this rumor, Deborah Skinner had become mentally ill, sued her father, and committed suicide as a result of her experience. These rumors persisted until she publicly denied the stories in 2004 (Joyce & Fay, 2010).

Effectiveness

One of the most common criticisms of the Skinner box is that it does not allow animals to understand their actions.

Because behaviorism does not require that an animal understand its actions, this theory can be somewhat misleading about the degree to which an animal actually understands what it is doing (Boulay, 2019).

Another criticism of the Skinner box is that it can be quite stressful for the animals involved. The design of the Skinner box is intended to keep an animal from experiencing other stimuli, which can lead to stress and anxiety.

Finally, some critics argue that the data obtained from Skinner boxes may not be generalizable to real-world situations.

Because the environment in a Skinner box is so controlled, it may not accurately reflect how an animal would behave in an environment outside the lab.

There are very few learning environments in the real world that replicate a perfect operant conditioning environment, with a single action or sequence of actions leading to a stimulus (Boulay, 2019).

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Dezfouli, A., & Balleine, B. W. (2012). Habits, action sequences and reinforcement learning. European Journal of Neuroscience, 35 (7), 1036-1051.

Du Boulay, B. (2019). Escape from the Skinner Box: The case for contemporary intelligent learning environments. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50 (6), 2902-2919.

Chen, C., Zhang, K. Z., Gong, X., & Lee, M. (2019). Dual mechanisms of reinforcement reward and habit in driving smartphone addiction: the role of smartphone features. Internet Research.

Dad, H., Ali, R., Janjua, M. Z. Q., Shahzad, S., & Khan, M. S. (2010). Comparison of the frequency and effectiveness of positive and negative reinforcement practices in schools. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 3 (1), 127-136.

Diedrich, J. L. (2010). Motivating students using positive reinforcement (Doctoral dissertation).

Dozier, C. L., Foley, E. A., Goddard, K. S., & Jess, R. L. (2019). Reinforcement. T he Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Development, 1-10.

Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement . New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Gunter, P. L., & Coutinho, M. J. (1997). Negative reinforcement in classrooms: What we’re beginning to learn. Teacher Education and Special Education, 20 (3), 249-264.

Joyce, N., & Faye, C. (2010). Skinner Air Crib. APS Observer, 23 (7).

Kamery, R. H. (2004, July). Motivation techniques for positive reinforcement: A review. I n Allied Academies International Conference. Academy of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues. Proceedings (Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 91). Jordan Whitney Enterprises, Inc.

Kohler, W. (1924). The mentality of apes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Staddon, J. E., & Niv, Y. (2008). Operant conditioning. Scholarpedia, 3 (9), 2318.

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis. New York: Appleton-Century.

Skinner, B. F. (1948). Superstition” in the pigeon . Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172.

Skinner, B. F. (1951). How to teach animals. Freeman.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. SimonandSchuster.com.

Skinner, B. F. (1963). Operant behavior. American psychologist, 18 (8), 503.

Smith, S., Ferguson, C. J., & Beaver, K. M. (2018). Learning to blast a way into crime, or just good clean fun? Examining aggressive play with toy weapons and its relation with crime. Criminal behaviour and mental health, 28 (4), 313-323.

Staddon, J. E., & Cerutti, D. T. (2003). Operant conditioning. Annual Review of Psychology, 54 (1), 115-144.

Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 2(4), i-109.

Vu, D. (2017). An Analysis of Operant Conditioning and its Relationship with Video Game Addiction.

Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it . Psychological Review, 20, 158–177.

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Skinner Box

What Is the Skinner Box?

Operant conditioning chambers are small environments designed to contain an animal subject. They are generally structured to block external light and sound in order to prevent distracting stimuli from interfering with experiments. The box ensures behaviors are conditioned appropriately and rewards are timed correctly. The purpose of the Skinner box is to analyze animal behavior by detecting when an animal has performed a desired behavior and then administering a reward, thus determining how long it takes the animal to learn to perform the behavior. If the goal of the box is to teach a rat to press a lever, for example, pressing the lever might cause food to fall out of a chute. The rat will likely only push the lever accidentally at first, but eventually it will learn food appears when it does so. Then the rat will begin to perform the behavior independently.

The Skinner box has been used in pharmaceutical research to observe the effects of drugs on animal behavior.

Criticism of The Skinner Box

B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist methods are generally widely accepted as basic teaching tools. However, because behaviorism does not require that an animal understand its actions, this theory can be somewhat misleading about the degree to which an animal actually understands what it is doing, when used to teach complex behaviors.

Skinner boxes have also been criticized by various animal welfare organizations as cruel, both because they tend to be small and because they often deprive the animal of all other stimuli, including species-appropriate social interaction.

Skinner’s Air Crib

Skinner’s 1945 invention of an air crib, a metal crib that had walls, a ceiling, and a front pane of removable safety glass, was meant to create a climate-controlled, healthier environment for infants. The parents of those infants who used the crib, including the Skinners, reported only positive effects, but because the crib was not publicized well, some linked it publicly to the Skinner box, assuming incorrectly that infants placed in the crib were being conditioned. Others were skeptical of using such technology in childcare, and some assumed that any child raised in such a crib might experience psychological damage. Eventually, rumors that Deborah Skinner had become mentally ill as a result of her experience in the air crib spread, persisting until Deborah publicly denied the stories in 2004.

References:

• American Psychological Association. APA concise dictionary of psychology . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009. Print.
• B.F. Skinner (2013). In Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/547663/BF-Skinner#ref279605.
• Buzan, D. (2014, March 12). I was not a lab rat. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/mar/12/highereducation.uk.
• Colman, A. M. (2006). Oxford dictionary of psychology . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• Joyce, N., & Faye, C. (2010). Skinner Air Crib. The Observer, 23 (7).

Last Updated: 01-29-2016

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I am a psychology and science teaching looking for a Skinner Box to train rats and pigeons using lights and sounds but there are nowhere to be found anymore (not even on Amazon or Ebay). Does anyone know where I could find one?

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B. F. Skinner

“To say that a reinforcement is contingent upon a response may mean nothing more than that it follows the response. It may follow because of some mechanical connection or because of the mediation of another organism; but conditioning takes place presumably because of the temporal relation only, expressed in terms of the order and proximity of response and reinforcement. Whenever we present a state of affairs which is known to be reinforcing at a given drive, we must suppose that conditioning takes place, even though we have paid no attention to the behavior of the organism in making the presentation.”

– B.F. Skinner, “Superstition’ in the Pigeon” (p. 168)

In the 20th century, many of the images that came to mind when thinking about experimental psychology were tied to the work of Burrhus Frederick Skinner.  The stereotype of a bespectacled experimenter in a white lab coat, engaged in shaping behavior through the operant conditioning of lab rats or pigeons in contraptions known as Skinner boxes comes directly from Skinner’s immeasurably influential research.

Although he originally intended to make a career as a writer, Skinner received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1931, and stayed on as a researcher until 1936, when he departed to take academic posts at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University.  He returned to Harvard in 1948 as a professor, and was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology from 1958 until he retired in 1974. 

Skinner was influenced by John B. Watson’s philosophy of psychology called behaviorism, which rejected not just the introspective method and the elaborate psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, but any psychological explanation based on mental states or internal representations such as beliefs, desires, memories, and plans. The very idea of “mind” was dismissed as a pre-scientific superstition, not amenable to empirical investigation. Skinner argued that the goal of a science of psychology was to predict and control an organism’s behavior from its current stimulus situation and its history of reinforcement. In a utopian novel called Walden Two and a 1971 bestseller called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, he argued that human behavior was always controlled by its environment. According to Skinner, the future of humanity depended on abandoning the concepts of individual freedom and dignity and engineering the human environment so that behavior was controlled systematically and to desirable ends rather than haphazardly.

 In the laboratory, Skinner refined the concept of operant conditioning and the Law of Effect. Among his contributions were a systematic exploration of intermittent schedules of reinforcement, the shaping of novel behavior through successive approximations, the chaining of complex behavioral sequences via secondary (learned) reinforcers, and “superstitious” (accidentally reinforced) behavior.

Skinner was also an inveterate inventor. Among his gadgets were the “Skinner box” for shaping and counting lever-pressing in rats and key-pecking in pigeons; the cumulative recorder, a mechanism for recording rates of behavior as a pen tracing; a World-War II-era missile guidance system (never deployed) in which a trained pigeon in the missile’s transparent nose cone continually pecked at the target; and “teaching machines” for “programmed learning,” in which students were presented a sentence at a time and then filled in the blank in a similar sentence, shown in a small window. He achieved notoriety for a mid-1950s Life magazine article showcasing his “air crib,” a temperature-controlled glass box in which his infant daughter would play. This led to the urban legend, occasionally heard to this day, that Skinner “experimented on his daughter” or “raised her in a box” and that she grew up embittered and maladjusted, all of which are false.

B.F. Skinner was ranked by the American Psychological Association as the 20th century’s most eminent psychologist.

B. F. Skinner. (1998).  Public Broadcasting Service.  Retrieved December 12, 2007, from:  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhskin.html

Eminent psychologists of the 20th century.  (July/August, 2002). Monitor on Psychology, 33(7), p.29.

Skinner, B. F. (1947).  ‘Superstition’ in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168-172.

Skinner, B. F. (1959) Cumulative record. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.

Bjork, D. W. (1991). Burrhus Frederick Skinner: The contingencies of a life.  In: Kimble, G. A. & Wertheimer, M. [Eds.]  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology. 

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The Behavioral Psychology Theory That Explains Learned Behavior

Aka the Skinner box

Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

A Skinner box is an enclosed apparatus that contains a bar or key that an animal subject can manipulate in order to obtain reinforcement. Developed by B. F. Skinner and also known as an operant conditioning chamber, this box also has a device that records each response provided by the animal as well as the unique schedule of reinforcement that the animal was assigned. Common animal subjects include rats and pigeons.

Skinner was inspired to create his operant conditioning chamber as an extension of the puzzle boxes that Edward Thorndike famously used in his research on the law of effect . Skinner himself did not refer to this device as a Skinner box, instead preferring the term "lever box."

How a Skinner Box Works

The design of a Skinner box can vary depending upon the type of animal and the experimental variables . It must include at least one lever, bar, or key that the animal can manipulate.

When the lever is pressed, food, water, or some other type of reinforcement might be dispensed. Other stimuli can also be presented, including lights, sounds, and images. In some instances, the floor of the chamber may be electrified.

The Skinner box is usually enclosed, to keep the animal from experiencing other stimuli. Using the device, researchers can carefully study behavior in a very controlled environment. For example, researchers could use the Skinner box to determine which schedule of reinforcement led to the highest rate of response in the study subjects.

Today, psychology students may use a virtual version of a Skinner box to conduct experiments and learn about operant conditioning.

The Skinner Box in Research

Imagine that a researcher wants to determine which schedule of reinforcement will lead to the highest response rates. Pigeons are placed in chambers where they receive a food pellet for pecking at a response key. Some pigeons receive a pellet for every response (continuous reinforcement).

Partial Reinforcement Schedules

Other pigeons obtain a pellet only after a certain amount of time or number of responses have occurred (partial reinforcement). There are several types of partial reinforcement schedules.

• Fixed-ratio schedule : Pigeons receive a pellet after they peck at the key a certain number of times; for example, they would receive a pellet after every five pecks.
• Variable-ratio schedule : Subjects receive reinforcement after a random number of responses.
• Fixed-interval schedule : Subjects are given a pellet after a designated period of time has elapsed; for example, every 10 minutes.
• Variable-interval schedule : Subjects receive a pellet at random intervals of time.

Once the data has been obtained from the trials in the Skinner boxes, researchers can then look at the rate of responding. This will tell them which schedules led to the highest and most consistent level of responses.

Skinner Box Myths

The Skinner box should not be confused with one of Skinner's other inventions, the baby tender (also known as the air crib). At his wife's request, Skinner created a heated crib with a plexiglass window that was designed to be safer than other cribs available at that time. Confusion over the use of the crib led to it being confused with an experimental device, which led some to believe that Skinner's crib was actually a variation of the Skinner box.

At one point, a rumor spread that Skinner had used the crib in experiments with his daughter, leading to her eventual suicide. The Skinner box and the baby tender crib were two different things entirely, and Skinner did not conduct experiments on his daughter or with the crib. Nor did his daughter take her own life.  

A Word From Verywell

The Skinner box is an important tool for studying learned behavior. It has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the effects of reinforcement and punishment.

Operant conditioning chamber . In: APA Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association.

B.F. Skinner Foundation. Biographical information .

Schacter DL, Gilbert DT, Wegner DM. Psychology. 2nd edition. Worth, Inc., 2011.

Ray RD, Miraglia KM. A sample of CyberRat and other experiments: Their pedagogical functions in a learning course . J Behav Neurosci Res . 2011;9(2):44-61.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Operant chamber ; Operant conditioning chamber ; Repeating puzzle box

As its name suggests, the “Skinner box” was invented by B. F. Skinner while he was still a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1930s. Rather than use the term “Skinner box,” Skinner only ever referred to this invention as an operant chamber or as an experimental box, space, apparatus, or chamber (Nye 1992 ). The origin of the “Skinner box” title has generally been associated with psychologist Clark Hull, having appeared in his publication, Principles of Behavior: An Introduction to Behavior Theory (Hull 1943 ; see also Iversen 1992 ). However, the term “Skinner box” appears in other publications, as early as 1939 (Krechevsky 1939 ; Smith and Smith 1939 ; Humphreys 1940 ).

Skinner first began studying animal behavior during his graduate training at Harvard. Inspired by the work of Pavlov, Skinner sought to study behavioral adaptation in rats using a controlled environment (Skinner 1972 ). He first...

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Burns, A., Sparks, M., Washburn, D.A. (2020). Skinner Box. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1523-1

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B.F. Skinner Raised His Daughter in a Skinner Box?

Did psychologist b.f. skinner raise his daughter in a 'skinner box', david mikkelson, published aug. 8, 2000.

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When Skinner's second daughter, Deborah, was born in 1944, Skinner (who then lived in Minnesota) constructed an alternative type of crib for her that was something like a large version of a hospital incubator, a tall box with a door at its base and a glass window in front. This "baby tender," as Skinner called it, provided Deborah with a place to sleep and remain comfortably warm throughout the severe Minnesota winters without having to be wrapped in numerous layers of clothing and blankets (and developing the attendant rashes). Deborah slept in her novel crib until she was two and a half years old, and by all accounts grew up a happy, healthy, thriving child.

The trouble began in October 1945, when the magazine Ladies' Home Journal ran an article by Skinner about his baby tender. The article featured a picture of Deborah in a portable (and therefore smaller) version of the box, her hands pressed against the glass, under the headline "Baby in a Box." People who didn't read the article carefully, or who merely glanced at the picture or heard about the article from someone else but didn't read it themselves confused the baby tender with a Skinner box, even though the article clearly explained that the baby tender was something quite different:

When we decided to have another child, my wife and I felt that it was time to apply a little labor-saving invention and design to the problems of the nursery. We began by going over the disheartening schedule of the young mother, step by step. We asked only one question: Is this practice important for the physical and psychological health of the baby? When it was not, we marked it for elimination. Then the "gadgeteering" began.The result was an inexpensive apparatus in which our baby daughter has now been living for eleven months. Her remarkable good health and happiness and my wife’s welcome leisure have exceeded our most optimistic predictions, and we are convinced that a new deal for both mother and baby is at hand. We tackled first the problem of warmth. The usual solution is to wrap the baby in half-a-dozen layers of cloth-shirt, nightdress, sheet, and blankets. This is never completely successful. The baby is likely to be found steaming in its own fluids or lying cold and uncovered. Schemes to prevent uncovering may be dangerous, and in fact they have sometimes even proved fatal. Clothing and bedding also interfere with normal exercise and growth and keep the baby from taking comfortable postures or changing posture during sleep. They also encourage rashes and sores. Nothing can be said for the system on the score of convenience, because frequent changes and launderings are necessary. Why not, we thought, dispense with clothing altogether — except for the diaper, which serves another purpose — and warm the space in which the baby lives? This should be a simple technical problem in the modern home. Our solution is a closed compartment about as spacious as a standard crib . The walls are well insulated, and one side, which can be raised like a window, is a large pane of safety glass. The heating is electrical, and special precautions have been taken to insure accurate control. After a little experimentation we found that our baby, when first home from the hospital, was completely comfortable and relaxed without benefit of clothing at about 86°F. As she grew older, it was possible to lower the temperature by easy stages. Now, at eleven months, we are operating at about 78°F, with a relative humidity of 50 per cent.

As Deborah Skinner described her experience with the baby tender many years later:

My father's intentions were simple, and based on removing what he and my mother saw as the worst aspects of a baby's typical sleeping arrangements: clothes, sheets and blankets. These not only have to be washed, but they restrict arm and leg movement and are a highly imperfect method of keeping a baby comfortable. My mother was happy. She had to give me fewer baths and of course had fewer clothes and blankets to wash, so allowing her more time to enjoy her baby.I was very happy, too, though I must report at this stage that I remember nothing of those first two and a half years. I am told that I never once objected to being put back inside. I had a clear view through the glass front and, instead of being semi-swaddled and covered with blankets, I luxuriated semi-naked in warm, humidified air. The air was filtered but not germ-free, and when the glass front was lowered into place, the noise from me and from my parents and sister was dampened, not silenced. The effect on me? Who knows? I was a remarkably healthy child, and after the first few months of life only cried when injured or inoculated. I didn't have a cold until I was six. I've enjoyed good health since then, too, though that may be my genes. Frankly, I'm surprised the contraption never took off. A few aircribs were built during the late 50s and 60s, and somebody also produced plans for DIY versions, but the traditional cot was always going to be a smaller and cheaper option. My sister used one for her two daughters, as did hundreds of other couples, mostly with some connection to psychology.

Nonetheless, many people jumped to the conclusion that Skinner was raising his daughter in a cramped box equipped with bells and food trays and was conducting psychological experiments of the "rewards and punishments" variety on her. Outraged letter-writers protested that a child should not be "kept in a box" and "subjected to experiments like an animal." Over the years the details about Skinner's baby tender (which was unsuccessfully marketed under the names "Heir Conditioner" and "Aircrib") became more fuzzily remembered, and by the mid-1960s (when Deborah turned twenty-one), the rumor had started that Skinner's psychotic daughter had sued him for traumatizing her by raising her in a box and conducting psychological experiments upon her, and that she had enventually committed suicide.

In fact, Deborah Skinner (now Deborah Skinner Buzan) grew up about as normally as can be, remained close to her father, and has been living and working in London as an artist since the mid-1970s. She quipped years later that "I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy. And I don't seem to have committed suicide," and of her unusual upbringing she said, "It wasn't really a psychological experiment but what you might call a happiness-through-health experience. I think I was a very happy baby. Most of the criticisms of the box are by people who don't understand what it was."

In 2004 author Lauren Slater touched off a brouhaha and accusations of shoddy research when she repeated many of the familiar "Skinner box" rumors in her book Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. According to legend, she wrote, Skinner kept Deborah:

... caged for two full years, placing within her cramped square space bells and food trays and all manners of mean punishments and bright rewards, and he tracked her progress on a grid. And then, when she was thirty-one and frankly psychotic, she sued him for abuse in a genuine court of law, lost the case, and shot herself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. Boom-boom went the gun.

Deborah Skinner Buzan affirmed that these legends were nothing more than outrageous rumors:

[T]here's the story that after my father "let me out", I became psychotic. Well, I didn't. That I sued him in a court of law is also untrue. And, contrary to hearsay, I didn't shoot myself in a bowling alley in Billings, Montana. I have never even been to Billings, Montana.

Although some of the information presented in Slater's book was indicated as being legend or rumor, Deborah Buzan felt that Slater inaccurately mischaracterized her father as a scientist who used her to "prove his theories" by putting her into a "laboratory box", and that Slater "seriously libeled" her in claiming: "I did not come across any data that could convince me of [Deborah Skinner's] mental status." Ms. Buzan responded:

[I]t's not true. My father did nothing of the sort.The plain reality is that Lauren Slater never bothered to check the truth of [these rumors] (although she claims to have tried to track me down). Instead, she chose to do me and my family a disservice and, at the same time, to debase the intellectual history of psychology.

9 August 2000 - original 21 July 2007 - reformatted 9 March 2014 - relisted -->

    Beam, Alex.   "Author Opens a 'Box,' and a Can of Worms."     Boston Globe.   16 March 2004.

    Buzan, Deborah Skinner.   "I Was Not a Lab Rat."     The Guardian.   12 March 2004.

    Morgan, Hal and Kerry Tucker.   More Rumor!     New York: Penguin Books, 1987.   ISBN 0-14-009720-1   (pp. 72-75).

    Skinner, B.F.   "Baby in a Box."     Ladies' Home Journal.   October 1945.

    Slater, Lauren.   Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century.     New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.   0-393-05095-5.

By David Mikkelson

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

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Babies in Boxes

B.f. skinner raised his own kids in special, enclosed cribs—and they turned out just fine..

By Robert Epstein Ph.D. published November 1, 1995 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016

What would the ideal crib be like? Would it be a drafty cage with no top? Or a cradle that gives you back pains when you pick up your baby?

These two unlikely designs--the crib and the cradle--have been about all we've had. But in 1944, psychologist B. F. Skinner thought he had a better idea. Adults sleep in adult-sized rooms. Why not let babies sleep in baby-sized rooms? So Skinner replaced a cage style crib with the first baby-sized room--the "aircrib." Heated and humidified for baby's comfort, it put the infant at waist-height, so it doubled as a changing table. Its first occupant: Skinner's daughter Deborah.

This unique crib made its public debut in, of all places, the Ladies' Home Journal, in October 1945. A headline proclaimed, "The Machine Age Comes to the Nursery!" and a psychiatrist lauded the new crib as a "tremendously interesting idea."

Plans for building aircribs abounded. One prospective manufacturer slyly dubbed its version the "Heir Conditioner."

But the aircrib didn't catch on. Skinner's famous lab studies of rats and pigeons were often conducted in small chambers called "Skinner Boxes." Uh oh. Some people confused the aircrib with the Skinner Box and assumed Skinner was conducting experiments on his children. By the 1960s, rumor had it that daughter Deborah was psychotic .

In all, perhaps 300 children have been raised in Skinner-type cribs. We recently tracked down more than 50 of them. The outcome? Positive results across the board. All of the children had normal health, and their parents praised the crib for its safety, warmth, and convenience. As for Deborah, she grew up normally, married a professor, and is now a successful artist in England.

Alas, the aircrib probably doesn't have much of a future. Major companies have little incentive to mass-produce it because it can't be protected by patents. (After all, you can't get a patent on a small room.) Built one by one, with independent heating and ventilation systems, aircribs are too expensive to become commonplace. Back to the cage!

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Room with a view: peering out of an aircrib.

Robert Epstein, Ph.D., & Michelle Bailey, San Diego State University & Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies

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The baby box myth and reality

B. F. Skinner, the dominant behavioral psychologist of the 20th century, contributed many insights into the understanding of animal and human behavior during his career. But one "experiment" attributed to him is among the most controversial of all his work. It involved his second daughter Deborah whom he was accused of using for one of his psychological experiments. Throughout Skinner's life, he was routinely charged with accusations regarding this incident and made many attempts to set the record straight.

Here's the real story

Skinner began his career in the 1930s and is best known for the operant chamber, more commonly referred to as the "Skinner box." It was a small laboratory apparatus used to conduct and record the results of operant-conditioning experiments with animals. These experiments typically required an animal to manipulate an object such as a lever in order to obtain a reward.

When Skinner's second daughter, Deborah, was born in 1944, Skinner (who then lived in Minnesota) constructed an alternative type of crib for her that was something like a large version of a hospital incubator. It was a tall box with a door at its base and a glass window in front. This "baby tender," as Skinner called it, provided Deborah with a place to sleep and remain comfortably warm throughout the severe Minnesota winters without having to be wrapped in numerous layers of clothing and blankets. Deborah slept in her novel crib until she was two and a half years old, and by all accounts grew up a happy, healthy, thriving child.

Skinner invented the baby tender not as a lab experiment but as a labor-saving device. Because it was equipped with filtered and humidified air it allowed Deborah to have less risk of airborne infection. The sound-proof walls provided for sounder sleep and the warm air that continually circulated through the crib allowed the child to wear only a diaper to bed. There was also a shade that could be drawn to keep the light out of the crib while the baby was sleeping.

Skinner claimed that his invention was used in the same way that a traditional crib would be used

Deborah was taken out of the crib for short periods throughout the day so that she could eat and interact with her older sister, Julie, and her parents. Friends and neighbor children who visited the house could view the young child in her enclosed crib while keeping her in a germ-free environment.

The trouble began in October 1945, when Skinner submitted an article on the baby tender to the popular magazine Ladies Home Journal. The article featured a picture of Deborah in a portable (and therefore smaller) version of the box, her hands pressed against the glass and the headline read: "Baby in a Box." People who didn't read the article carefully, or who merely glanced at the picture or heard about the article from someone else, tended to confuse the baby tender with a Skinner box, even though the article clearly explained that the baby tender was something quite different.

Nonetheless, many people jumped to the conclusion that Skinner was raising his daughter in a cramped box equipped with bells and food trays. It was viewed by many as just another of Skinner's psychological experiments measuring the reinforcement of reward and punishment. Outraged readers of the magazine wrote letters protesting such behavior and started a landslide of rumor that Skinner was never quite able to put to rest during his lifetime.

Over the years, the details about Skinner's baby tender, which was unsuccessfully marketed under the name "Aircrib," faded somewhat. But by the mid-1960s, about the time Deborah turned 21, the rumor emerged again this time saying that Deborah had become psychotic and was suing her father. Some reports stated that she had committed suicide.

The truth of this story is that Deborah Skinner (now Deborah Skinner Buzan) grew up having a very normal life and remained close to her father while he was alive. She has been living and working in London as an artist since the mid-1970s. She is not psychologically scarred as a result of her use of the baby tender. She claims that most of the criticisms of the box are by people who do not understand what it was.

Systematic de sensitization Operant-conditioning techniques are also at work in helping those with significant fears and anxiety learn to live more effectively. A process called systematic desensitization is used to overcome the fear or anxiety associated with a particular stimulus. The premise behind systematic desensitization is that if a fear is learned or conditioned, it can then be unlearned by the process of extinction or by not reinforcing the behavior. The person undergoing this treatment is asked to either imagine the anxiety-producing situation or confront the real-life situation incrementally, while positive reinforcement is provided to help establish the perception of control over the stimulus. Occasionally, relaxation training accompanies the use of systematic desensitization whenever the anxiety-producing stimuli are present. It helps to increase the likelihood of a relaxed response to the feared stimulus. This behavior-modification treatment has been very successful at extinguishing the stimulus that triggers the fear or anxiety.

Other applications Behavior modification techniques are also being used to help people with a wide variety of everyday behavior problems, including those with addictive behaviors, aggression, attention deficit disorder, teen delinquency, and learning disabilities, among others. These methods have been used successfully in schools systems, prisons, mental health institutions, the workplace, and many other environments. Behavior modification has become so popular because it has been shown to be extremely effective in various situations and it empowers the individual using the techniques to change unwanted behavior. Though Skinner would attribute behavior change to environmental reinforcements in one's life to which a person has only limited control, modern adaptations of behavior modification instill the perception of control in the person attempting to make the behavioral change.

Continue reading here: Max Wertheimer

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Building a Skinner Air Crib

• Post author By gearability
• Post date April 22, 2007
• 12 Comments on Building a Skinner Air Crib

What is a Skinner Box? In this context, it’s a temperature-controlled, enclosed baby crib that requires no sheets, blankets, crib bumpers or other bedding. The essential ideas are to allow babies maximum freedom to move around and sleep without being constricted by clothing; to reduce laundry quantities to the minimum; and to allow the room the baby sleeps in to be used as more than just a nursery. Best of all, an air crib puts the baby at adult eye level — great for interaction, and also easy on backs.

These aren’t plans, per se . . . one of the advantages of the air crib is its flexibility, and adapting it to your circumstances is pretty much the point. Implementation is up to you — make it quick and basic, get a pro to draft a blueprint, or hire the whole job out and have a craftsperson make it out of old-growth-forest walnut. (Now that’s an heirloom!)

Here’s the short version — the ‘what-needs-to-be-done’ list :

• Build a big box with an open front
• At about waist level, build a ledge to support the mattress
• Below the mattress supports, cut holes for two ventilation screens, making sure they face each other for best air flow
• Add two light bulb sockets at the right and left sides, below the mattress ledge (these provide heat)
• Link the sockets to an external switch on the crib
• Build a protective shelf (screening or perforated) above the light bulbs (lift-out, if you’re not going to have access through the front) below the light bulbs
• Build another shelf (also of screening or perforated material) (also, lift-out, if you’ll need access from the top)
• Install a thermostat outside the box where adults can reach it
• Place shallow evaporation pans below this second shelf (these control humidity)
• Install a small fan in the ceiling
• Make a mattress frame and lace a mesh mattress to the frame
• Attach door(s)
• Add legs or a cabinet beneath

The two cribs my siblings and I used were identical and made from Masonite (lightweight but strong) and were set on wooden legs — probably 2x2s. You can just barely make out the legs in this black and white picture of our first Baby Box.

The doors were heavy glass, and opened just like any cabinet; they had latches all over the place to ensure that nobody took a tumble. The dual doors on our childhood boxes opened across the entire width of the crib; my daughter’s had a single door, not nearly as wide, but perfectly suited to the job, just the same.

All of these boxes were technically quite simple — you could get elaborate if you wanted to, but it’s definitely not necessary. The light bulbs are the heat source; I think we used 40 watt bulbs in my daughter’s box.

Our mattresses were composed of a rectangular frame which was supported by the ledge. A canvas pocket (like a large pillowcase) slipped over the frame, and was removed for washing.

To make the mattress, I finished the edges of the mesh with a binding tape and grommets along all sides. On the ‘wrong’ side, the fabric wrapped around about 25% of the area of the mattress on the each side. (You can just barely make out the shadows of the edges in the image above left.) Having two would be most convenient.

The shelves above and below the light bulbs were a metal screen (ours) or perforated metal (my daughter’s). The shallow evaporation pans for all three of these boxes were ordinary baking pans. (Four, brownie-sized — 9 inches by 9 — in my daughter’s case.)

Screens on either end of the lower part of our childhood cribs allowed for air flow, and there was a fan above to circulate it. My daughter’s was designed so that air flowed up from below; a fan was installed in the ceiling.

Maintenance was pretty straightforward. Rinse, wash or scrub the mattress as needed and check the water in the evaporation pans. The water is what controls the humidity; you’ll want to keep an eye on it.

Other tips and notes:

Air-conditioning was not a consideration where we lived (southern Michigan before global warming; rural northern Michigan later), though I do think I recall my parents putting ice cubes in the evaporation pans during one hot summer. In more extreme climates, it might be necessary to make some more formal provision for cooling the air crib.

If you use a wheelchair, you’d probably want to shift things around a bit so that you’re slipping the chair right under the center of the mattress. In that case, you’d end up with the internal bits on either side of the wheelchair access, rather than placed all the way across the box beneath the mattress.

Previously: A Better Baby Crib for Parents Who Use Wheelchairs

12 replies on “Building a Skinner Air Crib”

This is very, very cool! I read both posts then headed over to Daddytype. It certainly makes me wish I’d had one when I was a kid. It almost (but not quite) makes me wish I’d had kids, just so I could watch what appears to be their uninhibited play and sleep in such an environment. It also makes me think about adults who are put in crib-like beds in hospitals and nursing homes…wouldn’t an adult adaptation of this be a better idea? I vaguely remember reading about Skinner Boxes in a few of those introductory psych classes in college…I didn’t pay much attention. I think the problem was, the idea wasn’t presented like this. Good show, Marty!

Thank you! FYI, “Skinner Box” usually refers to the experimental boxes that rats go in–levers and shock pads and so on. I wouldn’t bring it up, except that if you tell people that you’re putting your kid in a Skinner box they’ll look at you kind of funny.

The easiest place nowadays to get this type of thermostat is probably a store that caters to reptile owners. We have a similar set-up (temperature-control-wise) for our boa constrictor.

Thanna — you’re quite right about “Skinner box” referring to the boxes used for lab tests. It’s probably smarter to call the Baby Box an Air Crib, but for those of us who were in on the joke, “Baby Box” just seemed to be the right name.

For the record, though, our boxes had nothing to do with behavioral experimentation — they were just a great place to sleep and to play (briefly) before sleep.

Great suggestion for the thermostat!

Gail Rae — Your suggestion about nursing homes and hospitals is really interesting. Anyone who’s ever been hospitalized and lived to tell the tale probably has vivid memories about the terrible linens and how difficult it is to keep either warm or cool enough while in a hospital bed.

I wonder how much kinder a soft mesh would be on skin, too, and if it would reduce bed sores. I have to suspect that the air circulation through the mattress would be a real plus.

An Air-Crib-like hospital bed might be hard to sell on an emotional basis, but practically speaking, there might be lots to recommend the idea.

Thank you both for your comments.

It would be absolutely perfect for my grandmother, if the idea could be adapted to a small (5 foot maybe) elderly woman with alzhiemers and bad back problems. She is always either too hot or too cold and isnt getting the sleep she needs. Will there ever be sketches? I learn best with pictures AND instructions, helps me sort it out better. Thanks again for the instructions!

Hi, Michelle — I don’t see why it couldn’t be adapted for an adult. One change I’d make would be to reduce the mattress height so that it is optimized for easier entry and exit. With a baby, you really want it at waist height, but for an adult, you’d want feet to touch the ground easily.

An attentive care-giver would be essential — but, presumably, already is! And you’d want to do careful testing for weight, etc. — even a small adult is considerably larger than the average under-3 baby.

Sketches? Maybe one day, but I’m afraid that’s not in the cards right now for me. I keep hoping someone else who has built a Skinner Box will turn up with plans. At one time, several sets were available.

Thanks for your comment.

you are nuts if you put your kid in there nuts i tell u nuts

Not at all — it was an absolutely wonderful thing! It was fantastic to spend all the time I would have spent on laundry with my daughter, and so neat to always greet her at eye level. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she’d become a baby gymnast, too, gleefully bouncing and exercising, and playing much more physically than she could have if she had worn sleeping bags, pjs, or bed clothes — or been covered with blankets. She was one really happy baby, and the Skinner box was definitely part of the reason she thrived and grew the way she did.

Hi! My husband and I are expecting our first child this fall, and one of our friends raised his kids in air cribs. We’d like to build one ourselves as well, but I’m not totally clear on some of your building instructions, specifically how the humid air travels. Is the baby basically sleeping on a soft netting that allows air flow? Thanks!

MWG, yes, that “mattress” is exactly that, a fabric that’s like a very soft screening. It’s laced firmly to a frame.

We had screened openings in the lower part of the box, and a fan in an upper corner to circulate air throughout. It was actually a very simple set-up — the main thing is that you want to make sure that air flows in and out freely.

Good luck with your plans! I’m still (25 years later) amazed and thrilled with how drudgery-free my baby’s first years were as a result of the Skinner Box. It really put the focus back on the baby, right where it belonged.

LOL! I second Thanna! You don’t want to put a baby in a “Skinner Box”! “Baby Box” or “Air Crib” is the proper term. Thristy rats were taught to pull a lever for water or in other experiments, shocked until they pulled the lever. I doubt you want to make the association between the two, even though they were both created by Skinner.

Baby Box = Babies Skinner Box = Rats

I was doing some reseach for a psyc paper on B.F. Skinner & decided to google “air cribs” and came across your blog. I had never even thought about the concept fitting into today’s world but when I have kids I’m seriously thinking about making one of these. I seems like it would become a safe & familiar place for a baby or toddler to be. I think it would definitly put them at ease. Thanks for publishing your ideas!

i have 3 kids and a bad back and after seeing how much they hated the constrictions of a normal crib/cot i can see the advantages for us adults , but what about the instinctive nest building that most wee kids show , or do you stop using it when they are able to move about . very interesting site 🙂

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Invention by skinner.

…through his invention of the Air Crib baby tender—a large, soundproof, germ-free, mechanical, air-conditioned box designed to provide an optimal environment for child growth during the first two years of life. In 1948 he published one of his most controversial works, Walden Two , a novel on life in a utopian…

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B.F. Skinner

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(1904–90). Through his invention of the air crib in the 1940s, the psychologist B.F. Skinner became a well-known and controversial figure to the general public. He was a major influence on other psychologists as well.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pa., on March 20, 1904. He became interested in psychology while at Harvard University and was inspired by Bertrand Russell ’s articles on behaviorism. In 1931 he received a Ph.D. from Harvard and then continued to do research there until 1936. While there he developed the Skinner box, a controlled environment for studying the behavior of organisms.

In 1936 Skinner joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he wrote The Behavior of Organisms in 1938. From 1945 to 1948 he was a professor of psychology at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was during this period that Skinner wrote an article discussing his air crib—a large, soundproof, germfree, air-conditioned box designed to provide an optimal environment for the first two years of a child’s life. He joined the faculty of Harvard in 1948, where he remained until his retirement in 1974. He died in Cambridge, Mass., on Aug. 18, 1990.

Throughout his career Skinner was a strong supporter of behaviorism . He advocated the use of controlled, scientific methods in studying human behavior through a person’s response to the environment. His Walden Two (1948) is a novel of life in a utopian community based on his principles of social engineering. Other well-known works include Science and Human Behavior (1953) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).

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A glimpse of psychology’s greatest experiments.

• History of Psychology

By Lauren Slater W. W. Norton 2004 In the Roaring Twenties, in the midst of what Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock called an “outbreak of psychology in America,” Henry Knight Miller, a 31-year-old Methodist minister, resigned his Brooklyn pulpit to start a psychology magazine for an American public eager to reap the personal benefits of the new science. Banking on this enormous popularity of psychology with the general public and his success in generating interest in his self-help sermons, Miller produced his first issue of Psychology: Health, Happiness, Success in April 1923. He told his readers that psychology held the keys to self-determination. As the science of mind, psychology was the royal road to health, happiness, and success. He expressed dismay at the inability of psychologists to communicate the practicality of their work to the public. But that would be his role. He would get beyond the jargon and technicalities of this new science and translate the research into prescriptions for public consumption. Lauren Slater, the author of Opening Skinner’s Box , doesn’t promise health, happiness, and success to her readers, but she does promise, as a psychologist and author, to translate the arcane nature of some of psychology’s most famous experiments into a narrative for public understanding and appreciation. She writes, “It seemed sad that these insightful and dramatic stories were reduced to flatness that characterizes most scientific reports, and had therefore utterly failed to capture what only real narrative can – theme, desire, plot, history – this is what we are. The experiments described in this book … deserve to be not only reported on as research, but also celebrated as story, which is what I have here tried to do” (15). Alas, Slater is no more successful in explaining the nature and consequences of science in this book than was Miller in his magazine. As one who believes that psychologists need to write more for public consumption, and less for ourselves, I began reading this book with high expectations. The goal of the book – to turn science into narrative – promised an interesting read, as did the 10 experiments selected for the book, studies by Skinner, Milgram, Rosenhan, Darley and Latane, Festinger, Harlow, Alexander, Loftus, Kandel, and Moniz. The book opens with a chapter on B. F. Skinner, a dangerous choice for any author claiming special explanatory skills, because Skinner’s work is both so elegantly simplistic in its description and so profoundly complex in its implications and the questions it raises. The chapter, like the book, is entitled “Opening Skinner’s Box,” a title that is ambiguous given the many boxes in Skinner’s life from his operant chambers; to the air crib where his younger daughter, Deborah, spent some of her time as an infant; to his early teaching machines. Reading the chapter does not clear up the ambiguity. Indeed, there is none of the focus in this chapter that a reader can find in later chapters, for example, on Milgram’s obedience studies or Loftus’ work on false memories. The theme of the story of Skinner is still a mystery to me. The author seemed early on to be interested in Skinner’s notion of control but confessed that she did not read Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) until very late in her research. She is fascinated by the air crib and its effect on Deborah Skinner (Buzan), but evidently never made any effort to contact her. Indeed, there is no experiment of B. F. Skinner’s that is discussed in this chapter. Instead, the reader is told that when Skinner arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in 1928, psychology “was a numberless field sharing more with philosophy than physiology,” and that psychology was the stuff of “introspection” and “mentalism” (22). Not only is the author’s history off, but so is her basic comparative anatomy in her claim that rats “have brains no bigger than a boiled bean” (24). She does not understand the important distinction between reinforcement and reward. She wonders if Skinner realized at the end of his life “that the final act of life, which is death, cannot be learned or otherwise overcome” (27)? Slater chastises Skinner for his poor public relation decision of publishing his article on the air crib in the Ladies’ Home Journal , evidently unaware of his own published statements about his hopes for some commercial success from the invention. She writes that Skinner’s “proposed name of his invention: Heir Conditioner … is either frightening or just plain foolish.” It was not Skinner’s name for the device but one generated by a Cleveland businessman, Weston Judd, who for a time partnered with Skinner in an unsuccessful venture. Skinner liked the name as a clever play on words, but shortly rejected it for the preferred label, air crib. When Julie Vargas, Skinner’s older daughter, invites the author to tour the Skinner house in Cambridge, she takes Slater into Skinner’s study, which has been left as it was when he died 14 years earlier. Vargas shows Slater a piece of chocolate with Skinner’s bite mark, a chocolate he was eating just before his death. According to Slater, Vargas says, “I want to save this chocolate forever” (43). Later, when Vargas leaves the room, Slater tells the reader “I take a tiny bite, leave my mark right next to his, and on my teeth the taste of something very strange and slightly sweet” (43). With that revelation, I certainly feel that the “theme, desire, plot, and history” of Skinner’s work have been revealed to me. I feel no reason to read further, but I have promised this review and so read on. In the Milgram chapter I learn the startling fact that Bruno Bettelheim is a “paragon of humanism” (69). Much of this chapter is based on interviews with two individuals who claim to have been subjects in Milgram’s experiments, one who resisted the pressure of the situation and quit after “administering” 150 volts, and the other who went all the way. The focus is tighter in this chapter and the nuances of the meanings of Milgram’s experiments are generally well explored. Slater, admitting to a personal history as an institutionalized mental patient, offers her insights on Rosenhan’s “experiment” in getting himself and friends admitted to mental hospitals in the 1970s. And, evidently in the spirit of showing that times haven’t changed much, Slater attempts a “replication” of Rosenhan’s ruse, visiting nine emergency rooms in nine days, never being admitted but getting prescriptions from all for her complaint, like Rosenhans’ confederates, of hearing voices that say “thud.” In the Harlow chapter, the drive reduction notions of Kenneth Hull and Clark Spence (148) are described. Finally, to test Alexander’s notions of addiction in the chapter on “rat park,” Slater offers her insights based on her decision to try morphine for 14 days. Portions of the previous paragraph give evidence of one of the principal flaws of the book, a decision by Slater to impose too much of her own life into the research stories she is telling. Psychology teaches us that we typically try to make sense of the world, even the scientific world, by establishing connections between our personal lives and what we are trying to comprehend. Yet Slater’s autobiographical sketches often seem more intrusive than explanatory. They appear as digressions by an author who doesn’t seem to know what to make of the science she is trying to relate. Psychology needs individuals who can accurately and meaningfully portray our science and practice to a public who seems ever interested in the mysteries of human behavior. Thus I applaud the intent of this book. Further, it is, in the main, an interesting and entertaining read. Yet, in this reviewer’s opinion, the book fails in its avowed mission. It provides accounts of these great experiments as stories but does not convey them as research. As such the book lacks the scientific legitimacy that would give credibility to the narratives. It offers us only a glimpse – a brief and incomplete view. APS regularly opens certain online articles for discussion on our website. Effective February 2021, you must be a logged-in APS member to post comments. 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Vintage Everyday Bring back some good or bad memories, may 17, 2023, skinner air crib: the story of psychologist b. f. skinner raised his own daughter in a “skinner box” in the 1940s. “My father’s intentions were simple, and based on removing what he and my mother saw as the worst aspects of a baby’s typical sleeping arrangements: clothes, sheets and blankets. These not only have to be washed, but they restrict arm and leg movement and are a highly imperfect method of keeping a baby comfortable. My mother was happy. She had to give me fewer baths and of course had fewer clothes and blankets to wash, so allowing her more time to enjoy her baby. I was very happy, too, though I must report at this stage that I remember nothing of those first two and a half years. I am told that I never once objected to being put back inside. I had a clear view through the glass front and, instead of being semi-swaddled and covered with blankets, I luxuriated semi-naked in warm, humidified air. The air was filtered but not germ-free, and when the glass front was lowered into place, the noise from me and from my parents and sister was dampened, not silenced.  The effect on me? Who knows? I was a remarkably healthy child, and after the first few months of life only cried when injured or inoculated. I didn’t have a cold until I was six. I’ve enjoyed good health since then, too, though that may be my genes. Frankly, I’m surprised the contraption never took off. A few aircribs were built during the late 1950s and ’60s, and somebody also produced plans for DIY versions, but the traditional cot was always going to be a smaller and cheaper option. My sister used one for her two daughters, as did hundreds of other couples, mostly with some connection to psychology.” We raised both of our kids in homebuilt Air Cribs. Definitely recommend! Browse by Decades Popular posts. Advertisement 109 IMAGES Skinner's 'Air Crib' Skinner Air Crib: The Story of Psychologist B. F. Skinner Raised His Skinner Air Crib: The Story of Psychologist B. F. Skinner Raised His air crib 1 PPT A History of Cribs and Other Brilliant and Bizarre Inventions for COMMENTS Skinner Air Crib Skinner's Air Crib. 1944, B.F. Skinner and his wife, Yvonne, were expecting their second child. After raising one baby, Skinner felt that he could simplify the process for parents and improve the experience for children. Through some tinkering, he created the "air crib," a climate controlled environment for an infant. Behavior: A Skinnerian Innovation: Baby in a Box The box, or "air crib" as her father called it, was his own invention, a glassed-in, insulated, air-controlled crib that he thought would revolutionize child rearing and, in line with his ... Skinner Box: What Is an Operant Conditioning Chamber? The air crib was designed to create a climate-controlled, healthier environment for infants. The air crib was not commercially successful, but it did receive some attention from the media. In particular, Time magazine ran a story about the air crib in 1947, which described it as a "baby tender" that would "give infant care a new ... B. F. Skinner The air crib was designed with three solid walls and a safety-glass panel at the front which could be lowered to move the baby in and out of the crib. ... Skinner also used the term "experiment" when describing the crib, and this association with laboratory animal experimentation discouraged the crib's commercial success, although several ... GoodTherapy Skinner's Air Crib. Skinner's 1945 invention of an air crib, a metal crib that had walls, a ceiling, and a front pane of removable safety glass, was meant to create a climate-controlled ... B. F. Skinner He achieved notoriety for a mid-1950s Life magazine article showcasing his "air crib," a temperature-controlled glass box in which his infant daughter would play. This led to the urban legend, occasionally heard to this day, that Skinner "experimented on his daughter" or "raised her in a box" and that she grew up embittered and ... Understanding Behavioral Psychology: the Skinner Box Today, psychology students may use a virtual version of a Skinner box to conduct experiments and learn about operant conditioning. The Skinner Box in Research . ... The Skinner box should not be confused with one of Skinner's other inventions, the baby tender (also known as the air crib). At his wife's request, Skinner created a heated crib ... Opening Skinner's Box The Milgram experiment of the 1950s, a controversial experiment designed to explain obedience to authority to a post-Holocaust world; ... which spawned the legend, namely that her father had developed a heated crib for her, later marketed under the name "Air-Crib", which had been mistaken by the public for a Skinner box. [1] References B. F. Skinner and Psychotechnology: The Case of the Heir Conditioner To relieve some of the work of caring for an infant and to create a better environment for the infant, B. F. Skinner invented the baby tender, or aircrib, in 1944. The public first learned of this ... Skinner Box Synonyms. Operant chamber; Operant conditioning chamber; Repeating puzzle box. As its name suggests, the "Skinner box" was invented by B. F. Skinner while he was still a graduate student at Harvard University in the 1930s. Rather than use the term "Skinner box," Skinner only ever referred to this invention as an operant chamber or as an ... B.F. Skinner Raised His Daughter in a Skinner Box? David Mikkelson. Psychologist B. F. Skinner raised his own daughter in a "Skinner box"; as a result, she grew up psychologically damaged, sued her father, and committed suicide. B.F. Skinner was a ... Babies in Boxes Babies in Boxes B.F. Skinner raised his own kids in special, enclosed cribs—and they turned out just fine. By Robert Epstein Ph.D. published November 1, 1995 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016 Skinner's Baby Box Put simply, it's a sterilized climate-controlled crib for infants. It's suggested that a baby could safely spend an average of 17 hours a day in the crib in the first year of their life. As ... Psychology Study: Baby in a Skinner Box (1960) A 16 month old is trained to press a lever for snacks using principles of behaviorism and reinforcement. BF Skinner's Daughter Explains the Air Crib Brett DiNovi's mentor, Dr. Julie Vargas, clarifies that she & her sister were NOT "raised in a box". Brett DiNovi is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst & the... Did B.F. Skinner really put babies into boxes? And meanwhile, Skinner also invented the "air crib," which he tested on his daughter Deborah, and which also came to be referred to as a "Skinner Box.". As Marc N. Richelle explains in his ... A Science Odyssey: That's My Theory: Freud: Meet Skinner I suppose I have found some fame through devices I've created and through related experiments. One device, called the Air-Crib, is designed to be the ideal environment for the first two years of a ... The baby box myth and reality Deborah slept in her novel crib until she was two and a half years old, and by all accounts grew up a happy, healthy, thriving child. Skinner invented the baby tender not as a lab experiment but as a labor-saving device. Because it was equipped with filtered and humidified air it allowed Deborah to have less risk of airborne infection. Building a Skinner Air Crib An Air-Crib-like hospital bed might be hard to sell on an emotional basis, but practically speaking, there might be lots to recommend the idea. ... Thristy rats were taught to pull a lever for water or in other experiments, shocked until they pulled the lever. I doubt you want to make the association between the two, even though they were both ... Air-Crib Other articles where Air-Crib is discussed: B.F. Skinner: …through his invention of the Air Crib baby tender—a large, soundproof, germ-free, mechanical, air-conditioned box designed to provide an optimal environment for child growth during the first two years of life. In 1948 he published one of his most controversial works, Walden Two, a novel on life in a utopian… B.F. Skinner It was during this period that Skinner wrote an article discussing his air crib—a large, soundproof, germfree, air-conditioned box designed to provide an optimal environment for the first two years of a child's life. He joined the faculty of Harvard in 1948, where he remained until his retirement in 1974. He died in Cambridge, Mass., on Aug ... A Glimpse of Psychology's Greatest Experiments The goal of the book - to turn science into narrative - promised an interesting read, as did the 10 experiments selected for the book, studies by Skinner, Milgram, Rosenhan, Darley and Latane, Festinger, Harlow, Alexander, Loftus, Kandel, and Moniz. The book opens with a chapter on B. F. Skinner, a dangerous choice for any author claiming ... Skinner Air Crib: The Story of Psychologist B. F. Skinner Raised His Skinner Air Crib: The Story of Psychologist B. F. Skinner Raised His Own Daughter in a "Skinner Box" in the 1940s . May 17, ... a laboratory apparatus used to conduct and record the results of operant conditioning experiments with animals. When Skinner's second daughter, Deborah, was born in 1944, Skinner (who then lived in Minnesota ... Getting allometry right at the Oak Ridge free‐air CO2 enrichment Long-term field experiments to elucidate forest responses to rising atmospheric CO 2 concentration require allometric equations to estimate tree biomass from non-destructive measurements of tree size. We analyzed whether the allometric equations established at the beginning of a free-air CO 2 enrichment (FACE) experiment in a Liquidambar styraciflua plantation were still valid at the end of ... essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis