Burrhus F. Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, is considered by some to be the second most famous psychologist after Sigmund Freud. A behaviorist researcher who was trained and later worked at Harvard University, Burrhus Skinner was most well-known for his theory known as "operant conditioning." In this theory, the operation or behavior, of an animal is its activity in its environment. When the animal confronts a reinforcing stimulus it increases the operant behavior. In operant conditioning, the behavior is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence affects the future behavior of the animal. His research found that behavior is more affected by consequences than by preceding stimuli, as opposed to the theory of "classical conditioning" proposed by other researchers in behaviorist theory, John B. Watson and Ivan Pavolv. http://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html <ref>http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/AboutSkinner.html http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html

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B. F. Skinner grew up in a Susquehanna, a small railroad town in northeastern Pennsylvania near the New York State border. He and his younger brother grew up having a stable family life, with a father who was a lawyer and the mother was a housewife. The young Skinner had a penchant for building things, such as carts, a machine for sorting blueberries, a cabin he built with a friend, and a "perpetual" motion machine that didn't work. His ability to build things was important to his research work later in life.

Skinner did his undergraduate work at Hamilton College in Upstate New York, where he received and English degree. Thereafter he tried his hand at newspaper writing for a short while, but was not satisfied with the work. He worked as a bookstore clerk in New York City, where he encountered the works of Watson and Pavlov, which motivated his entrance into Harvard University to begin his studies in behavioral psychology. Skinner received his doctorate in 1931 and stayed on doing additional research at Harvard until 1936, when he moved to Minneapolis for a teaching position at the University of Minnesota. It was there he met his wife and they began their family. He moved to be chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University in 1945 and was there until 1948 when he was offered a position at Harvard University. He was a prolific writer in his field, publishing many books including: Science and Human Behavior (1953), Schedules of Reinforcement, co-authored with Fester (1957), Verbal Behavior (1957), The Technology of Teaching (1968), and About Behaviorism (1974).

Perhaps his most influential popular book was Walden II, which as a one review puts it was a "Significant transition in Skinner's writings. On its own merits it is a period piece of science fantasy of less predictive accuracy than say, Orwell's 1984....(it) is also the Gospel of a politically significant discipleship of institutional functionaries for whose old wines of compulsion and torture Skinner has provided the new bottles of Operant Theory. Therein lies Walden Two's continued importance."

Towards the end of his life, he wrote three autobiographies. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 1989 and died on August 18, 1990. http://www.bfskinner.org/BFSkinner/AboutSkinner.html http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/skinner.html http://www.newfoundations.com/EGR/Walden.html