Behavior Modification

People, including B. F. Skinner, often talk about the philosophical proposition that operant principles reduce humans to animals whose behavior is determined by features of the environment, denying the be-loved construct of free will. For a variety of reasons (just one here: Read Dan Wegner’s excellent The Illusion of Conscious Will), I am pretty well convinced that those principles of stimulus control, reinforcement, punishment, shaping, and etc. explain great deal—even virtually all—of human behavior.

Mayhaps in another series of posts, I’ll write about the freedom-determinism question, but in this post I’m going into a simpler concern about freedom: Allowing children the freedom to do things on their own. If children are denied the opportunity to function in free-operant situations (i.e., those enviroinments where many different behaviors may occur and repeated), it will be very difficult for them to learn contingencies that exist in those environments.
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