professor, finally made himself ridiculous. At one time, Skinner may have been

the best-known psychology professor in the world. He partly deserved his peak

reputation because his early experiments using rats and pigeons were ingenious,

and his results were both counterintuitive and important. With incentives, he

could cause more behavior change, culminating in conditioned reflexes in his

rats and pigeons, than he could in any other way. He made obvious the extreme

stupidity, in dealing with children or employees, of rewarding behavior one

didn’t want more of. Using food rewards, he even caused strong superstitions,

predesigned by himself, in his pigeons. He demonstrated again and again a great

recurring, generalized behavioral algorithm in nature: “Repeat behavior that

works.” He also demonstrated that prompt rewards worked much better than delayed

rewards in changing and maintaining behavior. And, once his rats and pigeons had

conditioned reflexes, caused by food rewards, he found what withdrawal pattern

of rewards kept the reflexive behavior longest in place: random distribution.

With this result, Skinner thought he had pretty well explained man’s misgambling

compulsion whereunder he often foolishly proceeds to ruin. But, as we shall

later see when we discuss other psychological tendencies that contribute to

misgambling compulsion, he was only partly right. Later, Skinner lost most of

his personal reputation (a) by overclaiming for incentive superpower to the

point of thinking he could create a human utopia with it and (b) by displaying

hardly any recognition of the power of the rest of psychology. He thus behaved

like one of Jacob Viner’s truffle hounds as he tried to explain everything with

incentive effects. Nonetheless, Skinner was right in his main idea: Incentives

are superpowers. The outcome of his basic experiments will always remain in high

repute in the annals of experimental science. And his method of monomaniacal