reliance on rewards, for many decades after his death, did more good than

anything else in improving autistic children.

 

When I was at Harvard Law School, the professors sometimes talked about an

overfocused, Skinner-like professor at Yale Law School. They used to say: “Poor

old Eddie Blanchard, he thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” Well,

that’s the way Skinner got with his very extreme emphasis on incentive

superpower. I always call the “Johnny-one-note” turn of mind that eventually so

diminished Skinner’s reputation the man-with-a- hammer tendency, after the folk

saying: “To a man with only a hammer every problem looks pretty much like a

nail.” Man-with-a-hammer tendency does not exempt smart people like Blanchard

and Skinner. And it won’t exempt you if you don’t watch out. I will return to

man-with-a-hammer tendency at various times in this talk because, fortunately,

there are effective antidotes that reduce the ravages of what pretty much ruined

the personal reputation of the brilliant Skinner.

 

One of the most important consequences of incentive superpower is what I call

“incentive- caused bias.” A man has an acculturated nature making him a pretty

decent fellow, and yet, driven both consciously and subconsciously by

incentives, he drifts into immoral behavior in order to get what he wants, a

result he facilitates by rationalizing his bad behavior, like the salesmen at

Xerox who harmed customers in order to maximize their sales commissions.

 

Here, my early education involved a surgeon who over the years sent bushel

baskets full of normal gall bladders down to the pathology lab in the leading