Science and Human Behavior

Science and Human Behavior sets out Skinner's account of behaviour as lawful, shaped by its consequences, and open to prediction and control. Published in 1953, it moves from the reinforcement of single responses through to the behaviour of people in groups, treating perception, thinking, emotion, and self-control as activity to be explained by environmental history rather than by inner agents.

Skinner works outward from the operant: behaviour that operates on the world and is selected by what follows it. He applies the same terms to government, religion, education, and psychotherapy, reading each as a set of controlling practices with describable effects on conduct.

For clinical work the book supplies a vocabulary that many therapies later drew on, and it names the questions a determinist reading of conduct raises about responsibility, choice, and the aims of treatment. It states its case plainly enough to be argued with, which is much of why it stayed in print.