I recently finished a novel by B. F. Skinner, who is perhaps the most famous behavioral psychologist of all time. If you’ve ever taken so much as a survey course in psychology, you will have heard his name—likely with the term “operant conditioning” following closely behind. Skinner spent over half a century exploring the ways in which, with the right incentive structures, you can turn animals into regular circus performers—manipulating them into conducting the most odd and unexpected acts.

He trained rats to solve puzzles and play a version of rodent basketball. He trained pigeons to make art and to square off against each other in pigeon ping-pong matches. He proved against a shadow of a doubt that with enough patience and knowledge of a creature’s reward systems, you could compel it to do just about anything, regardless of how bizarre and unnatural. You probably know all of this, though.

What you might not know—what your overpriced textbooks and underwhelming professors didn’t teach you—was that Burrhus Frederic Skinner was also an inventor with a penchant for putting living things into boxes as well as a utopian novelist who would (in the book’s preface) place Karl Marx beside Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius in a list of “great men who are said to have made a difference in human affairs.” More importantly, you are almost certainly unaware of the extent to which B. F. Skinner’s work is leveraged against you on a daily basis.

 

SKINNER’S BOXES:

When not busy conducting research or teaching behaviorism and experimental psychology courses at Harvard, you could find B. F. Skinner tinkering. He invented lab recording devices, teaching machines, and even—during World War II—a nose-cone habitat that amounted to a pigeon-guided missile system. However, it’s for two different inventions that Skinner is most well-known for today—both of them boxes. One for rats. The other for children.

If the first of Skinner’s boxes were to have never existed, it’s unlikely that his name would have been carved into the field of psychology as deeply as phone numbers and crude haikus are knifed into the partition walls of truck stop bathrooms. Skinner initially called the small habitat for birds and rodents The Operant Conditioning Chamber. Whether it’s because that name doesn’t roll off the tongue or because it sounds like an apparatus from a dystopian torture room, researchers simply began calling it the Skinner Box.

A Skinner Box is an enclosure in which an animal’s behavior can be modified through enforcement—that is to say, reward or punishment. Skinner’s earliest versions were simple enough with a bar that, when pressed after the desired action had been performed, would dispense a food pellet into a tray. Each iteration brought more features. Bright lights that could flash, dim, and flare in all sorts of annoying manners. Speakers that would play anything from foghorns to cat yowls to whatever the rodent equivalent of Enya is.

Soundproofing. Environmental controls. Vibrating floors. Electrified floors. The boxes got more sophisticated as more and more researchers adopted them and improved upon the design. Some current models have even managed to integrate augmented and virtual reality. However, despite all the changes, the function of the Skinner Box remains more or less the same—do what your research overlords want you to, and you’ll receive a reward. Don’t, and you won’t. Though punishments were used, it was always the proverbial carrot that intrigued Skinner more than the stick.

The second box that B. F. Skinner invented still gives many parents the willies. He called it the Air Crib, and it was an attempt to solve his own problems. After finding out that his somewhat difficult-to-please wife was pregnant with their second child, good ol’ B. F. went full-on autist. He began listing every possible burden and task associated with baby rearing—then he got to work categorizing these as either essential or non-essential. He began thinking up ways to eliminate as many of the latter as possible. Unsurprisingly, the solution was a box.

Skinner trounced down to his home basement with sketchpad and tool bag in hand and, after some time, emerged with a proposed design for a product that could save his wife of the undue and menial tasks associated with raising a baby. He sought to relieve her of as many of the burdens of her ill-fated domesticity (like many academics, B. F. Skinner had a fairly negative view of stay-at-home moms). It wouldn’t be long before a prototype was completed. Then, in an effort to unshackle new moms at scale, it would become a proper product.

The Air-Crib-actual ended up being an enclosure with a big-ass viewport not unlike the reptile displays at a zoo. It was designed to be a safe space for the child to exist so as to free up the hands of new mothers for more important things than having to walk around constantly holding their baby. The box was environmentally controlled and made of enough non-porous material to be damn near hoseable. Its primary value, however, was keeping those pesky babies from being underfoot, burdening the household with all their attempts to explore their newfound habitat.

Several hundred couples jumped on board, electing to raise their babies for a good amount of the day in the human equivalent of a terrarium. Skinner’s second child, a daughter named Deborah, spent huge chunks of her days in the thing over her first two years—playing, sleeping, and lounging with limited access to her environment and her parents.

Despite the willingness of a few hundred folks to give it a go, the product failed to reach mainstream success for various reasons. Surprisingly, most parents weren’t too keen on raising their infants in boxes—least of all a box designed by a research psychologist who specialized in getting rats and birds to do weird shit in boxes that (to the lowly plebian eye) weren’t all that dissimilar to the Air Crib.

Like many people at the time, and most people today, I am struck with the oddity of Skinner’s overly sterilized and systematized view of child-rearing. However, it wasn’t the box itself that unsettled me so much as it was the willingness with which B. F. Skinner subjected his own daughter (and the children of many others) to what was, in effect, a real-time experiment in early childhood development. To me, it demonstrated a view of childhood, parenting, and human nature that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. Yet, I couldn’t put my finger on why it bothered me so much. That is, until I began reading through Skinner’s first and only novel.

 

WALDEN TWO:

A century prior to B. F. Skinner putting everything and anything that couldn’t outrun him into boxes, another man was conducting a boxed experiment of his own. The philosopher Henry David Thoreau closed himself off from the world of men into a 10-foot by 15-foot cabin he built on a remote part of the land owned by his friend and renowned poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The experiment was a success, and two years, two months, and two days later, he emerged with a newfound bed of philosophies—centering around such notions as self-reliance, free will, and human nature—as well as a draft of the manuscript that would eventually become his magnum opus, Walden. Many years later, Skinner would take both the title and the themes of Thoreau’s work and, not unlike the behaviors of the creatures in his lab, bend them to his desired will in a novel that he cheekily called Walden Two.

In addition to the title, Walden Two is the name of a fictional compound that is a utopian hippie’s wet dream. It’s surrounded by lush and expansive greenery with buildings made of heaped earth and a thousand-some-odd inhabitants working in egalitarian harmony. No one person is more important than anyone else. Gone is the need to out-compete, out-perform, or out-attain anyone else. There are oddities in Skinner’s utopia that—when coupled with many of the cultural issues that have come to the forefront in recent years—most of us might recognize today.

Capitalism is, of course, bad. Personal property is abolished. Reward and recognition for one’s own individual achievements are counterproductive, and the traditional family structure has been transcended. To primitive and uneducated people (with their outdated preferences and unrefined sensibilities), this might seem like cause for concern. To the enlightened inhabitants of Walden Two, though (and their technocratic elite), these things are seen for what they are—the individual costs of the collective good.

The story arc of Walden Two follows Professor Burris, a psychologist and obvious stand-in for Skinner himself, as he and a small group of colleagues tour the utopian community. The guide of the tour is the founder of the community, as well as another thinly veiled Skinner proxy, named T. E. Frazier. Frazier spends several days showing the group of outsiders around and explaining the many behavioral interventions that have led to such an ideal way of life. One of the earliest tour stops in the novel is the community nursery—where our old friend and creepy commercial failure, the Air Crib, reappears.

Echoing Skinner’s real-life obsession with efficiencies-maxing, the unwanted burden of early childhood rearing is distributed by putting babies in boxes (Skinner strikes again) and raising them collectively. The children may or may not know who their parents are, but in order for that relationship to not interfere with the necessary primacy of loyalty to the collective, the nuclear family structure is what some in academia today would call “problematic” to the social harmony of Walden Two.

Marriage exists within Walden Two, though not in a way that we would recognize. Firstly, it’s strictly non-religious, of course. As history shows, nothing gets in the way of authoritarian or technocratic control quite like a shared religious belief structure. Secondly, monogamy—what many cultures would consider to be the bedrock of a lifelong intimate relationship and a stable environment for child development—isn’t enforced or even suggested as the baseline. Instead, marriage is reduced to something like an open relationship without the familial obligations. Gone are those loathsome gender roles and the oppressive shackles of domesticity for housewives—fully unburdened by what has been.

I would suspect plagiarism if there wasn’t at least one good rant about the unfairness and injustice of stay-at-home mummery, and Skinner doesn’t disappoint. It takes interacting with a middle-aged woman—to see if she is actually happy there—before Professor Burris finally believes that the people of Walden Two aren’t simply plastering on smiles and putting on airs for visitors. It’s as if Skinner was saying, “The utopia must be real if even a lowly housewife doesn’t have something to bitch about.”

It’s no surprise to the reader that Skinner’s main character eventually decides that he will give up the trappings of society—success, status, and socioeconomic vying of the larger culture—to join the commune. Perhaps he lives happily ever after in the collectivist utopia that Skinner, unlike all the real-world examples of Marxist-inspired movements, managed to bring into existence. Never mind that this could only be accomplished on the pages of a fictional story penned in the aftermath of the Second World War.

On the day that I finally closed the book, I didn’t get the feeling I typically get after finishing a story—neither the deep satisfaction of a well-spun yarn nor the apathy that follows a disappointing resolution set in. Instead, I was left with a lingering unease. It took me a while to figure out why that was.

 

WALDEN THREE:

George Orwell once famously—and, in my opinion, incorrectly—quipped that all art is propaganda. He argued that every artist embeds their beliefs, values, and political views into their work—consciously or otherwise. On this, we agree. However, when this is done consciously, it’s called propaganda. When it’s done unconsciously, it’s called projection. To that end, we can tell a lot about the man who wrote the novel Walden Two just by what he considers to be a proper utopia. At first, I thought what was nagging at me was the fact that the things I hold most dear—freedom, family, and fatherhood—were all missing from Walden Two.

It wasn’t until I picked up the novel again and began thumbing through the preface that it finally clicked. I saw the reference to Marx. I saw the citing of Lenin. I even saw the offering up of China as an example of Skinner’s proposed solutions to society’s woes, though he followed it up almost forlornly with, “…but a Communist revolution in America is hard to imagine.” I closed the book again and placed it atop my desk and was accosted with the image of what it would look like if someone were to attempt such a thing with a deep awareness of the psychological mechanisms that gave rise to slot-machine-reward schedules, mobile games, scroll-worthy algorithms, and credit card loyalty programs.

Open-mouthed, I envisioned what a Skinner Box would look like if the goal was to subdue people like me, to keep them bar-pressing in order to make that revolution in America a little “easier to imagine.” I thought of how my sometimes near automaton thumbs reach to open apps that I have no intention of opening, how I rush to click the “next episode” button while binging Netflix series, how after a rough day I might reach towards a smoke/drink/snack/app to help me zone out for a bit. That’s when I pushed the book a little further away, unconsciously looking to put more distance between it and me.

The simple white cover of the book lit up as it slid into the last rays of sunlight that were bending their way through my office window, announcing the lateness of the day as the sun set in the West. For a brief moment, the thing looked fiery and set ablaze. I was struck with the realization of what it would mean for the social engineering principles of Skinner’s behaviorism to collide with the pervasive technology of today and the hubris of Marxist utopianism. That would surely be an unholy trinity of world-breaking potential. I leaned back in my office chair, unable to look away from that little book that had begun as a mediocre work of utopian fiction and was now beginning to look a whole hell of a lot like the first draft of an instruction manual.