Audio log: Skinner reciprocal

A further quote from Skinner about how control is not always what we think it is.

## Location

This tape is located is the central column, nestled among the trash. Check in the pile's back side (facing the exit and the room with the models).

## Transcript

The relation between the controller and the controlled is reciprocal. The scientist in the laboratory, studying the behavior of a pigeon, designs contingencies and observes their effects. His apparatus exerts a conspicuous control on the pigeon, but we must not overlook the control exerted by the pigeon.
The behavior of the pigeon has determined the design of the apparatus and the procedures in which it is used. Some such reciprocal control is characteristic of all science.
As Francis Bacon put it, nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

The scientist who designs a cyclotron is under the control of the particles he is studying. The behavior with which a parent controls his child,
either aversively or through positive reinforcement, is shaped and maintained by the child's responses. A psychotherapist changes the behavior of his patient in ways which have been shaped and maintained by his success in changing that behavior. A government or religion prescribes and imposes sanctions selected by their effectiveness in controlling citizen or communicant. An employer induces his employees to work industriously and carefully with wage systems determined by their effects on behavior. The classroom practices of the teacher are shaped and maintained by the effects on his students.

In a very real sense, then, the slave controls the slave driver, the child the parent, the patient the therapist, the citizen the government, the communicant the priest, the employee the employer, and the student the teacher.

B.F. Skinner, 1971

## Literal interpretation

This quote is next to the statue of a man who is getting crushed by his environment and who is reaching for something. It seems as if he wants to be free of something.
This could refer to the systems of control Skinner is talking about, but there might be a better meaning in this scene somewhere.

Possible interpretations are that the statue might be a representation of a young Skinner, who is buried by his own environment and not even noticing or it might be a reference to the Portal-like environment and the messages from that game about resisting a controlling environment.

## Literary context

This quote, like the  other Skinner audio log, is taken from "Beyond freedom and dignity".

In this quote Skinner rationalizes systems of control by saying that this system of control has to be shaped specifically to the controlled subject, by which the subject also has a form of control. This is partly a rationalization of his thesis that the government should find ways to let people behave in a civil manner through controlling systems, but it's also a way to talk about the idea that control isn't just one thing. It's a system of interacting parts, where the whole system breaks down if you use a form of control that isn't made specifically for the right job.

## Relation to the six themes of the Witness

This quote is part of Theme 2: Relativism.

Skinner argues that these kinds of systems aren't the only way of looking at the world. If you look at the world through the lens that every action someone does in the world has an effect on that world, it's easy to see that it's not just powerful people controlling the less powerful, but in a way the less powerful use their agency to shape the way they can be governed.

In short: truth isn't just one thing. There can be multiple truths and multiple ones can actually be valid.