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Review 70:80-100
McClosky, Herbert (1964). «Consensus and ideology in American politics». American Political Science
Review 58:361-382
McClosky, Herbert, and Alida Brill (1983). Dimensions of Tolerance. New York: Russell Sage.
McCutcheon, Allan L. (1985). «A latent class analysis of tolerance for nonconformity in the American
public». Public Opinion Quarterly 49:474-488.
«A TECHNOLOGY OF BEHAVIOR»
by B. F. Skinner
1. In trying to solve the terrifying problems that face us in the world today, we naturally turn to the
things that we do best. We play from strength, and our strength is science and technology. To contain a
population explosion we look for better methods of birth control. Threatened by nuclear holocaust, we
build bigger deterrent forces and anti-ballistic-missile systems. We try to stave off world famine with new
foods and better ways of growing them. Improved sanitation and medicine will, we hope, control disease:
better housing and transportation will solve the problems of the ghettos; and new ways of reducing or
disposing of waste will stop the pollution of the environment. We can point to remarkable achievements in
all these fields, and it is not surprising that we should try to extend them. But things grow steadily worse,
and it is disheartening to find that technology itself is increasingly at fault. Sanitation and medicine have
made the problems of population more acute, war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear
weapons, and the affluent pursuit of Happiness is largely responsible for pollution. As Darlington has said,
«Every new source from which man has increased his power on the earth has been used to diminish the
prospects of his successors. All his progress has been made at the expense of damage to his environment,
which he cannot repair and could not foresee.
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2. Whether or not he could have foreseen the damage, man must repair it or all is lost. And he can do so
if he will recognize the nature of the difficulty. The application of the physical and biological sciences alone
will not solve our problems, because the solutions lie in another field. Better contraceptives will
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control population only if people use them. New weapons may offset new defenses and vice versa, but a
nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed.
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New methods of agriculture and medicine will not help if they are not practiced, and housing is a matter
not only of buildings and cities but of how people live. Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing
people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are
abandoned.
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3. In short, we need to make vast changes in human behavior, and we cannot make them with the help
of nothing more than physics or biology, no matter how hard we try. (And there are other problems, such
as the breakdown of our educational system and the dissaffection and revolt of the young, to which
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physical and biological technologies are so obviously irrelevant that they have never been applied.) It is not
enough to «use technology with a deeper understanding of human issues», or to «dedicate technology to
man's spiritual needs», or to «encourage technologists to look at human problems. Such expressions imply
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that where human behavior begins, technology stops, and that we must carry on, as we have in the past,
with what we have learned from personal experience or from those collections of personal experiences
called history, or with the distillations of experience to be found in folk wisdom and practical rules of
55 thumb. But these have been available for centuries, and all we have to show for them is the state of the
world today.
4.
What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could
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adjust the growth of the world's population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve
agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or
move toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached
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absolute zero (even though both remain presumably out of reach). But a behavioral technology comparable
in power and precision to physical and biological technology is lacking, and those who do not find the very
possibility ridiculous are more likely to be frightened by it than reassured. That is how far we
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are from «understanding human issues» in the sense in which physics and biology understand their fields,
and how far we are from preventing the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably