Name:  John Holladay
Title:  Professor of Humanities  /  Room C212.
Office Hours:   Monday/Wednesday/Friday  11-Noon   Tuesday / Thursday 11-Noon

Email:jholladay@mail.monroe.cc.mi.us

152 Western Philosophy Study Questions

 

Skinner and Rogers

"The Control of Human Behavior"

1. What are the two traditional obstacles to scientific control of human behavior?

          2. Why has the idea of behavior control always been so unpopular?

3. Why does Skinner feel we are hindering education with our fear of controlling human behavior?

          4. How does fear of behavior control hamper our government's legal                   systems?

5. Why do people react so negatively to his idea of a utopian world which is behaviorally engineered?

          6. What role should behavioral science pursue?

7. About what points does Rogers agree with Skinner? On what points do they differ?

          8. Define a) Behavioral Science

                        b) Prediction

                        c) Three Kinds of Control

9. What are the flaws Rogers sees in following the five steps needed to establish control of human behavior?

         10. What does Rogers see as the relationship of values to scientific endeavors?

         11.  Rogers feels that the day may be coming when we will "look back on the

concepts of human freedom, the capacity of choice, the responsibility of

choice, and the worth of the human individual as historical curiosities which

once existed by cultural accident as values in a pre-scientific civilization."

Do you agree? Why or why not?

        12. What alternative use of the scientific control of human behavior does Rogers see

as a more appealing possibility?

        13.  If Skinner's Walden Two is a closed society, what, in Rogers' view, would an open society be like?

        14.  Explain Rogers' view of the "great paradox of behavioral science."

        15.  Which of Rogers' ideas does Skinner reject and why?

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