![]() It blared on the cover: “Including ‘Walden Two Revisited,’ a new commentary by B. ![]() Those days were exciting indeed, made even more so by the unending intellectual jousting that seemed to occur with almost everyone else, who saw us as arrogant and naive and our ideas as simplistic and dangerous.Īmid this turbulent social and academic background, Walden Two was reissued in 1976, years after its unnoticed initial publication. The behavioral movement was energized by its confident belief that both therapy and society would be improved by replacing nonscientific approaches to behavior control with those generated by the science of behavior. The behavioral movement, though less visible, shared much in common with its contemporary social forces: It was fiercely loyal to its ideology, aspired to achieve grand goals, challenged dominant cultural assumptions, and advocated social justice and fairness through changing the environment. This was a time when American society was in the process of massive redefinition in response to powerful environmental forces, most notably the war on poverty and the civil rights, antiwar, environmental, hippie, and women's movements. It is no coincidence that behavior modification, a combination of behavioral ideology and scientifically supported interventions, emerged as a potent clinical force in the 1960s and 1970s. Skinner's ideas excited his behavioral colleagues, who maintained his keen interest in cultural design this inclination comported well with the zeitgeist of 1960s America, which embodied an activist approach to social change. ![]() …What is needed is not a new political leader or a new kind of government but further knowledge about human behavior and new ways of applying that knowledge to the design of cultural practices. …The great cultural revolutions have not started with politics. It advocated social change through “nonpolitical empiricism” ( Rakos, 1992a), reflecting Skinner's faith in science over politics:Īn important theme in Walden Two is that political action is to be avoided. Walden Two, of course, described in detail a community in which societal control is achieved through the comprehensive scientific application of behavioral principles. ![]() To this day, the novel plays an important role in sustaining the core behavior-analytic tenet that control of behavior is an inescapable fact the only issue is whether the control will be planned or unplanned by humans. It is a history, by a nonbehavioral author, of what unquestionably is the central philosophical and conceptual unifier among committed behavior analysts: a shared understanding of the deterministic nature of human behavior and its implications for cultural design, first articulated by Skinner in his 1948 utopian novel Walden Two. It is about who we are-not about what we do as scientists, clinicians, or teachers. Skinner's Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental Communities (2005), by Hilke Kuhlmann, is a book about us-the intellectual heirs to B. ![]()
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