B F Skinner and Superstition in the Pigeon

Claudia Hammond explores the legacy of BF Skinner and Behaviourism. One of the most famous psychologists of the 20th century, he became one of the most controversial, by applying the theory he developed through animal studies to human learning.
Claudia is shown round his study by his daughter, Julie Vargas. Remaining much as it was when he died in 1990, it reveals another side to the man famous for his operant conditioning experiments with rats and pigeons, and infamous for his template for what some have described as a totalitarian state, in his book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity'.

Claudia also meets his younger daughter, Deborah Buzan, and explodes the myth that she was raised in one of Skinner's experimental 'boxes'.
She hears more about the man and his work from Richard McNally at Harvard, and Gordon Bower and Lee Ross of Stanford University.

Producer: Marya Burgess