B. F. Skinner was the guy who turned rats and pigeons into psychology celebrities.

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Born in 1904 in the USA, while Freud dug into the unconscious, Skinner preferred to focus on what can be seen and measured, creating radical behaviourism - the idea that human behaviour is just a matter of stimulus and response, like a well-trained laboratory experiment.

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He invented the famous ‘Skinner box’, where he tested how positive and negative reinforcements shaped actions (spoiler: it even works with humans).

He wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, where he suggested that free will was more illusion than reality, making many people uncomfortable. He died in 1990, but his legacy lives on whenever someone uses a reward system to train a dog - or manage a team.

Science and Human Behavior