Notes:

Buried:
GRid=130099394

Eliza married James S. SKINNER in Oct 1873. James (son of Thomas SKINNER) was born on 21 Sep 1847 in Devon, England; died on 8 Nov 1937 in Scranton, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, USA; was buried on 10 Nov 1937 in Dunmore Cemetery, Dunmore, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

William married Grace Madge BURRHUS on 30 Apr 1902 in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, USA. Grace (daughter of Charles Henry BURRHUS and Isa Mary POTTER) was born on 4 Jun 1878 in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, USA; died on 6 Feb 1960; was buried in Dunmore, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Writer, Psychologist. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, commonly known as B. F. Skinner, was an American psychologist, behaviourist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. While a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1920s, he studied animal behaviour, including positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, and memory.

He created a box with a simple control that could be manipulated by animals, such as a lever or disk, and trained animals to respond to stimuli with rewards (such as food) or punishment (such as shocks). This box is known as an operant conditioning chamber, or a Skinner Box. He received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher until 1936.

He publicised his behavioural theory in his first book, Behavior of Organisms, published in 1938, describing how environment controls behaviour. He taught at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and later at Indiana University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946–1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. In his book Science and Human Behavior, published in 1953, he redefined negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is the strengthening of behaviour by the occurrence of some event, and negative reinforcement is the strengthening of behavior by the removal or avoidance of some aversive event. He believed that effective teaching must be based on positive reinforcement which is, he argued, more effective at changing and establishing behaviour than punishment, as the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment.

This view had implications for the practice of rote learning and punitive discipline in education. He also wrote Walden Two and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, for which he made the cover of TIME Magazine. Walden Two describes a fictional "experimental community" in 1940s United States, where the residents practice scientific social planning and use operant conditioning in raising their children.

His public exposure increased in the 1970s, and he remained active in social causes until his death. Ten days before his death, he was given the lifetime achievement award by the American Psychological Association and gave a talk in an auditorium concerning his work.

Burrhus married Yvonne Eve BLUE on 1 Nov 1936 in Cook County, Illinois, USA. Yvonne (daughter of Robert Bruce BLUE and Harriet Veronica READ) was born on 9 May 1911 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, USA; died on 30 Aug 1997 in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

Buried:
GRid=130880331

Deborah married Bary Gordon BUZAN in Jan 1973 in London, Middlesex, England. Bary (son of Gordon Frank BUZAN and Jean Mary BURN) was born on 15 Feb 1941; died on 22 May 2019. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]