For as de-humanizing as everybody accused him to be, after I studied and read a couple books by and about B.F. Skinner and his Behaviorism I found his material to be really deeply moving and reaffirmed my basic belief in constructionism, the idea that we're shaped(or conditioned, as he would put it) by the world around us to make us into who we are.
Skinner himself considered the mind and emotions to be a "black box" - he didn't really care what was going on in there for the purposes of his work. Cognition was not his concern whatsoever. Some call that a mistake, and perhaps to an extent it was, but his focus allowed him to show the great depths to which a living being's actions can and are shaped by environment - whatever that environment is - mostly regardless of "nature", within extremely broad confines of raw physical ability/biological capacity.
Everything around us affects us, changes us. Everything we see, do, read, touch, hear, smell, taste. Many accused him of being cold-hearted, but read his interviews and listen to him speak, the guy was either a Buddha or completely insane, and I think it was maybe a mix of both. He would probably maintain that he didn't "feel" he had "belief" in Behaviorism, so much as the environment of his work provided reinforcement that it was true. And funnily enough, to use a word he would've disliked intensely I suspect, he sounded almost transcendental about the whole thing.
That being said, I think what he neglected to consider was that not only are we shaped by our environments to a tremendous degree, but that we build internal models of our reality based on experience - and then we project those models into the future. Based on those internal projections/expectations, we then adapt our *current* behavior to those expectations in a constantly self-modifying process. Our ability to do that, particularly our ability to do that *consciously*, seems to be extraordinarily powerful compared to anything else we've encountered.
That, I believe, is part of the key to what makes us "human".
We see and experience, we predict, we act on those predictions, we experience the consequences of that action good or bad, we modify our predictions and act, and so on. Those predictions, models, aren't the same for everybody because not everybody has the exact same experiences. Skinner maintained that if we did, we'd all come out more or less exactly the same. It's the small variances combined that give us individuality - like how, generally speaking, most all babies act the same at first, but as experience builds and brain capacity develops, differentiation occurs to finally a fully formed personality capable of modeling and re-shaping.
Hi, you just hit kind of a big point of my studies
I hope I've made sense, as I've been coming back to this for a few hours now and it's quite late and my own internal coherence has been steadily plummeting. Bedtime for me.