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Book Review: Alexandra Rutherford, Beyond the Box: B. F. Skinner’s Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life, 1950—1970s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 210 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9774-3 (hardback), $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-8020-9618-0 (paperback), $24.95

Rutherford’s readers are likely to recognize two central figures in her book’s title: B. F. Skinner, the controversial propagator of behaviorism, and his ‘boxes’, the containers in which operant conditioning experiments with pigeons and rats would yield animal models for human behavior and motivation. But the star of this book is not Skinner, his experiments, or even behaviorism proper – at least as it has been traditionally defined in relation to John Watson’s human experiments – but the concept of a ‘technology of behavior’. This technology sought to use operant conditioning to ‘engineer’ human choices and interactions for the betterment of society. It is this technology, rather than Skinner himself, that drives the narrative of Rutherford’s argument by ‘dismantling’ the lab-based box through its increasingly widespread application. Without turning B. F. Skinner into a behaviorist Dr Frankenstein, Beyond the Box allows his technology to move farther away from Skinner’s own ideas, experiments and biography – and affirms his proper historical place as its father. The first chapter, which appeared in an earlier form in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, discusses B. F. Skinner’s career as a public intellectual. The chapter’s premise is that Skinner’s work and public presence were significantly intertwined with mid-century American society and culture. Having established this, Rutherford explicates Skinner’s considerable impact on both. Unlike other public psychologists (such as ‘Freud, Rogers, Maslow, or Dr. Phil’) Skinner ‘embodied the psychologist as bench scientist’; his revolutionary version of ‘psychology without the psyche’ proved polarizing among professional psychologists and their ‘publics’ (21). His most profound influence was the application of his ideas through what Rutherford calls a ‘technology of behavior’ and the creation of the field of ‘applied behavior analysis’ (21). The chapter