Deborah Skinner and Her Father, B.F. Skinner

We should try to be careful about misrepresentation, gossip, hearsay, slander, libel, etc. I need to work on this too, especially.

"I loved my father dearly. He was fantastically devoted and affectionate. But perhaps the stories about me would never have started if he had done a better job with his public image. He believed that, although our genes determine who we are, it is mostly our environment that shapes our personality. A Time Magazine cover story ran the headline "BF Skinner says we can't afford freedom". All he had said was that controls are an everyday reality - traffic lights and a police force, for instance - and that we need to organise our social structures in ways that create more positive controls and fewer aversive ones. As is clear from his utopian novel, Walden Two, the furthest thing from his mind was a totalitarian or fascist state."

Deborah Skinner Buzan, daughter of B.F. Skinner; http://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/mar/12/highereducation.uk