Today I Learned (TIL)

7282 readers

28 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

Information must be true
Follow site rules
No, you don't have to have literally learned the fact today
Posts must be about something you learned

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Kokomheart

JCSpark

TIL B.F. Skinner invented an air crib. (media.pluto.psy.uconn.edu)

submitted 4 days ago by Quilotoa to c/til

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Psychologist B. F. Skinner create a "baby in a box" crib that was designed to make the mother's role easier. It would probably have prevented a lot of SIDS death, but because of its association with Skinner, it never caught on.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah, me too, but we're looking backwards.

The guy was in an era where the things he espoused and challenged were not looked well upon, and he caught flak from the general populace because of that.

Remember, he was an early anti-spanking proponent, though mostly in schools afaicr. He had pretty strong beliefs about other stuff that was going against the grain of assumed norms in other ways too

So, parents seeing the watered down version of his reasoning and objecting to it, it makes sense they might just associate anything related to him as unwelcome too.

Yeah, big chunks of his ideas have been shown to function as he said now, but there's still academic criticism of some of it. Mostly down to flaws on a procedural level, or with some of the assumptions he made in formulating his ideas. But to anyone taking psych classes nowadays, he's at worst a little outdated, and often is seen as one of the more important figures in the field