A Social Psychological and Personality Approach to Human Motivation

After I graduated from high school, in 1960, I was a student for four years at Hamilton College. Mathematics was my major, but I became increasingly interested in psychology during that period. Many years before I was at Hamilton, B. F. Skinner had been a student there, and by the time I got there the psychology faculty’s research was based entirely on Skinner’s operant theory, which was focused primarily on rewards, although they were called reinforcements. Similarly, the psychology program for students was entirely operant-theory-based.