About
B. F. Skinner Plays Himself revisits the life and works of B. F. Skinner through never-before-seen footage recovered from a failed educational film project. Skinner–a world famous public intellectual in his lifetime who continues to be ranked among the most important psychologists of any era–is now largely forgotten outside a select academic niche. From Skinner’s early work with rats, pigeon-guided bombs, and air-conditioned baby cribs to Utopian communes and debating Dennis Hopper, we deconstruct the scientist and the prescience of his warnings about the power of shaping behavior. The failure of the educational film shows that changing behavior, whether for utopian or authoritarian purposes, is both more nuanced and more difficult than his proponents or critics imagined.