Skinner’s Theory of Contingency Selection

All animals move and interact with their immediate milieus to eat, reproduce, and avoid harm. In doing so, animal actions either succeed or they do not with consequences to the animal and to its species. Skinner’s Theory of Contingency Selection encompasses the entirety of animal behavior. In doing so, it eschews an agency putatively responsible for animal actions. Instead it chronicles the contingencies under which such actions occur. Skinnerian theory describes (and eventually explains) the success and nonsuccess of actions, the conditions under which these occur, and the patterns they exhibit. It provides the foundations of behaviorological science, and in turn, its relations to other sciences and their central concepts.