Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself.

Properly used, positive reinforcement is extremely powerful.

The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.

Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren’t hungry, they wouldn’t work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

Religions work for their own aggrandizement – strengthen the church and so on – and they use reinforcers of one kind or another to get obedience and so on from their communicants.

Reinforcement is being right.

The study of one’s own behavior, especially when reinforced, has far-reaching implications for a science of behavior.

A failure to apply positive reinforcement is a failure of application, not a failure of the principle.