The differences between friends cannot but reinforce their friendship.

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.

If we apply a reinforcer to increase a response, we must be prepared to apply it forever.