Personal influences on professional work: an empirical case study of B.F. Skinner

This study addresses the hypothesis that individuals have characteristic ways of looking at the world that are revealed not only in their life story but also in their professional work. It seeks to provide the first empirical test of this hypothesis using systematic methods for data selection, interpretation, and matching, as applied to the case of B. F. Skinner. Using the salience identifier "primacy" (Alexander, 1990), Skinner's first research design and the first paragraph of his autobiography were selected for analysis. Adopting a personological approach to interpretation, "scripts" (Tomkins, 1987) were derived from these materials by blind and independent coders. A matching task (Allport, 1961) then indicated that the scripts derived from Skinner's work and life were substantially similar and significantly more similar than random pairs of scripts . A search through other autobiographical and professional writings by Skinner revealed that the elements of the discovered script appear recurrently in his imagery.