B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner was the most famous behaviorist of his era, a Harvard psychologist who championed the approach in which psychologists studied learned observable responses to outside stimulation. During World War II, Skinner had tried to train pigeons to guide bombs for the military. The CIA's Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology gave Skinner a $5,000 grant to pay the costs of a secretary and supplies for the research that led to his book Freedom and Dignity. Skinner had no memory of the grant or its origins but stated, "I don't like secret involvement of any kind. I can't see why it couldn't have been open and aboveboard."¹

The Behaviorist Monopoly

During the 1950s, Skinner's school of thought was accepted on campus virtually to the exclusion of all others. The behaviorists tended to dismiss matters of great interest to the CIA: the effect of drugs on the psyche, subjective phenomena like Hypnosis, the inner workings of the mind, and personality theories that took genetic differences into account. MKULTRA officials used the Society to fund iconoclastic researchers outside the Skinnerian mainstream, helping liberate the behavioral sciences from "the world of rats and cheese." The CIA's money changed the academic world to some degree, though no one can say how much.¹

An MKULTRA source explains that grants to figures like Skinner "bought legitimacy" for the Society and made the recipients "grateful." The money gave Agency employees at Human Ecology a reason to phone Skinner to pick his brain about particular problems. "You could walk into someone's office and say you were just talking to Skinner," says an MKULTRA veteran. "We didn't hesitate to do this. It was a way to name-drop."¹