That entire work was trained on what Skinner continued to regard as the chief impediment to social progress: the conceptual confusion that cloaks our deepest ignorance in the sacred robes of freedom and dignity. Skinner argued that our allegiance to these lofty notions is simply the way we protect ourselves from the hard truths of “unsuspected controlling relations between behavior and environment.”56 They are a psychological “escape route” that slowly closes “as new evidences of the predictability of human behavior are discovered. Personal exemption from a complete determinism is revoked as a
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