B. F. Skinner Plays Himself

Theodore Kennedy United States 2025 74 min.

BF Skinner, founder of radical behaviorism and operant conditioning, “plays” himself in this reissue of a “failed” educational film. Encounter pigeon-guided bombs, rat experiments and baby-box trials, utopian communes and debates with Dennis Hopper.

Through never-before-seen archival footage we get a rare insight into the work of B. F. Skinner, one of the most influential American psychologists of the 1950s and 60s. He is still regarded as one of the most important psychologists of all time, although he is now largely forgotten outside academic circles. A creative analysis of the scientist and his foresight regarding the power of behavioral influence. Skinner’s educational film -ultimately a failed project that was never screened - shows that behavioral change, whether pursued for utopian or authoritarian ends, is far more nuanced and difficult than either its advocates or its critics once suggested.