Meeting of minds: Skinner and Michotte at the International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, 1951

Abstract

This note discusses the apparently unpublished correspondence between B. F. Skinner and the Belgian psychologist Albert Michotte, preceding Skinner's visit to the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm in 1951. Skinner's letters, written in French, were intended to arrange a visit to Michotte's laboratory in Leuven (then called Louvain) in Belgium, which in the end never took place, although it seems highly likely that they met in Stockholm. There is no record of the topic of the conversations they may have had, although one possible speculation concerns discussions of causality, as both Skinner and Michotte had published work relating to this topic in the 1940s, Michotte's La Perception de la Causalité and Skinner's Superstition in the pigeon. The note also discusses the way in which Skinner's visit to the Thirteenth Congress influenced the development of the experimental analysis of behavior in both Europe and Japan.

Keywords: Albert Michotte; B. F. Skinner; causality; superstition.