Awards

National Academies - 1955

American Association for the Advancement of Science

About James Dinsmoor

Born on October 4, 1921 and raised in Woburn, Massachusetts, James Arthur Dinsmoor lived in Britain for part of his youth, which drove some of his lifelong questions of life and science. Dinsmoor attended Dartmouth College and Columbia University and was a social activist and pacifist, serving for a time on the national executive committee of the Young People’s Socialist League. Later, on the faculty at IU, he helped to organize opposition to the war in Vietnam, chaired the first campus teach-in, and spoke on radio programs and at numerous political rallies. In 1966, Jim ran an independent campaign for the United States Congress on a Peace Platform.

After earning his PhD in 1949 at Columbia where he had been a lecturer, Dinsmoor came to Indiana University in 1951, where he rose through the ranks to professor of psychology. Dinsmoor’s research focused on the possibility of substituting the power of operant concepts and procedures for philosophical-political debates over untestable theories of the causation of behavior. He made fundamental contributions to the analysis of conditioned reinforcement, the use of signaling (discriminative) stimuli to shape and control behavior related to both positive and negative reinforcers. One of his most influential results was the demonstration that observing responses (responses necessary to discover the likelihood of reward) were maintained only by signals of positive outcomes. A cue that predicted the absence of food or the presence of aversive events did not maintain observing. This finding meant that organisms (including humans) will not work consistently to obtaining information, per se, just information that predicts positive outcomes. Jim was instrumental in bringing the flagship Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior to IU.

He “retired” in 1986, but he continued for 20 additional years presenting papers, interacting with colleagues, and producing significant articles at a rate approaching 1.5 publications a year. Jim was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis. The memorial symposium at the convention was titled: “Jim Dinsmoor : Experimentalist, Scholar, and Gentleman.” Jim died August 25, 2005.