| J. E. R. Staddon | |
| Birth Name: | John Eric Rayner Staddon |
| Nationality: | British-American |
| Education: | University College London Hollins College Harvard University |
| Thesis Title: | The effect of "knowledge of results" on timing behavior in the pigeon |
| Thesis Url: | http://id.lib.harvard.edu/alma/990039676860203941/catalog |
| Thesis Year: | 1964 |
| Discipline: | Psychology |
| Sub Discipline: | Psychobiology |
John Eric Rayner Staddon is a British-born American psychologist. He has been a critic of Skinnerian behaviorism and proposed a theoretically-based "New Behaviorism".[1] John Staddon conducted theoretical behaviorism research in adaptive function, mechanisms of learning, and optimality theories. He completed his graduate work at the Skinner Lab in Harvard in the 1960s, with Richard Herrnstein.[2]
Educated first at University College London, a three-year period interrupted by two years[3] in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. After graduation from UCL, he went to the U. S., to Hollins College in Hollins, Virginia for a year, and then to Harvard University where he studied under Richard Herrnstein, obtaining his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1964 with a thesis The effect of "knowledge of results" on timing behavior in the pigeon.
Staddon has done research at the MIT Systems Lab, the University of Oxford, the University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Ruhr Universität, Universität Konstanz, the University of Western Australia and York University (U.K.) and taught at the University of Toronto from 1964 to 1967.
Since 1967, Staddon has been at Duke University; since 1983 he has been the James B. Duke Professor of psychology, and a professor of biology and neurobiology. Since 2007, he has been professor emeritus at Duke University.[4]