Another critical contribution that Skinner made was to translate his laboratory research on rats and other animals into a new form of psychotherapy termed behavorial modification.

He initially developed his behavior modification techniques for use with psychotic psychiatric patients, but variations of his techniques have been applied to work with juvenile delinquents and emotionally disturbed children.

This was an adaptation of Thorndike's puzzle box, used by scientists to observe how an animal learns to escape the box. Skinner's innovation was to connect the animal's behavior (a rat pressing a bar) to a counting mechanism so that the number of times the behavior was performed would be automatically recorded. This way the frequency of the behavior could be compared across different reinforcement conditions.

Skinner was also interested in applying operant conditioning principles to education. He introduced the concept of programmed learning, in which the material to be taught is presented in a sequence of small steps. Thus learning progresses step by step, with positive reinforcement given after each step is mastered.