Opening Skinner's Box

With the free time I had over the past week or so I read a book titled Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater. The book tells of what the author considers to be the ten most important experiments of the twentieth century. Slater describes each experiment and then tells the tale of the experimenter and their story that led them to do their work. She is very critical and asks a lot of questions, a skeptic. She writes in such a way that the personal lives of each experimenter is key to their experiment. She is keen to show both sides, the good and the bad, while acknowledging the greatness of the experiments and sometimes the horror of their findings. I have written up a little bit about each experiment she tells about.


B.F. Skinner: Skinner was known for his boxes. These boxes were used to condition and raise animals and Skinner's own daughter. Often, people criticized Skinner for being a radical behaviourist and a person wanting to condition people into robots. Slater makes a case for Skinner based on some of his novels and papers. Skinner didn't want a world where people would be robots; rather, Skinner wanted to condition and positively encourage good behavior. He was a fan and user of operant conditioning. If you reward good behaviour enough, it would become the standard.


Stanley Milgrim: Milgrim is famous for his experiment on authority and how people react to it. He had students and locals shock the other participants, but did not tell them it had been acted out until the end. He discovered that 65% of his participants would deliver harmful shocks to a person as long as a person in a lab coat was behind them telling he/she to do so. Milgrims worked was challenged and praised. It showed how people could be come subjected to authority and it opened up questions about ourselves. 65% of people gave harmful to deadly shocks. 65% of people you know may do the same to you and you might do the same Slater states. Milgrim's experiment created awe, fear, and doubt.



David Rosenhan: Rosenhan had done an experiment to disprove psychiatry and mental institutions. He had people pretend to have problems, yet act normal, in order to enter in an institution. In essence, he proved that the people giving drugs and administering people did not know what they were doing. His experiments hit the institutions hard and caused a stir. Slater repeated the experiment and says that while Rosenhan's participants had an average stay of seven days, she was never admitted and always greeted warmly (no abuse and Rosenhan's participants witnessed).

Darley and Latane: These two researchers studied the bystander effect. What prompted this was a a murder committed over many attacks and many minutes. It was recorded that lights in the surrounding windows went on and off as the attacks continued, but no one came down to help the screaming woman. Society was shocked and wanted an answer as to how such an event could happen. Darley and Latane conducted experiments showing that the more people present at an incident the less likely someone present would help. We inhibit each other, more likely to help by ourselves than in a group.

Leon Festinger: Festinger investigated cognitive dissonance. People think in order to justify their actions. He showed this by telling two groups of people to lie. In compensation, participants in one group were given one dollar for their lie and in the other they were given 20 dollars. The people given 20 dollars were more likely to admit they lied because they said they did it for the money. The people given one dollar tended not to admit they lied because it is hard to justify lying for just one dollar.

Harry Harlowe: Harlowe studied attachment and how it affected the monkeys he was raising. He discovered that attachment is very important; monkeys only develop correctly and normally when raised with others and with a parental figure. Harlowe also went on to discover that monkeys raised abnormally would not raise their children or would harm then. He invented a cruel restraining devise that allowed other male monkeys to impregnate the female monkeys raised abnormally. He called it the rape rack. Despite what I see as the dark side of Harlowe, Harlowe did show that caring and touching your baby is important. One needs attention to grow normally and to be able to interact acceptably

Bruce Alexander: Alexander experimented with rats and addictions to drugs. He created two situations. In one situation the rats were in a paradise and given an option between drugged water and normal water. In the other situation rats were put in a cage and given the same choices of water. It turned out that in paradise the rats did not want or take the drugged water, but in the caged situation the rats became addicted to the drug water. Alexander tried to prove that it was culture and surroundings that influenced addictions, not the drug itself.

Elizabeth Loftus: Slater says this is one of the more disliked researchers of our time. She proved that you can implant or alter memories in a person. She helped criminals on trial to show that maybe people recalled the wrong incident or memory. One thing I noticed throughout the description of her experiments and Slater's telling is that no one recalled a memory from their teens or twenties or had a memory implanted that was said to happen in their twenties. Rather, all memories were implanted or recalled from their early years when memory isn't so clear.

Eric Kandel: Kandel investigated memory enhancing drugs. Discovered that when given certain drugs rats could perform better. He showed their was a mechanism for memory and therefore helped challenge Loftus. Also, while discovering the brain had ways to monitor what it remember he also discovered that their are monitors to forget. Tampering with either could cause problems; a person could recall what he or she doesn't wish to recall or forget more than necessary. Slater, in 2004, said the drugs to enhance memory were not yet marketed due to ethical issues. I do not know if the drugs are still not sold. Apparently scientists thought this would create a competition and a requirement for the drugs, a scary competition.

Antonio Egas Moniz: Moniz studied and practiced lobotomies. He discovered that by snipping a nerve or so in the brain or taking infected pieces out one could lose the psychosis and regain their self. However, some the patients were not helped, some died, and some say that after the surgery they were better but lost some part of their self. Lobotomies are still practiced as the majority of the patients have been cured of their problem. So far, the loss of a little bit of self is worth the depression or issue taking place in the brain.

A good read and very interesting for any psychology person. I found that Slater often doubts more than necessary, but the stories she relays are good and made me think more about my self and how I interact with the world.