Book Reading #26 - Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 7: Rat Park

Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.

Summary:
Slater told the experiments and findings of Bruce Alexander who thought that there were no chemical causes to addiction, but rather cultural factors that played into everything.  He devised an experiment with rats in which a control group remained in their tight cages and another group lived in a rat-park he built.  It was a utopia.  He offered the rats both regular water as well as sweet water laced with morphine.  He steadily increased the dosage of the morphine.  He found that the Utopian rats did not become addicted to the morphine, but rather preferred the regular water whereas the opposite was true for the other group.  He neutralized the morphine part of the solution and found that the Utopian rats then wanted the sweet water.

His next experiment started with the same two groups, but this time only offered the morphine-water.  He gave them that to drink for an extended period of time and then offered them regular water as well as the sweet morphine.  His findings were the same as the last.

His papers were not published in popular journals, and he was never highly regarded.  Slater says that political factors could be involved in these things.

Slater once again tries the experiment.  She begins taking her husbands morphine pills at night for 14 days to see if she develops an addiction, but it turns out she does not.

Discussion:
The focus of this chapter seemed to be on cultural construction.  I really liked her analysis on everything: that the environmental factors highly affect our personal lives and therefore our desire to use and be "addicted to" drugs.  She said that people merely escape their current surroundings through drugs and the only sufficient thing to call an addiction would be the fact that this fantasy world is better than the one they are living in.  This causes the desire to continue.  This could be seen in the cycle of taking drugs as it sometimes costs a lot of money.  The user becomes poor, finds himself in bad circumstances, and only increases the "need" for it based on his surroundings.