Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Opening Skinner's Box


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

Summary:
In Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater interprets 10 different notable psychologists and their experiments that have shaped psychology as well as many other fields as a result of their unique approaches of looking at humanity.  Each chapter goes through one of these contributions, and usually at the end she writes her own experiment or experience with this area of psychology or relates it back to a topic in which she is interested.  The chapters are briefly reflected upon in the next section.

1. B. F. Skinner looked at the idea of positive reinforcement and how beings learn.  He tested rats and pigeons among others and found that positive reinforcement was a strong method of learning.  Many reject his work because of its extrapolation to humans from other animals, and also criticize him as evil for some of his thoughts and humanist views, but according to his daughter he was quite the opposite.
2. Stanley Milgram tested human obedience to authority in response to long past Nazi Germany obedience.  He test subjects as teachers who administered shock to a volunteer (he was on the inside) if the volunteer incorrectly answered a question.  He found 65% of people administered lethal shocks to the other.  He is criticized that the experiment has inconclusive findings.
3. David Rosenhan tested psychiatry to see if he and eight others could get into a mental institution by saying they had a voice in their head saying "thud".  All of his team was able to get in and stayed anywhere from seven to 52 days.  He was part of debunking mental institutions and psychiatry itself.
4. Darley and Latane studied a murder witnessed by a large crowd, but no one acted upon it.  The cops were not called until well after the event had taken place.  They developed an experiment which modeled the same thing where there was the idea of a group and then someone who was in trouble to see if someone would act.  It was found that as a group, the level of accountability is distributed through the group and therefore each person feels less responsible and accountable.
5. Leon Festinger researched cognitive dissonance beginning with a cult.  This is the idea that people will change their views to model reality.  In his experiment he paid people different amounts of money to lie and found that the ones paid less often attributed their actions to a belief in themselves whereas the ones paid more said they just did it for the money.
6. Harry Harlow studied monkeys and how baby monkey reacted to an artificial mother.  They found that the babies responded better to the mother who felt better (with towels on her rather than just metal).  Affection was still there even when this "mother" hurt the babies.  All these babies, however, grew up to have terrible social and individual problems.
7. Bruce Alexander had a Rat Park utopia in his hypothesis that drugs are not addictive.  He thought that favorable circumstances elicited enough euphoria that the drug was not wanted while bad situations simply made the pleasure better than reality.  He found that the utopian rats did not like the morphine laced water while the control group did.  He showed through this and other experiments that addiction may not be as bad as we make it out to be.
8. Elizabeth Loftus came up with the "lost in the mall" experiment.  She defends people from false allegations based upon recalled memory.  She wanted to expose the myth of memories being accurate after an extended period of time and that memory could be planted in people.  She had people plant false memories of being lost in the mall and then had them recall said memory.  She found a statistically significant percentage recalled the memory and many also expounded upon it.
9. Eric Kandel experimented with sea slugs to find the neural connections in our brain associated with repetition in learning.  He found that as an action is repeated, the bond between neurons becomes stronger.  
10. Antonio Moniz performed some of the first lobotomies.  He did not keep records very well, so he is highly criticized for that as well as his loose practice, but he did pave the way for the progress that has come from cutting into the brain for assistance in mental problems.

All these researchers contributed to society in some way.  Slater relates them to alternative thought: that sometimes borders are teetered upon in order to gain findings otherwise unattainable.

Discussion:
Psychology is an area that interests me, so most chapters caught my attention.  I really did not appreciate how she would tack her own two cents on to most of the earlier chapters.  It made it look like she was a want-to-be researcher chasing all of these old open coffins.  Aside from that, her writing style was very readable and interesting.  The book made me think a lot about different types of learning; not only how we as humans learn, but also what are the factors that go in to learning.