Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

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Jill

Summary

In Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, Lauren Slater details ten of the greatest psychological experiments of this past century that have shaped the way we think about the human mind and human behavior. She narrates the stories of these researchers and their work as if we are reading a story or watching a movie. The researchers she describes are:

• B. F. Skinner: Skinner experimented with rats and conditioning, and found that the mind is extremely receptive to rewards, which strengthen conditioning, and that the mind is not as receptive to punishment, which weakens conditioning.
• Stanley Milgram: Milgram designed an experiment where the participant was told to shock another participant up until the point where the shock would deliver death, and found that 65% of participants shocked up until death. His experiments taught us a lot about human's obedience to authority.
• David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and some helpers admitted themselves into mental hospitals saying that they were hearing a voice that said "thud". They found that even though they were perfectly sane, and said so after being admitted, they still would be kept in the hospital for a long time, and psychologists would swear that they were psychotic. This showed the subjectiveness of psychiatric diagnosis.
• John Darley and Bibb Latane: Darley and Latane, through their experiments, found that when a crisis happened and someone needed help, that if a bystander perceived there were lots of other people there, would not help. These people would wait a long time, and would never truly decide on whether to help or not. But, when they thought they were the only person there to help, they would help almost immediately.
• Leon Festinger: Festinger studied the way that people will change their ideas and beliefs based on their actions, primarily studying the way that cult members reacted whenever the "day of judgement" and the end of the world did not come as they had predicted.
• Harry Harlow: Harlow studied how infant monkeys came to be attached to a fake "mother" that had soft cloths on it, versus a mother that was hard and metal but provided food. He found that love does not have to do with providing resources and food, but instead has an aspect of touch as well as motion.
• Bruce Alexander: In order to study the nature of addiction, Alexander placed some rats in a nice, clean environment, and others in a solitary, confined environment, and gave each of the rats water laced with morphine, and some regular water. They found that the rats in the bad conditions liked the morphine, while the rats with the nice environment didn't like the morphine, suggesting that addiction is not a physical dependency but instead a result of situation.
• Elizabeth Loftus: Loftus showed that memories of our past quickly disintegrate and that we can never trust them. She helped participants in her experiments "remember" fake memories of being lost in the mall, and the participants were almost 100% sure that they had remembered this fake memory.
• Eric Kandel: Kandel showed that memory is strengthened by increasing the strength of connections between neurons, and that a specific substance called CREB helps that strengthening.
• Antonio Moniz: Moniz pioneered the practice of brain surgery, specifically the lobotomy, in order to treat patients that had depressed or psychosis. While further refined, a lot of his techniques are used today.

In all, Slater presented some great examples of important psychological experiments that have shaped and changed the field as practiced today.

Discussion

I actually really liked this book because of the way that Slater wrote. She formulated and changed all of these boring experiments to be interesting stories that really give great insight into the human mind. Especially interesting is the fact that while many of these discoveries are of grave import, and should change the field completely, psychologists today still widely discredit them and continue to believe otherwise. One such example is the addiction example, as kids today are still taught that drug addition is physical.