Title:
Opening Skinner's Box Chapter 7 Rat Park
Summary:
This chapter is about Bruce Alexander and Robert Coambs' investigation into drug addiction using rats. They created a rat park with open areas, nice wood chips, and separate areas. Then they placed a sixteen rats into the park, and another sixteen in standard laboratory cages. They placed two water bottles in each, one containing pure water, and the other water laced with morphine and some sucrose, to hide the bitterness of the morphine. The rats in the cages, drank mostly the morphine water, but the rats in the rat park drank mostly the plain water.
Discussion:
This experiment was interesting. While reading the experiment, I thought that the rat park rats would drink more water, but not to the extent of the results. The caged rats drank the morphine water sixteen times more than the rat park rats. That number was surprising to me. These results have some interesting implications to peoples drug addictions, and if they are even addictions, or just an outlet for their connections with society.
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