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:
Opening Skinner's Box is about 10 different psychologists, their experiments, and how their work affected psychology and other fields.  Each chapter is dedicated to a different psychologist and experiment, which she concludes with her own personal experiments or experiences on the subject.  Here is a brief summary of each chapter:


Chapter 1:
This chapter is about B. F. Skinner, and his experiments.  Skinners first experiment included rats in a box with levers.  He studied their behavior, and how it changed by when they pushed a lever, they got food.  He also tried altering the schedule of food reward, and discovered that when using a fixed-ratio schedule, the rat quickly learned how many times to press the lever before getting food.


Chapter 2:
This chapter is about Stanley Milgram and his shock experiment.  In the experiment, there is a teacher and a learner.  The teacher reads a set of words, and the learner must repeat them, otherwise they receive a shock from the teacher.  The experiment was actually about obedience and how people follow what they are told. 




Chapter 3:
This chapter discussed an experiment conducted by David Rosenhan.  The experiment was to test the ability of psychiatrists to determine if a person is "sane" or "insane".  Rosenhan and 8 other people went to separate mental institutions and complained that they had a voice in their head, and it said "thud".  All 9 were admitted.  Then as the next step in the experiment, all acted normally, and if asked, said that their symptom was gone.  The time spent in the institutions ranged from 7 days to 52 days.




Chapter 4:

This chapter is about an experiment done by 2 psychologists, John Darley, and Bibb Latane.  They got their idea for the experiment from a murder in NY.  It was not the murder that actually caught their attention though, it was the fact that there were 38 witnesses, the murder happened over a 35 minute period, and none of the witnesses called the police or even went outside their apartment to help.  Darley and Latane's experiment used a faked seizure to test the subjects reactions.  The subject was placed in a room with a microphone, and told they would talk for 2 minutes about life in college, then the next person in a different room would talk, and they would listen, with a group of talkers taking turns.  Actually, all of the voices were prerecorded.  One of the recordings had the voice act like it was having a seizure, and Darley and Latane recorded the results.

Chapter 5:
In this chapter, Slater discusses Leon Festiger's theory of cognitive dissonance.  This is the thought that people will change their beliefs to match certain circumstances.  Slater found a woman whose child almost drowned at the age of 3.  The mother surrounded her child with religious relics, and after a while, the relics began move of their own accord.  Also, the relics would ooze blood, or strange oils. People began to come to the child and take some of the oils for cures for many different ailments.  The mother then believed that her child was a saint, to take the pains of others to heal them.  Slater says that this is classic dissonance, by the way the mother rationalized what had happened.




Chapter 6:
This chapter was about Harry Haslow's experiments with love.  For the experiments, he used baby rhesus monkeys.  In his first experiment, he placed some monkeys in an area with 2 surrogate mothers.  One was made of cardboard, and covered in cloth, but had no milk to drink.  The other was made out of wire, and had milk for the monkeys.  What he observed was that the baby monkeys would cling to the cloth mother, when they got hungary, go to the wire mother until they were full, then return.  Haslow discusses how this relates that touch is more important than just getting food to love.




Chapter 7:
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. 




Chapter 8:
This chapter discusses Elizabeth Loftus and her experiments with memory.  Her experiments are about how easy it is to plant a suggested memory into someones head, and have that form into a believed memory for that person.  Her one of her initial experiments consisted of 24 students who went home and implanted false memories in their sibling that they had been lost in a mall when they were younger.  When the siblings came into the lab later, 25 percent of them elaborated in detail of the time that they got lost in the mall, but never actually happened. 




Chapter 9:
This chapter is about Kandel's experiments with sea slugs.  He probed the slugs with electric probes, and was observing how they remembered a new task.  He trained them to withdraw their gills whenever they were touched, and he was able to observe with a microscope how the neurons changed.  The more the relationship was enforced, the links between the neurons grew stronger.




Chapter 10:
This chapter is about Antonio Moniz, and his work with lobotomy.  The chapter starts out by describing how he created a dye that would be injected into the neck which would allow the vessels and lobes in the brain to be seen on x-ray.  This dye made it possible to locate tumors and fault lines that were previously invisible on x-rays.  Then the chapter goes on to discuss his work on lobotomies, starting with a patient called Mrs. M.




Discussion:
I was never really that interested in psychology, but some of these chapters really caught my attention.  Sometimes her experiments or side notes were a little annoying, but all in all, it was well written.  I found it more interesting that most books, because each chapter looked at something different so there was no redundancy.  This book showed me some interesting thoughts on human behavior that intrigued me.

Book Reading #34: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 10: Chipped

Summary:
This chapter is about Antonio Moniz, and his work with lobotomy.  The chapter starts out by describing how he created a dye that would be injected into the neck which would allow the vessels and lobes in the brain to be seen on x-ray.  This dye made it possible to locate tumors and fault lines that were previously invisible on x-rays.  Then the chapter goes on to discuss his work on lobotomies, starting with a patient called Mrs. M.

Discussion:
This chapter was disturbing at times.  To think of cutting into someones brain and removing a piece of it.  Also, the correlations between certain pills and a lobotomy were scary.  Today, we don't really think about taking a pill, but what if it had the same effect as a lobotomy, that would be a disturbing thought.

Book Reading #32: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 9: Memory Inc.

Summary:
This chapter is about Kandel's experiments with sea slugs.  He probed the slugs with electric probes, and was observing how they remembered a new task.  He trained them to withdraw their gills whenever they were touched, and he was able to observe with a microscope how the neurons changed.  The more the relationship was enforced, the links between the neurons grew stronger.

Discussion:
I thought that this was an interesting chapter.  I didn't know that the synapses grew stronger the more they are used, but it makes sense.  Also, I didn't know that there are specific areas in the brain that are used for memory.

Book Reading #16: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 4: In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing

Summary:
This chapter is about an experiment done by 2 psychologists, John Darley, and Bibb Latane.  They got their idea for the experiment from a murder in NY.  It was not the murder that actually caught their attention though, it was the fact that there were 38 witnesses, the murder happened over a 35 minute period, and none of the witnesses called the police or even went outside their apartment to help.  Darley and Latane's experiment used a faked seizure to test the subjects reactions.  The subject was placed in a room with a microphone, and told they would talk for 2 minutes about life in college, then the next person in a different room would talk, and they would listen, with a group of talkers taking turns.  Actually, all of the voices were prerecorded.  One of the recordings had the voice act like it was having a seizure, and Darley and Latane recorded the results.

Discussion:
I thought that this was a very sad story about the murder in NY.  However, I have seen their conclusions often.  It reminds me of a TV show, Doctor Who.  He travels around in a blue police box, and when asked why no one notices it, he said that if you put something that is odd in plain view, people don't want to be a part of it.  I think that this relates to the diffusion of responsibility because they think that if it was bad, someone else will deal with it.

Book Reading #10: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 2: Obscura

Summary:
This chapter is about Stanley Milgram and his shock experiment.  In the experiment, there is a teacher and a learner.  The teacher reads a set of words, and the learner must repeat them, otherwise they receive a shock from the teacher.  The experiment was actually about obedience and how people follow what they are told.

Discussion:
I think that this experiment could be seen as horrible.  It was interesting, and scary that 65% of the teachers did not stop the shocks.  I don't know how I would react in a similar situation, but now that I have read about this experiment, I think that I would stop sooner.

Book Reading #7: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 1: Opening Skinner's Box

Summary:
This chapter is about B. F. Skinner, and his experiments.  Skinners first experiment included rats in a box with levers.  He studied their behavior, and how it changed by when they pushed a lever, they got food.  He also tried altering the schedule of food reward, and discovered that when using a fixed-ratio schedule, the rat quickly learned how many times to press the lever before getting food.

Discussion:
I thought that this was interesting.  I was in a management class, and we discussed different schedules for training individuals.  I noticed that all of the ones we covered in that class were ones that Skinner tested on his rats.

Full Blog: The Design of Everyday Things

Title:
The Design of Everyday Things

Reference Information

Title: Design of Everyday Things

Author: Donald Norman

Summary:

This book is about how devices are designed, and how they should be designed.  Norman discusses how poorly designed things are today, and some key points to incorporate when creating a well designed product.  One of them is to keep things simple.  The more complex something is, the harder it is to learn it, and the less universal it is.  What may be obvious to some users, is not even though of by other users.  Another key idea is to provide feedback to the users.  If there is no feedback, then the user doesn't know if what they are doing is correct or not.  These ideas are included with others like keeping controls visible to produce the concept of a well designed product.  The designer needs to keep in mind that all users are different when designing a product as well.

Discussion:

Towards the beginning of the book, I was interested, but I soon felt like i was reading the same thing over and over.  I usually don't worry about the end design when I am creating new software, but I think that this book has shown me some new ideas.  Most importantly that I need to think more about the end user rather than just developing code.

Book Reading #21: The Design of Everyday Things

Title:
User-Centered Design

Summary:
This chapter is about how to design a product for the user.  One of the key principles is to keep the design simple so the user can understand.  Also, let them keep some control, don't automate everything.  Finally, design for errors.  One way to do this is to standardize things.

Discussion:
Well, this can be one of the hardest things to do.  Especially making everything simple, and designing for errors.  I read a quote online stating that a Computer Programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.  I think that this quote applies to the design problems of errors.  Interestingly enough, I actually saw someone go the wrong way down a one-way street, which made me realize that if there is an error that can be made, there is a user who will make it.

Book Reading #18: The Design of Everyday Things

Title: The Design Challenge

Summary:
This chapter is about the design of products, and how the designs evolve.  This happens between the old model and the next model.  One of the challenges is that the next model is already in the design process before the prior model is even released.  The chapter discusses the evolution of design of the typewriter and keyboard.  Also the chapter discusses how designers think of themselves as typical users even though they are not.

Discussion:
The design process and evolution is a very important one.  A product may be amazing, but if it is not designed in a way that average people can use it, then it will not be successful.  The different keyboard layouts were interesting.  I thought typing was difficult on a qwerty keyboard, but when I saw the Dvorak keyboard, I was astonished.

Book Reading #14: The Design of Everyday Things

Title:
Chapter 5: To Err is Human

Summary:
This chapter is about the different types of errors that a user can make when using a device.  There are 2 categories: a slip and a mistake.  Slips are errors that are caused from automatic behavior, and are often attributed to a lack of attention.  Mistakes are caused by cautious deliberation.  We don't know what to do exactly, so we jump to conclusions that can be incorrect.  The rest of the chapter discusses the different types of slips and mistakes, how they can be detected, and avoided.

Discussion:
Errors are everywhere.  I think that the most common are slips, because I feel that I have made more of them than mistakes, but I may be wrong.  I could just be noticing slips because when I make mistakes, I attribute them to just learning something.

Book Reading #8: The Design of Everyday Things

Title:
Chapter 3: Knowledge in the Head and in the World

Summary:
This chapter is about the difference of knowing something and having your brain fill in the blanks.  For example, there was a study done on professional typists. They were given capital letters and asked to place them in the appropriate positions on a keyboard.  interestingly, many of them could not place them in the proper positions.  This shows how that a lot of knowledge is not completely known, people use their surroundings to fill in the gaps.

Discussion:
I liked this chapter.  I thought that the fact the typists were not able to place the characters in the right positions was funny. I also thought the different pennies was interesting.  When I looked at them, I was unable to tell which one was the real one.  I wonder how many Americans would be able to identify the correct penny.

Book Reading #5: The Design of Everyday Things

Title:
Chapter 2: The Psychology of Everyday Actions

Summary:
This chapter is about how users perceive the causes of certain actions and where the blame for problems is.  Many users think that if something goes wrong with a device, then they messed something up, and the blame is only theirs.  However, this is not true.  Often the design of the device does not match up to the mental model of most users, which makes certain actions confusing for them.

Discussion:
This chapter reminds me of when people don't know how to use programs on their computer.  Often it is something that is obvious when known how to do it, but people blame themselves for not knowing how to do it. I also thought it was interesting the differences of naive versus real physics that he mentioned.

Book Reading #29: Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Summary:
This chapter discusses Elizabeth Loftus and her experiments with memory.  Her experiments are about how easy it is to plant a suggested memory into someones head, and have that form into a believed memory for that person.  Her one of her initial experiments consisted of 24 students who went home and implanted false memories in their sibling that they had been lost in a mall when they were younger.  When the siblings came into the lab later, 25 percent of them elaborated in detail of the time that they got lost in the mall, but never actually happened.

Discussion:
I thought that this was an interesting chapter.  As I read it, I thought about some of my memories, and realized that I had memories of things only after I heard the story fomr my family.  I feel bad for Loftus for all of the anger that was focused on her.  Unfortunately, it seems that often the important research and ideas get the most ridicule.