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.