Opening Skinner's Box

Book: Opening Skinner's Box

Author: Lauren Slater

Comments: Jill

Summary:

This book discussed the top psychological experiments that have shaped the way we view things today. Each chapter discussed a new experiment.

• B. F. Skinner: Skinner's experiment dealt with rats who were conditioned to do things for rewards. He found that the mind does well when given rewards, and punishments only hinder the conditioning. Maybe this could be linked to the way children learn from their parents?
• Stanley Milgram: Milgram designed an experiment where a "teacher" was told to shock the other person answering questions if they got a question wrong. The volts went from a small shock up until the point where the shock was lethal. There were 65% of participants who used the shock level up to the lethal voltage during the experiment. This experiment showed that people are obedient to authority and to just what extent some people could be obedient.
• David Rosenhan: Rosenhan along with a few friends got themselves admitted into mental hospitals by telling them that they were hearing a voice that said "thud". Even though each participant was actually sane they were admitted anyway and psychologists really thought that they were insane. This experiment caused a lack of trust in psychology and today there it is more difficult to get admitted to a mental hospital but just as easy to get prescribed drugs.
• John Darley and Bibb Latane: Participants were in rooms of different amounts of people and were shown recordings of someone having a seizure. To them it was an actual person having a seizure and not a recording but since no one else in the room was reacting most of the people who saw the recording also didn't react. This experiment showed that if no one else in a group reacted to the person having a seizure it would take someone much longer to react than it would if they thought they were alone and the only person to possibly help the person having a seizure.
• Leon Festinger: This chapter dealt with cognitive dissonance. These studies found that people will change their beliefs in order to not sound crazy.
• Harry Harlow: Harlow did a study on infant monkeys and how they could become attached to a fake "mother" that was soft, versus a "mother" that was hard but gave them food. The babies preferred the soft "mother" but of course when they needed to eat they would go to the metal one. In the end he concluded that touch was important to a babies development.
• Bruce Alexander with Robert Coambs and Patricia Hadaway: This experiment dealt with addiction and the test subjects were rats. Alexander placed some rats in a nice, clean environment, and then palced other in a solitary, confined environment. The rats were then give clean water and water laced with morphine in both environments. They found that the rats in the confined conditions drank the water with the morphine, while the rats with the nice environment drank the regular water. This experiment suggest that drug addiction isn't a "natural affinity" to drugs but possibly a situational based addiction.
• Elizabeth Loftus: This experiment dealt with false memories. The participants started to remember things that never really happened to them. They were reciting false memories such as being lost in the mall when they were a kid and each participant was certain that these memories actually happened. Loftus used her findings to keep people from being wrongly convicted of sexual abuse crimes that weren't brought up until years later of the supposed crimes being committed.
• Eric Kandel: Kandel did experiments on sea slugs in order to show that memory is strengthened by increasing the strength of connections between neurons. By using the neurons from a sea slugs head in order to see process of memory creation. This helped him create memory-enhancing drugs later on.
• Antonio Moniz: Moniz was the first person to perform a lobotomy on patients who were depressed or had other mental disorders in order to cure them of the disorder. Now we have medicine that does this, but because of his experiments we were able to understand what parts of the brain the drugs should focus on.

Discussion:.

I thought all of these experiments were interesting and it was kind of neat to see where we get our current thinking about certain things from. Some of these experiments seem to be ignored though when people are learning about certain disorders, and it is odd to think that people aren't looking into some of these experiments more to find more humane ways to prove the results. Slater herself is rather interesting and it wouldn't surprise me if there was actually something wrong with her....she at least wrote a good book?