Opening Skinner’s Box Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater
Opening Skinner’s Box Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century by Lauren Slater
Opening Skinners box by Lauren Slater as a psychologist herself covers 10 great psychological experiences of the twentieth century to bring them to life by understanding how they were thought up, how they were received by other psychologists and what effects they had on the participants.
For more then a century, psychologists have desperately sought to have their disciplines accepted. Psychology requires some degree of trickery in the experimental set-up. But how much insight do we then gain into how people will behave outside the laboratory? And if the experimental method we wish to use is sufficiently destructive to prevent us using it on humans, what do we learn from studying on animals? A description of psychology experiments has drawn many criticisms. These and other details where looked at in chapter 1, where Slater goes back in time and looks at B.F. Skinner famous experiment called “the rat race”. Skinner performed an experiment on rats using food levers and other instruments to condition and shape their behavior, to see if we organisms are easily programmed to obedience or we are all at our free will. Skinner believed through his experiments that we would obey the rules like computers.
Slater came across as an eccentric person who had a great courage and passion for psychology to try and solve the most controversial issues. Her love for psychology dates to her very early age where she always had a curiosity to search for answers in the open ended theories.
As part of Slater story of Stanley Milgrams famous obedience experiments, where a large proportion of people where shown to be enable to resist instructors to deliver what they thought to be lethal electric shocks to their fellow men.
Another engaging chapters in the Skinners box was the one in 1972 experiment of David Rosenhan, who recruited several participants to visit psychiatric emergency rooms with a single complaint: “I am hearing a voice. It is saying, Thud.” They were to present no other remarkable symptoms or behaviour. Rosenhans participants were allegedly all admitted to inpatient units and diagnosed as mentally ill. Celebrants of Rosenhans study have a certain self-righteous criticism on psychiatry as a disciplinable to differentiate between illness and health, between insanity and sanity. Slater joins the rank and repeats a version of Rosenhans study herself, in which she reports to various emergency rooms with the same single complaint. Slater on the other hand was treated with kindness and respect, after a consultation with a psychiatrist, she was released, but the downside of it was only after 12 minutes of doctors time she was given a prescriptions for anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs.
Psychiatry and psychiatrists, by necessity, continue to refine diagnosis and treatment. The fact that the system is flawed translates into continued effort to improve our tools, and the fact that the system can be fooled seems to be only a superficial satisfaction for those who wish to criticize the field. Psychiatry will continue to evolve, along with its imperfections as a clinical field. Evolution, after all, is a progress not to perfection but to improvement.
Take, for example, the work of John Darley and Bibb Latan, psychologists who devised a series of experiments to test why it is that people sometimes ignore other peoples calls for help, and why, at other times, we will leap to others comfort. Darley and Latans experiments were inspired by the gruesome murder and rape of Kitty Genovese, a crime that took place over a 35-minute period in the predawn hours of March 13, 1964, in a working-class section of Queens, New York. Thirty-eight people witnessed the murder and rape, and nobody