Opening Skinner's Box: ten psych experiments that remade the world
Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century is one of those popular science books that leaves you feeling a lot smarter after you finish it. Specifically, it makes you feel smart enough to feel kind of dumb and humble -- to feel like your received wisdom about the world and your place in it needs to be rethought.
Slater traces the history, personalities and science of ten momentous psychology experiments, from the infamous Stanford obedience experiment to experiments on the construction of false memories, the experimental use of lobotomy, experiments on addiction, compassion and indifference. You've probably heard of many of these experiments -- for example, Elizabeth Loftus's notorious "Lost in the Mall" experiments on false memory -- but if you're like me, you only retained a cursory impression of the experiment and its conclusion. Here, Slater fills in the whole story: the experimenter's personal history, the social upheaval arising from the conclusions drawn, the detractors' arguments. Where possible, Slater interviews the actual experimenter -- when that can't be done, she tracks down experimental subjects, mentors, spouses, anyone who can provide the context.
The book opens with Slater's quest to find Deborah Skinner, BF Skinner's daughter whom "everyone knows" was raised in a sterile, experimental transparent box, and grew up to be a mad broken person, a memorial to her father's terrible hubris. What she discovers is Skinner's descendants, living happy and well (including the supposedly deceased Deborah), and the truth about the Skinner box: it was designed to maximize personal attention from parents, to maximize experimental play by the baby, to minimize harm and punishment arising from a baby's first clumsy gropings. A psychiatrist herself, Slater turns to Skinner's reviled works on political theory -- the supposedly reductionist, cryptofascist tracts that show how a population can be trained into docility -- and discovers in them a humanist streak that matches well with the most progressive ideas of today.
From here, Slater moves on to Milgram's obedience experiments, uncovering the identity of one of the subjects in the experiment as well as Milgram's former lab assistants, and unpicks the conclusions of the experiment, and discovers the untold story of the experiment: the subjects, scarred by the simulated execution to which they'd been a party, spent the rest of their lives thinking for themselves, refusing to go along to get along.
From there, Slater goes on to look at Rosenhan's psychiatric diagnosis experiment (normal people go to a mental ward, complaining of a voice saying "thud" and are diagnosed as insane, medicated, and finally released "in remission") -- and then re-enacts it, going to many emergency rooms complaining of the same symptoms, to see what happens (she's given antipsychotics, but not held). This is a springboard to discuss Slater's own mental health history (she was institutionalized as a teen), and the ways that diagnosing mental illness have become more concrete and less impressionistic in response to Rosenhan's research.
And on: research into how and why we freeze in emergencies, into how bystanders could allow Kitty Genovese to be brutally murdered while they watched from their apartment windows, on Festinger's extraordinarily cruel experiments on separating monkeys from their mothers and the compassionate results that he came up with, on Bruce Alexander's shocking conclusions on the biological basis for addiction, and then onto the use of drugs and surgery to alter the brain.
Shot through this is Slater's life story, the conflicts with her family, and her compassion for the researchers, even the ones who are unequivocal monsters. Her style is lush, bordering on florid, filled with poesy and metaphor, and though it sometimes gets in the way, it mostly does its job and makes every detail vivid and memorable, every puzzle fascinating and frustrating.
This is a great book, about great things, many of them done by bad people. The ten experiments that Slater investigates have shaped the world we live in, informing our theories of the mind, our penal system, government, education, relationships, employment -- all of it. I love secret histories, and this one is a doozy.
Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (US)
Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (UK)
Update: After its initial publication in 2004, this book generated a lot of controversy; this Salon article does a great job of summing up both sides of the debate (Thanks, Goldfroggy!)
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Is this a new edition? The first google result for Deborah Skinner is an article detailing her horrified reaction to this book in 2004.
http://www.skeptically.org/skinner/id6.html
For those of us who are boycotting Amazon.com due to their long-term patterns of censorship of books on lesbian, gay, and sexuality issues, alternative links to books on Powells.com would be appreciated.
The story of Kitty Genovese is more parable than fact.
Glaurung, [citation needed]
Ought to check snopes before posting this review of Slater's book.
http://www.snopes.com/science/skinner.asp
Isn't it "Milgram", not "Milgrim" ?
Great review, book looks great.
Looks like a good read - and hopefully as good an analysis of Skinner as Erich Fromm provided in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
I think that those people who can't stop beating the dead horse of "AmazonFail" can come up with their own links to whomever.
And, Goldfroggy, I can't see in the article, that you linked to, any evidence that Deborah Skinner actually read the book--she based her Guardian article on a review in another paper.
Well, you've sold me. This sounds fascinating. I still remember reading about the Milgram obedience to authority experiments for the first time, when I was in 6th grade. It blew my little 11-year-old mind.
Or you could just get out of your chair and make a trip to your local independent book seller and order it there.
you know...as long as there's "idealism" in the mix.
a "nut" on the cover?
sheesh.
I think I already read the chapter on false memories, but I guess I can't be sure.
I agree with the commenters suggesting those who prefer not to use Amazon could either look elsewhere themsleves or even (gasp!) visit their local brick-and-mortar bookseller.
And while I'm not defending Amazon here, it was my understanding that after the recent LGBT book-censorship fiasco, they had promptly announced it was a technical glitch and that they were correcting it.
Do we have reason to disbelieve their claim? Has there actually been a pattern of these sorts of discriminatory practices on their part previously?
I have no interest in supporting Amazon with my business if this has been a repeated issue for them, but if it has I wasn't aware of it.
Regardless, the book looks fascinating. Thanks to CD for pointing it out to us.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity changed my life forever. (Well, OK, that and a couple of microdots and a long walk on the beach watching the sun rise over the North Atlantic...) I also located the source of my nagging doubts over what are now apparently mainstream theories of psychology - supernaturalist crap of the sort that Freud and Jung kicked off a 50-100 years ago. And so on and so forth.
Oh, apparently a lot of people written about in this book had problems with it - this is probably the fairest article on it -
http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2004/05/21/slater/index.html
Interesting snippet (not representative, the article wavers on Slater):
And in response to Spitzer's demand that Slater more fully document her attempt to repeat Rosenhan's study, Slater called in the big guns -- her lawyer. In a letter to Spitzer, Slater's attorney not only declined to provide any details of Slater's visits to psych hospitals, he also threatened Spitzer with fines of $150,000 for distributing text of the book on the Internet.
This book looks like fun. Although @#3, I agree about Kitty Genovese, probably more an urban legend. I heard a really great podcast about that from NPR: http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2009/03/27/segments/127346
It's worth a listen.
Correction: Festinger was not the monkey researcher that went so morally haywire; it was Harlow.
I have much love for Lauren Slater, and I'm thrilled to see her on BB. Her "memoir" Lying is also amazing.
Is this book supposed to be fictional? If so, the description is very misleading. I'm not sure about all of the experiments, but the "Skinner Box" one is completely untrue. Deborah Skinner did not sure her father or grow up to be crazy. Look it up on Snopes.com
using copyright law to silence her critics? Not good.
No mention of how much urban legend surrounds the Kitty Genovese story? Not good.
And apparently she's adamant that humans have no free will, just like Skinner, which I think is pointless.
Think I'll pass.
KristinStokes, putting quotes around "everybody knows" was Cory's way of saying that Deborah Skinner did not grow up crazy. In fact he says she was "living happy and well."
I was going to say this sounded interesting, but much less so hearing about the controversy.
Think I'll be passing..
Dear Glaurung_Quena @#2 and Anonymous @#13,
I would visit my local, independent, B&M bookstore but it is closing its doors for the last time on Saturday and would not have time to order it for me.
Vertigo, you will be missed. Goodbye and thanks for all the . . .
I am sorry. I meant to address Chunkymonkeybrain @ #10 not Glaurung.
Looks like a good book. I recognise most of the experiments.