Full blog: Opening Skinners Box



Summary

This book, by Lauren Slater, details ten of some of the most important psychological experiments of this past century that have caused us to rethink about how the human mind and human behavior works. She narrates the stories of the researchers in question and their work. The researchers she describes are:

• B. F. Skinner: Skinner experimented with rats and conditioning, and found that the mind is extremely receptive to rewards, which strengthen conditioning, and that the mind is not as receptive to punishment.
• Stanley Milgram: Milgram designed an experiment where the participant was told to shock another participant up until the point where the shock would be "lethal", and found that 65% of participants would continue administering shocks to the other participant despite their better judgement. His experiments served to illustrate human's obedience to authority.
• David Rosenhan: Rosenhan and some helpers admitted themselves into mental hospitals saying that they were hearing a voice that said "thud". They found that even though they were perfectly sane, and said so after being admitted, they still would be kept in the hospital for a long time, and psychologists would swear that they were psychotic. This resulted in the questionning on psychiatric diagnosis' validity .
• John Darley and Bibb Latane: Darley and Latane, through their experiments, found that when a crisis happened and someone needed help, if a bystander perceived there were lots of other people around, would not help. These people would wait a long time, and would never truly decide on whether to help or not. But, when they thought they were the only person there to help, they would feel compelled to help.  
• Leon Festinger: Festinger studied the way that people changed their ideas and beliefs based on their actions, primarily by studying the way that cult members reacted whenever the "day of judgement" and the end of the world did not come as they had predicted.
• Harry Harlow: Harlow studied how infant monkeys came to be attached to a fake "mother" that had soft cloths on it, versus a mother that was hard and metal but provided food. He found that love does not have to do with providing resources and food.
• Bruce Alexander: In order to study the nature of addiction, Alexander placed some rats in a nice, clean environment, and others in a confined environment, and gave each of the rats water laced with morphine, and some regular water. He found that the rats in the bad conditions liked the morphine, while the rats with the nice environment didn't like the morphine, suggesting that addiction is not a physical dependency but instead a result one's environment.
• Elizabeth Loftus: Loftus showed that memories of our past quickly disintegrate and that we can never trust them. She helped participants in her experiments "remember" fake memories of being lost in the mall, and the participants were almost always sure that they had remembered this fake memory.
• Eric Kandel: Kandel showed that memory is strengthened by increasing the strength of connections between neurons, and that a specific substance called CREB helps that strengthening.
• Antonio Moniz: Moniz pioneered the practice of brain surgery, specifically the lobotomy, in order to treat patients that had depression or psychosis. A lot of his techniques are still used today.

Discussion

I really appreciate the author's personal touch and perspective on all of these experiments. It made reading the book that much more interesting. Usually, these types of works are presented in a more formal, detailed, scientific, and boring fashion. Slater makes the experiments easy to understand for the average person.
I also liked that she tried some of the experiments on her own. I don't know if I would have the guts to perform some of the experiments myself like admitting myself in a mental institution and seeing if I would be diagnosed correctly.