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Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century By Lauren Slater ( W. W. Norton & Company )
Release Date: 2005-02
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List Price: $14.95
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Product Description
"A vivid, insightful account....Told with wit and warmth."—Kirkus Reviews Through ten examples of ingenious experiments by some of psychology's most innovative thinkers, Lauren Slater traces the evolution of the century's most pressing concerns—free will, authoritarianism, conformity, morality. Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, she takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.
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 Don't forget the grain of salt...
I have to say, I was thrilled to begin this book. I devoured the first few chapters, excited that finally I could humanize and flesh out some incredible experiments. It's a great idea, taking ten amazing and groundbreaking psychological studies and putting a human face on them. And to her credit, she made an excellent decision for these ten, covering a wide spectrum of areas.
Unfortunately, that's where my praise ends. After the first few chapters, I began to find her writing style suffocating. While I love artistic flair, a creative licence has its limits in a text like this. Even worse, her continual writing about her own life began to take over the book. Granted, I understand that having your first child is a big event in your life- it's not a big event in mine. I began to ask the one question that this topic does not deserve- who cares? Your kid likes Band-Aids. Thrilling. While there were moments where her personal stories felt relevant (a paragraph or two about using behavioral modification to help an infant sleep at night, for example), more often than not, it felt intrusive.
I also had some ethical concerns with how she treated some of the psychologists. I found that while the male researchers are portrayed as tortured, brilliant scientists (which is something that in itself, gives pause) Elizabeth Loftus, I feel, did not receive the same consideration. While her male counterparts had at least some reverence, Loftus was portrayed as a scatterbrained eccentric. Her subject, the reliability of memory, is one that is extremely controversial, but no more so than any of the earlier studies. Slater focuses mostly on memory and sexual abuse cases, she does so in only the scantest of terms. She does not mention the McMartin pre-school trial, the Jane Doe case which Loftus is involved in, or the rate of false confessions, portraying the situation as somewhat few and far between.
Another specific point of contention was the situation of the Audrey Santo case, which, even after reading the chapter, felt completely out of place. (A 3 year old girl almost drowned in a pool and until her death in 2007 was paraded around by her mother as an example of God's intervention.) In a situation rife with extensive ethical qualms, Slater overlooks all of them, from the extensive Audrey memorabilia (from magnets to videos to mousepads) that is sold by the family, to the fact that the 'miracle oil' that Slater witnesses was tested in 1998 by the Washington Post and found it to be part soybean oil, part chicken fat. But instead of seeing the situation for what it was - unfortunate at best, exploitive at worst - Slater uses it to be moved, making both a religious digretion and everyone else uncomfortable. It's not hard to find holes in her own research, but for me it was this section where the book really began to fall apart in terms of credibility, a point that several other people have commented on.
What it comes down to was that the book, while at times interesting, was poorly researched and written for and by Lauren Slater. It's unfortunate that a topic which deserves so much received so little. I'll give it two stars for what it tried to do, but it simply is not worth a read for anything more than a cursory interest in the studies.
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 A good read for everyone ( jubilee100 )
As a junior student of psychology, I read a lot of technical literature. I found this book to be a "fun" read, as it was less technical and more entertaining. The author injects her own perspective on each of the scientist's personality and motives, which at first bothered me, but ultimately made the reading more "human." You just have be aware that this is her own opinion. Herself being a psychologist, I think she was doing what she does naturally, analyzing the subject... And trying to make the book more interesting.
The best thing about the book, is that although I read about the experiments and their outcomes in textbooks, I never knew anything about the researcher himself/herself. The book filled in a lot of blanks as to the background and motives, as well as the history behind those textbook citations.
The only thing I didn't like was the way the book was printed. It seems as if the person who did the electronic manuscript for print forgot to add two spaces before the next sentence, so it seemed they all ran into each other! It drove me bonkers!
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Provocative and Deeply Unhinged ( houlahan4 )
Slater kept me reading. She is clearly a master personal essayist, and a first-class nut of the intellectual/neurotic variety.
I am not a psychologist, but had some familiarity with most of the experiments she recounts, and had read the original work for several (Millgram, Skinner, Harlow). The most distressing insight of this book is in the final pages, where Slater claims that practicing therapists not only do not use the insights provided by the experimentalists, they are unfamiliar with much of it. Did these folks not attend A College Of Their Choice?
Ironically, Slater misses the point profoundly in her title chapter. While Skinner's personality (or lack thereof) and radical behaviorist ideology was behind the persistent cartoonish rumors about the way he raised his own child, and her alleged bad end, *that is not the point of serious criticism of Skinner's work,* and never has been.
Stories of the baby in the box are a distraction from the essential critique of radical behaviorism as lacking in explanatory power, non-predictive, inadequate, morally bankrupt -- or whatever other angle thoughtful psychologists and philosophers have come at it. Debunking the silly stuff is more misdirection. What about the man's actual experiments, what they showed and failed to show, and his claims about them?
Subsequent chapters are far more interesting and relevant, but remain highly personal as Slater injects herself into the narrative and frequently bathes in the personal details of the experimenters themselves.
In the end, I still cannot decide whether *Opening Skinner's Box* is a good book, true, fair, accurate. But I can't deny that it is a great *read,* and that it has kept my own wheels turning. It is meant to provoke, and that it does.
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Personalizing Psychology ( bettema )
This book provided insights into what was on the minds of those who both designed these experiments and those who participated in them. Karen Slater writes from a wealth of experience and a fresh outlook on the development of psychology and those who participated it.
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Opening Skinner's Box
Very well written. A page turner. Great experiments disected to be relevant for everyday experiences. Makes one think about today's society in a different light and rethink one's belief system.
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