Chapter 7: Rat Park
Summary
This chapter talks about the experiments that are to this day practiced on rats to determine addiction to drugs. In particular, it describes the experiment done by Bruce Alexander, Robert Coambs, and Patricia Hadaway. They did not believe that the classic experiments done to the animals revealed anything about drug addiction. Instead, they thought classical experiments revealed that the environment to which the animals were subjected to affected the addiction. In order to test their hypothesis, they built a rat park in which rats had the freedom of moving around instead of being in a box. Their hypothesis was right, the rats that were placed in the park did not show any signs of addiction and instead rejected the drug.
Discussion
It is interesting when someone believes to have found a flawed experiment, creates a new experiment and proves their hypothesis right. This same thing happened to these scientists, as they did not believe that animals were actually needing to come back and get more of a certain drug. By creating a whole new environment where walls were painted with trees and other things, they were able to prove that the environment itself was the factor for the animals to come back for the drugs.
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