Full Blog - Opening Skinner's Box

Summary:

Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box book was very interesting. In every one of the chapter she describes the findings of important psychologists and analyzes the impact their findings have had in our daily lives. There are ten chapters in this book. I will try to give a short description of every chapter.

The first chapter describes B.F Skinner and his findings of how behavior is shaped by the environment. Slater talks about an example of she uses Skinner's principle of positive reinforcement in her personal life. The second chapter talks about Stanley Milgram and his studies of authority of obedience. Milgram conducted the fake shocking experiment and this chapter reveals that more 65% of the people in the experiment should apply the highest voltage. The third chapter describes David Rosenham's insane test in which along with seven other people fake being insane. Everyone in the group gets admitted into a mental institution and this chapters describes Rosenham's findings. The next chapter describes the study of diffusion of responsibility. This means that if an accident happens to an individual, the larger the present crowd the least responsible individuals feel to help the person involved in the accident. The following chapter describes Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. The sixth chapter describes Harlow's monkey experiments which proved monkeys preferred a soft cloth surrogate mother than a milk bearing one. The next chapter talks about experiments done to rat to prove addiction to certain drugs. In specific the experimenters in this chapter wanted to disproved that the classic addiction experiments could not prove anything about addiction, instead they only revealed that the environment of the experiment inferred addiction. Chapter eight explains Loftu's work related to people distorting past memories. The next chapter talks about the molecule CREB which disrupted long term memory. The last chapter talks about the initialization of lobotomy and its founding father Antonio Egas Moniz.

Discussion
I really enjoyed reading this book because it was an easy reading, yet I was able to learn many facts about psychological findings. It was interesting seeing scientists trying to disproved other findings, and being able to prove new contradicting findings. There were many chapters which involved unethical activities according to several class lectures. I personally had never read any material to psychology and it is an interesting field to study.