Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“We most fully integrate that which is told as tale. My hope is that some of these experiments will be more fully taken in by readers now that they have been translated into narrative form.”

Slater seeks to bring psychology to a wider audience, outside of the scholarly community. To this end, she translates the scientific research into story, re-telling the tales surrounding psychological experiments using narrative. Recasting psychological experiment as “story” is also an attempt to capture another kind of truth that is lost in what Slater views as one-dimensional scientific accounts.

“Poised between the first world war and a future one soon to come, Skinner may have sensed—although he would reject such a flimsy word—the need for action, for interventions and results that could be bronzed, each one, like bullets. He therefore avoided anything ‘soft.’”

When B.F. Skinner entered the field of psychology in the early 1930s, psychology was perceived as a “soft” science, devoid of numbers and metrics to quantify its findings. Slater, in this passage, contextualizes Skinner’s work in a broader scope of the field, and the world at large. Skinner, with his boxes and hard notions about conditioning, sought to study concrete subjects and make concrete findings.

“We sit there for a minute, he down there, I appear. I think I hear that damn dog in the hall, scratching. I’m afraid to go back out there, but I no longer want to be in here. I am caged by contingencies, and so I sit very still.”

Slater conducts first-person research in the book. This method not only gives Slater unique insight on her subjects, but it also leads to some cinematic moments in the narrative. For example, in this scene, Slater interviews Jerome Kagan, one of B.F. Skinner’s biggest detractors. To demonstrate that we are not bound by our mechanical biological impulses, as B.F. Skinner suggests, Kagan leaps underneath his desk at random, “proving” that the only thing that compelled him to do that was free will.