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

In the Introduction, author Lauren Slater explains the origins of her lifelong fascination with the field of psychology. Blending scholarly research with personal anecdote, Slater sets the tone for the rest of the narrative. She gives an overview of the larger themes of the book, which is to explore these philosophical questions: “What makes us human? Are we truly the authors of our own lives? What does it mean to be moral?” (3). These questions underlie the psychological experiments profiled in the book.

Slater opens with a personal anecdote about her earliest memory of being drawn to psychology: “I did my first psychological experiment when I was fourteen years old” (1). Upon finding a family of racoons living in the walls of her family’s Maine vacation house, Slater captured one of the newborns for a pet: “I stuck my hand in the crumbling plaster and pulled out a squalling baby, still milk-smeared, its eyes closed and its tiny paws pedaling in the air” (1). Recreating the experiment by Konrad Lorenz with his “imprinted ducklings,” in which the ducklings were trained to respond to Lorenz as though he was their parent, Slater made sure that she was the very first thing that the newborn raccoon saw when it opened its eyes: “It worked.