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

Born in 1904, B.F. Skinner was America’s leading neo-behavioralist, known for his experiments on rats to demonstrate environmental reward and punishment’s effect on behavior. At detailed in Chapter 1, Skinner’s reputation is fraught: “Say the name Skinner to twenty college-educated people and most will respond with an adjective like ‘evil.’ This I know to be true, as I’ve done it as an experiment” (7). He was named the most influential living psychologist by Time Magazine in 1971, but even so, the negative lore surrounding his work is extensive:

The story goes that Skinner desired nothing more than to shape—and shape is the operative word here—the behavior of people subjected to gears and boxes and buttons, whatever humanity he touched turning to bone (7).

In Slater’s own investigation, however, she debunks the mythology surrounding Skinner. She reads his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which essentially argues that environment will shape human behavior, and so our government should be cognizant of that fact. Between this, and talking to Skinner’s daughter, Julie, Slater reveals a much more humane Skinner, one who does not have frightening objectives about engineering human behavior.

The subject of Chapter 2, Stanley Milgram is the Yale researcher who conducted an infamous study on obedience and authority. Slater writes that Milgram was a “lyricist at heart” who “wrote librettos in children’s stories, quoted Keats and Rilke” (40). With this knowledge, Slater sees a kind of artistry to the experiment that he designed:

In fact, Milgram did have a keen sense of comedy, and it maybe he more than any other scientist, who has shown us how small the space between art and experiment, between humor and heartlessness, between work and play (42).

David Rosenhan, author of the 1973 article “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” was a Stanford psychologist who studied diagnostic criteria for insanity. In Chapter 3, Slater describes Rosenhan, around the time he designed his most noteworthy experiment, as follows: “Rosenhan was a bald boxy man in his thirties when all this happened. He was known as an entertainer, holding at his house seders for as many as fifty people” (71). Later in life, Rosenhan would succumb to a mysterious illness, which involved a series of strokes that ultimately left him completely paralyzed and incapable of communicating: “Doctors, confused, could not determine exactly what was ailing this renegade researcher, one who devoted the better part of his career to the dismantling of psychiatric diagnosis” (64).

John Darley of New York University and Bibb Latané of Columbia University joined forces to study what they termed “human helping behavior,” which Slater profiles in Chapter 4. When Kitty Genovese was murdered in Queens in 1964, Darley and Latané sought to understand “the bystander effect,” or why none of the many onlookers who witnessed the brutal murder went to aid her:

Darley and Latané were not happy with these explanations, in part because, like Milgram, they were experimental social psychologist who believed less in the power of personality than in the power of situation, and in part because the explanations defied intuitive sense (98).

Born on May 8, 1919, Leon Festinger was a psychologist at the University of Minnesota who founded the concept of “cognitive dissonance,” which Slater explores in Chapter 5. Of Festinger, Slater writes: “It seems fitting that a man like Festinger would discover cognitive dissonance. Festinger had a grumpy manner, and wherever he went, he grated” (116). In 1954, Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult to see how they would react when the world did not end, as they predicted. Festinger noted that the cult members would need to reconcile their beliefs, which were in direct contradiction of reality. Slater also compares Festinger to existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness, No Exit): “Festinger did not have happy view of human nature. He smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels a day and died of liver cancer at age sixty-nine […] Man, thought Festinger, was not a rational being, but a rationalizing being” (118). 

Harry Harlow was a researcher with the National Institute of Health who conducted experiments on the psychology behind emotional attachment. Slater details his work in Chapter 6. He is controversial due to the fact that many view his experiments as sadistically cruel to animals; also, he had an alcohol abuse problem. Like many of the psychologists profiled in Opening Skinner’s Box, Harlow was a polarizing figure: “He was prickly, impolite, a man who is remembered by some with real distaste and by others with fondness” (132). Toward the end of his life, Harlow again suffered severe depression and underwent experimental electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic. 

The subject of Chapter 7, Bruce Alexander is a Vancouver-based radical psychologist who studied the nature of addiction. In the late 1970s, he wanted to test the cultural and social basis of addiction, and so he constructed an elaborate “rat park” that would provide an ideal social setting for rats. If addiction thrived in this setting, then that would prove the biological basis of addiction; however, the rats in Alexander’s “rat park” avoided addictive substances, thus reinforcing Alexander’s idea that addiction was largely a social phenomenon. Slater describes Alexander as follows: “He speaks in a soft voice tinged with a bit of British, I think, but there is something compulsive in his talk, his eyes wide and sort of startled behind their oval glasses, his folded hands tightening to prove a point” (159). 

Elizabeth Loftus was a University of Washington psychologist who studied human memory—specifically, she espoused the controversial idea that human memory could be manipulated and altered. Discussed in Chapter 8, Slater describes her as “utterly focused, constantly fueled” (191). Slater provides her personal interpretation of Loftus’s personality and details why she doubts some of Loftus’s findings on the malleable nature of memory:

It’s the fact that when all is said and done, Loftus does not seem quite in control. She does not appear to be steering her ship. She blurts out comments, has targets from a rifle practice affixed to her office wall; but at the same time she does brilliant memory experiments while comparing herself to Schindler (200).

Slater discusses Eric Kandel, an psychologist affiliated with Columbia University, in Chapter 9. Kandel conducted research on sea slugs to determine the biological basis of memory. Kandel was born in Vienna in 1929:

His father owned a toy store, and so, on the one hand, he had access to a childhood full of color. But then, in 1938, Hitler’s army marched in. Kandel recalls Kristallnacht, all that glass, and later the toothbrushes the Jews were forced to use to scrub the street (210).

Slater speculates that living through the Holocaust profoundly influenced Kandel’s work on memory.