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

Slater uses plot-driven storytelling as a way of deepening our understanding of the psychological experiments profiled in Opening Skinner’s Box. Through narrative, Slater is able to view the experiments in a unique way. As she moves away from a traditional science-based understanding, Slater unpacks the larger, philosophical truths at the core of each experiment. Taken as art, she views overarching philosophical meaning that is often overlooked by traditional scientific study.

Storytelling is instrumental to Slater’s understanding of psychology. She thinks of the psychological experiments in narrative terms, referring to their “plot” in the Introduction: “I was first hooked on Amelia and later hooked on the pure plot that structured almost all psychological experiments, intentional or not” (2). As Slater explains, the important elements of psychological experiments lost in scientific reports can be recaptured through storytelling:

It seemed sad that these insightful and dramatic stories were reduced to the flatness that characterizes most scientific reports, and had therefore utterly failed to capture what only real narrative can—theme, desire, plot, history—this is what we are (3).

Slater uses narrative-driven explanations of psychology to engage a larger audience in learning about this important research:

Our lives, after all, are not data points and means and modes; they are stories—absorbed, reconfigured, rewritten.