Microblogs for Open Skinner's Box

Chapter 1: Opening Skinner's Box

Summary
This chapter begins with a brief biography for B.F. Skinner before up until his rate experiments. This experiments were extensions of Pavlov's classical conditioning experiments, where he took a dog's natural reflex of salivating in response to food and associated it to a new stimulus: ringing a bell. In Skinner's experiment, he conditioned rats to press a lever to receive a food pellet. He ultimately found that his rats would press the level most under irregular intermittent reinforcement schedules. Slater makes connections to much of human behavior, such as gambling and politics. Slater goes on to describe how she suggested to her husband to "Skinnerize" their child by providing reducing the intervals in which they comfort their child when it cries at night. Slater ends the chapter describing her search for and visit to Deborah Skinner, B.F. Skinner's daughter, whom he "raised" in his invention, the air crib or baby box.

Discussion
I liked Slater's saying, "Thanks to Skinner, you know that rewards work far better in the establishment of behavior than punishment. This has huge implications politically, if our government could just absorb that." This was a nice extrapolation of Skinner's findings. When Slater spoke of Skinnerizing her child, it reminded me of the Ferber method for training babies to learn to sleep on their own without the help of their parents. I wasn't very familiar with Skinner's work before reading this chapter, apart from the purpose of his rat experiments, but I still found it curious and strange how people in his time misconstrued his air crib as cruel. Because in fact, she did not live inside the baby box for the entire two years; perhaps she only stayed in there while sleeping.

Chapter 2: Obscura

Summary
Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to determine whether people will blindly follow orders under certain  circumstances: through authority figures. Milgram was inspired to conduct this experiment by the events of the Nazi Holocaust. He invited volunteers, calling it a study of punishment on learning. Subjects were told to give increasingly lethal electric shocks to a man every time he answered a question incorrectly. Sixty-five percent of his subjects obeyed, continuing with the shocks to the end. The shocks were not real, and the man being shocked was merely hired to act as such. There was much controversy, with many other psychologists questioning the nature of his experiment and debating whether it had to do with obedience, trust or validity. Through some interviews with his subjects, Slater found that those who obeyed led slightly "worse" lives than those who defied; "the good are bad and the bad are good." Ultimately, it is decided that the experiment was most important because it taught its subjects about life and caused them to rethink their relationship with authority.

Discussion
I particularly enjoyed recounts by Joshua Chaffin and "Jacob Plumfield" (not his real name apparently). When it slowly donned on me that the experiment did not in fact make any conclusions of its own, but was actually helping some of its subjects to reevaluate their lives, I was very surprised yet pleased. I can only speculate on how I would have behaved during the experiment, and would like to have been through it to see for myself, and possibly see if it could have some profound change on my life in the long run.

Chapter 3: On Being Sane in Insane Places

Summary
This chapter explored David Rosenhan's experiment in 1972 to determine whether psychiatrists could correctly diagnose someone as insane, as opposed to blindly declaring someone as such because they have admitted themselves to a hospital. He did this by having multiple volunteers, or confederates, including himself, admit themselves to hospitals across the country claiming to be hearing a voice that says "thud". He himself was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, despite telling his doctor that the voice wasn't bothering him anymore. He noticed that some other patients could tell he was normal, whereas the doctors believed otherwise, until one day he was arbitrarily discharged. In the end, he sought to discredit psychiatry as a practice, a science and as a medical specialty. He noted how hospital staff treated patients with little regard. Since then, many changes and improvements have been made in psychiatry and its diagnostic system in response to Rosenhan's experiment. Slater attempted this experiment herself nine times, each time only to be sent on her way, (mis)labelled and given prescriptions for antipsychotics and antidepressants.

Discussion
Regardless of whether you think Rosenhan's experiment was ill-advised or flawed, I think it still caused doctors to take psychiatry more seriously as a medical field and revamp its diagnostic system, as Slater suggests. It was a very novel and important experiment, as I feel psychiatry is a real science, so I would expect it to have very high standards. I'm not sure, though, if I could have done that myself, being too fearful of being a patient in a mental hospital.

Chapter 4: In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing

Summary
This chapter describes the infamous crime in 1964 when Catherine (Kitty) Genovese was stabbed and raped by a Winston Moseley outside her apartment over the course of about thirty-five minutes, at around 3AM. During this period, thirty-eight neighbors, witnesses, nearby heard her screams but did nothing to help besides turning on their lights. Even when it over did someone call the police, and she was already dead by then; the other witnesses went back to bed. The nation was rather confused by why no one came to Genovese's aid, so two psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, conducted some experiments to find out. In their experiments, they replicated a similar situation as the murder, but with a seizure, and in another, with smoke coming through a vent. They found both of these that group size was important: the more witness there were in each experiment, it was less likely anyone would seek help; if there were up to maybe four people, any one person was likely to call for help. They called this the "diffusion of responsibility": with so many others around, people decided they "didn't want to get involved", valuing social etiquette over survival.

Darley and Latané eventually developed five stages of helping: 1), You, the potential help, must notice an event is occurring; 2) You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed; 3) You must assume the personal responsibility; 4) You must decided what action to take; 5) You must then take action. Videos of their seizure and smoke experiments and displaying these steps were shown to people, who were then twice as likely to help others than those who hadn't seen (been educated) by the videos.

Discussion
This was a very eye-opening chapter. I had read this last semester, and found myself with more courage to help others, to break social norms, to disregard the shame in making a fuss over nothing. But that helping behavior dissipated rather soon afterwards, lasting maybe only a week. Something like this really should be included in early education, just as Slater suggests.

Chapter 5: Quieting the Mind

Summary
In 1954, Marion Keech received a message from a higher power named Sananda that a great flood would come from the Atlantic Ocean on December 21 of that year. She and several others who formed a cult shared little with the media, only giving a warning. When December 21 came and the "prophecy" was no fulfilled, Marion and her cult eventually altered their beliefs, believing that Earth was spared. Leon Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, where people change their beliefs when confronted with contrasting evidence.   Festinger conducted a very simple experiment to demonstrate this: he paid some people twenty dollars to lie and other people only one dollar to lie. Those who received one dollar were far more likely to believe the lie they told than those paid twenty. Festinger quickly learned that the more paltry the reward for engaging in behavior inconsistent with one's beliefs, the more likely one is to alter their own beliefs instead; it's easier to align your beliefs with your actions, since those actions can't be taken back. Furthering this theory were American POWs taken by the Chinese during the Korean War. These soldiers were given a bit of rice or candy to write anti-America essays and many eventually converted to communism. This dissonance theory was quite the opposite of Skinner's reinforcement (and punishment) theory.

Slater completes the chapter with a story of a woman named Linda Santo, whose daughter, Audrey, drowned in the family pool at age 3 and was resuscitated with massive brain damage. Audrey's visitors who came with ailments seemed to be cured, except her mother Linda, who had breast cancer. Linda seemed to engage in a lot of rationalization and introspection, in large contrast to dissonance and consonance

Discussion
I believe this chapter could have very grand implications on society, as opposed to some of the previous chapters, which could affect society on smaller scales. I also have some understanding on why and how people seemingly "change their minds".

Chapter 6: Monkey Love

Summary
This chapter examines Harry Harlow's (born Harry Israel) experiments on the affect that touch has on love. In these experiments, Harlow separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and put them in cages with two surrogate mothers; one mother was a soft surrogate wrapped in terrycloth, but with no food, while the other was a wire mother with a single breast for milk. The baby monkeys became attached to the soft surrogates, and only approached the wire surrogate when hungry. He also eventually found that the baby monkeys will prefer the first face they see. Harlow saw this as a success at first, but eventually he noticed that the cloth-mothered monkeys are antisocial and some autistic. One of his students later found that motion, like rocking, is a third variable along with touch and facial features that help produce a normal primate. Slater then discusses the ethics behind these experiments.

Discussion
I thought this chapter was very interesting and I wonder how Harlow's findings have affected childcare and child-raising since his experiments. The experiments don't really apply to me presently, but their implications I will try to internalize for the future when they become important.

Chapter 7: Rat Park

Summary
In this chapter, Slater describes Bruce Alexander's experiments exploring addiction. In these experiments, Alexander created a "rat park", a long open and more-or-less ideal environment for rats, with food and toys scattered around. Rats were placed into this park and in the standard lab cages. In both, they provided morphine-laced water with sucrose and plain water. The caged rats loved the morphine water, while the park rats mostly avoided it, preferring the plain water significantly more. With this, Alexander claimed that addiction occurs when one's situation provides not better alternatives than to indulge in whatever "addictive" substance. But one of Alexander's critics, Herbert Kleber felt the experiment was flawed and disagrees with its results, instead saying that availability increases exposure, which increases addiction. Other experiments as well as history seem to suggest and echo Alexander's results. For example, soldiers in the Vietnam War became "addicted" to heroine overseas, but stopped using when they returned home.

Discussion
I liked that this experiment produced results went against the standard notion of addiction, and that it was supported by natural experiments in history. I feel I, too, can offer personal supporting evidence. In some of my "depressive" parts of life so far, it became very easy to be drawn to playing video games all the time and drinking alone frequently. But when something came along to improve my lifestyle and make me happier, I stopped thinking about playing games and drank markedly less.

Chapter 8: Lost in the Mall

Summary
In this chapter, Slater looks into Elizabeth Loftus's experiments on false memory creation and the tenuous nature of memory itself, calling into question the Freudian notion of repressed memories. Her first experiment involved subjects recounting an entirely fictional story of getting lost in a mall from their families. These retellings were oddly descriptive, and as many as 25% of her subjects were victims of these false memories. This experiment sparked some other similar ones with higher confabulation rates, including an experiment by Steve Porter, in which he convinced about 50% of his subjects that they had survived a vicious animal attack as children. Loftus learned from her experiments that the human brain is highly suggestible and tends toward creation and invention to fill in holes.

Discussion
I thought this chapter was pretty telling, but I have a hard time determining whether her results are sound. Naturally, I look back at my past for select "traumatic" memories. I do remember them fairly well, but with less attention to detail, so I am led to believe they happened. Some of them happened with my brother as witness, so I believe that covers the corroboration that Loftus requires for a memory to be true. But some of them were with me alone, so I am now unsure.

Chapter 9: Memory Inc.

Summary
This chapter explores Eric Kandel's work in neurology. When confront by a patient named H.M., who was suffering from constant seizures, Kandel removed his hippocampus. This disabled his short-term memory while preserving long-term memory. With this, Kandel dispelled the then-commonly held belief that memory is dispersed throughout the brain. This led to further research regarding the location of memories in the brain, including Eric Kandel's Sea Slug experiments, whereby he tested individual neurons in sea slugs to determine their purpose and produce fast learning. From this, he learned that learning can be increased/sped up by the use of certain chemicals.

Discussion
This was a pretty touchy chapter, though I understand the reasoning and do not think the experiment should not have been performed, especially because it was a rather important finding. Accelerated learning is an interesting concept that could really have some useful applications.

Chapter 10: Chipped

Summary
In this chapter, Slater explores Antonio Moniz's foray into psychosurgery, specifically the lobotomy. Moniz is known as the father of psychosurgery. The chapter centered around one of Moniz's patients who suddenly suffered from OCD. After his surgery, his OCD was gone and was practically the same person, if not very slightly depressed.

Discussion
Appropriate as the last chapter of the box, this felt like the darkest and most controversial chapter, as Moniz viewed his patients or subjects as just another test; in his defense, these patients were so fargone that they exhibited very abnormal behaviors. I liked the story of Moniz at a conference where he suggested testing lobotomy on humans, something a lot of other doctors at the conference were probably thinking themselves, but too afraid to voice.