Opening Skinner's Box (nonfiction)

[corinthian]

TITLE: OPENING SKINNER'S BOX AUTHOR: Lauren Slater LENGTH: 254 pgs SUMMARY: Through ten examples of ingenious experiments by some of psychology's most innovative thinkers, Lauren Slater traces the evolution of the century's most pressing concerns -- free will, authoritarianism, conformity and morality. Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, she takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgrim's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric disorders. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality and theme.

Below the cut is an indepth review including quotes and a biased opinion of Opening Skinner's Box. I hesitate to say "spoilers" as the book's intent is not to shock and awe but offer a different perspective of ten famous psychological experiments.


Lauren Slater claims that psychology attempts parcels the self into sealed vacuum bags of experience. She states: "... psychological experiments are fascinating, because at their best they are compressed experience, life distilled into its potentially elegant essence, the metaphorical test tube parsing the normally blended parts so you might see love, or fear, or conformity, or cowardice..." (p.2). For Lauren Slater the psychological experiment is hardly about the end value, the number or the statistical significance, she traces a story arc and parses the individual sections (introduction, method, results, discussion) as a single thing, a story. With Opening Skinner's Box she aims to more than just contribute to the literary body of psychology, she aims to take a hammer to its coconut shell and release the loose, sloshing mess within. The question she poses to the reader, just as she examines it, is do you or do you not (drink, obey, read, understand, eat, believe, agree)?

Slater starts with a hard edge, she picks away at the lore that surrounds one of the most starched and stiff figures in psychology -- B.F. Skinner. This chapter shares its title with the book, Opening Skinner’s Box. Known mostly for his boxes -- six rigid walls which he placed around a living organism and create an environment which directed, in theory, any behaviour -- Slater takes apart traditional discourse of his findings first, last and only; she starts with who he might have been. She paints a terrifyingly human picture of him, summing up his ideals with a single quote from him: "Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from wars, crimes, and other dangerous things. The feelings are the by-products of behaviour." (p. 28). Slater tells the reader that Skinner was a man who loved his daughters and loved humans, the kind of man who was deeply wounded by the darker sides of humanity. He was striving for utopia, she said, and clarifies: "In other words, stop punishing. Stop humiliating." And she adds: "Who could argue with that?" (p. 27). This man, Slater says, was a kind man seeking an answer.

She has left the tradition of operant conditioning reeling. Slater has not only embellished on Skinner's life but she has given an entire chapter about him without breaking down the steps of operant conditioning. Slater is clearly aware of who Skinner is and what he means to a body of science; she makes reference to his pigeons, to his boxes, to the data. Her chapter on Skinner, however, is equal parts other as it is Skinner and yet entirely about the singular idea of Skinner: free will. This idea, this important and pivotal study, Slater argues throughout her chapter without explicitly stating so, is about choice. More specifically it is about absence of choice and the price of a benevolent society. What is so bad about Skinner's utopia?, she asks. Slater opens the narrow Skinnerian world with the most cruel and human tool of them all, herself. She Skinnerizes her baby and her doubts are made clear ("She has been eerily gagged. She sleeps so still, in her white baby box.", p. 20). What about this unnerves us?, she asks. She leaves the chapter with a question of free will, "I raise my arm -- or my arm is raised --" (p 30). Why do humans do things? Do we or do we not.

We do, Milgram answers in the next chapter, Obscura. Slater places Skinner, who she claims was pushing for a benevolent utopia of kind hearted, conditioned, automata, right next to Milgrim who proved that within everyone is a tiny seed of darkness. It was Skinner who explored free will and Milgrim "proved" that free will was nothing more than a hopeful illusion ("With your head you say no and with your hands you tap-dance up and down the shock board, in and around the words --", p. 37). Slater beings with the you and imposes the story, the scene and the choices that you would make. Some readers may be sitting there saying, "I wouldn't." but she says, how many of Milgrim's participants (and Milgrim himself) believed that the compliance rate would have been 65%? Not very many. Slater looks for meaning in the numbers, and variables, finding that well dry she turns her attention elsewhere.

It is within Milgrim's chapter where Slater raises yet another question: "When you look at this information, what do you get?" She goes on further to pose the idea that either division between what kind of person who would be obedient and what kind of person would be deficient is artificial and wrong or that there are "...so many strands... we cannot cleanly sort it out." (p. 47). This experiment, Slater writes, is powerful. A survey of any psychology class or even a well read layman could repeat this statement. But Slater also says "No one, however, could tell just what the Milgrim experiments meant, what they measured or predicted, or how much meaning to ascribe to their findings." (p. 55). In an attempt to quantify the human experience a story was born, and it is the story that carries the weight. It's the story about well-born, well-bred, well-read participants who would easily kill a man because they were compliant. There is no conclusion about what kind of person these participants could be, no manipulated variable. Just the question. Will you? And the resounding answer of I will. This free will, which Skinner had posed the question of erasing, rears its head in a decidedly ugly manner. The spark of life is important, Slater had said last chapter, the ability to choose, the idea of free will is precious, strange and sweet. But, she says, but it can also be dark and violent, and it is within every single one of us.

The other answer that Slater pulls out of the Milgrim experiences is that humans are too complex to be properly and simply categorized. There is no single conclusion that can be drawn about defiants and obedients, there is only the resulting behaviour. These entirely too complex and individual people can do the same thing in the same situation; it is not inherent within a certain kind of person. Choice exists, but there are things more complex than will at work.

It is with Harlow and Festinger that Slater answers "I do" with "but why?". Or she poses the question of "but why?" and investigates the answer with two beautiful and brutal explanations. We do irrational things, Festinger says in Quieting the Mind, because of cognitive dissonance. Humans want to balance their hypocrisy, justify their beliefs and be okay with their decisions, Festinger claimed. And Slater claims that Festinger was a cranky cancerous man who did not look for utopia or hope for defiance or proof of human spirit. "Man, thought Festinger, was not a rational being, but a rationalizing being." (p. 118). We behave because we think, and the irrational suddenly seems rational. Slater pries this apart with the story of a girl (bordering on sainthood) name Audrey. She is invasive in her goal, because there is what Slater (and she thinks what Festinger) would have seen as irrational belief there. This behaviour of devotion and the idea of miracles for Slater is utterly irrational (the phenomenon of faith is as strange as the holy oil which beads on the statues near Audrey's head). But why Slater asks, because Audrey's mother Linda has already said I do believe, and I do take care of my beautiful brain dead daughter. Festinger would have claimed this was an attempt to balance the hypocrisy of behaviour with justification. Slater counters with: "This is what Festinger's experiments missed, what it's like to live in the gap between consonance and dissonance, where new theories take shape, new beliefs are about to be born, or something much smaller, just a person, just me, with my hands out, my body held high, wide open -- no ending." (p. 131).

Harry Harlow ran with the missing pieces of Festinger's experiments. He grabbed onto the emotion behind irrational behaviour, something deeper than a plus b equals c and something far more intimate than justification. Harry Harlow, Slater says in Monkey Love, was trying to prove love. "...Blum writes, the best way to understand the heart was to break it." (p. 136). The pervading theory of love was that love was a response to a necessity; an infant loves its mother because without her breast milk it will die. Harlow pointed to this, he refuted it, and said that there is something deeper than physical necessity. But this answer was hardly so compact and neat as Harlow envisioned it. He thought love could be made from a single item, from a touchable, comforting cloth. Harlow created a generation of autistic monkeys because in his distillation of love he had missed some vital aspect. Oh that Harlow, he was terrible, ethics say today. He was rotten, twisted and evil. "Thanks to Harlow and his colleagues in the study of attachment, we have been humanized -- we possess an entire science of touch, and some of this came from cruelty. There's the paradox." (p. 146) Slater writes. There is a price to explaining humanity, the lines that we call taboo, untouchable, ones we should never cross, have to be touched to bring out something new and healing.

"Our cures are only as good as our courage." (p. 246) Slater emphasizes, and she ends the book where she began. She circles back to Opening Skinner’s Box from a different angle in Chipped, the last chapter of her book. Inhuman Skinner, she said, was the most human of us all. Inhuman Moniz and his lobotomies, she says, was a benevolent, childish man who reached for good and only barely missed the mark. The few scars he left behind (a death, a broken blade in the brain, an audaciously dangerous angiography) have done nothing more than open the field's awareness even further. "...I hypothesize, a certain cherished reluctance that, while it will not stop us in our surgical journeys, will nevertheless prove to us again and again how we believe the brain to be sacred." (p. 247).

Impact and choices, Slater balances both throughout her chapter on Moniz. People who are struck down with what seems like stubborn afflictions of depression, anxiety and OCD can be cured by a simple snip of the brain tissue. She also says that we are afraid of the price of benevolent behaviour. When faced with the idea that lobotomized people are calm, good citizens she says "... a chilling comment," and adds, "but not in its essence different from the criticisms levied at the psychiatric drugs we imbibe today." (p. 233). We fear the permanence of a lobotomy, the invasive nature of its theoretical irreversible change on who we are. The choice is being taken away, even if the choice leads us to embrace and grow that seed of darkness.

Then what is the purpose of psychology? Slater has given the reader a cruel, a beautiful, a helpful, a harmful and overall inconclusive picture of psychology. This is a study of the self, and the self is too complex to be pigeonholed into predicative behaviour. The mind contributes to how we do things, our sense of belief is important, our emotions override our logic, and we crave free will while we strive for obedience. Is it that the human condition is to be reaching for perfection that we will never reach? Slater's answer to "What is psychology?" is this book, as seen through a single lens -- one slightly offset from the rest of them, maybe a bit tinted or warped in the middle. Slater writes, "When I started this book, I thought I would find a natural narrative arc that would begin with experiments closely allied with the humanities and then would gradually, over time, move into experiments more and more akin to the natural sciences as the century progressed. However, it turns out that arc is nonexistent." (p. 253). She was looking for the story of psychology, and takes a decidedly Harlowian approach to it. What better way to understand it than to break it? She took a hammer to the walls, the six rigid walls of psychology held up by science and statistics. Slater opened Skinner's box to take a look inside. In doing so she was disruptive, and disturbing. She went over the line of what should happen in psychology.

And it is because she has done that we must ask but why?. Lauren Slater makes the case that an experiment is experience, and that it is also story. She triumphantly waves the banner for narrative arc, and attempts to fill in the gaps between numbers and data. What can be taken away from these studies? What can be learned is outside the realm of science. Results are hardly an explanation of a person, or even a slice of a person; they are merely the end to a story. Everything needs a beginning, middle and end. She states: "An experiment, in order to break beyond the container of science, needs to have some poetry in its presentation, some smoke, some shock, a verbal trill or two." (p. 109). What can narrative do for us that science cannot? What irrational piece of emotion can override everything we think know with a well-placed word?

There is an us within all these experiments. There is a series of experiments in our lives, Slater writes. "We seek out answers. We try this and that. We love and work. We kill and remember. We live our lives, each one a divine hypothesis." (p. 254). This is what Lauren Slater feels that psychology should be, a three dimensional view of the self. She looked at the experiments in this book in their traditional form. She saw the results, the data tables, the percentages and statistics and wondered but what else is there? Because there inevitably had to be. It is clear that she has examined psychology from another angle, from the very one that she writes against. To be able to break something properly you have to at least understand it partially. Slater explains in the introduction and in her questions raised ("But why do we see the lobotomy as evil?" "Why do we associate Skinner with such inhumane things?" "65% of Milgrim's participants were compliant.") that she has cut her teeth on traditional psychology and found it slightly sour.

Opening Skinner's Box is not the metaphorical Bible of psychology, how could it be? It is the answer to Lauren Slater's questions, the raising of her new questions and how she sees psychology. In short it is her vision of psychology. Where can this philo-psuedo-science go? It is not everyone's view on psychology, it seems impossible and certain Slater argues this, to be able to draw a solid singular perspective from any of this. Then what is the function of the pursuit of truth? The place for understanding ourselves? Story, Slater answers.

This is not to say that Opening Skinner's Box isn't flawed. It is perspective, and with it comes Slater's personality and bias. Some readers may find her distasteful, others may find her obnoxious. She has chosen ten (just ten!) experiments to examine. She has not touched on Jones and Harris's exploration of the fundamental attribution error, or Zimbardo's controversial Stanford prison experiment. What choices drive those experiments? Where has free will come and gone and left those participants aching for another chance to back out? It seems that her exploration of free will, choice and learning by damage could have benefitted greatly from Zimbardo's experiment. The but why and the choices humans make without thought, the questions of belief and faith seem to align with Jones and Harris. And yet Slater leaves them out. She turns her head in the other direction.

Slater also seems prone to leaving the ends of her chapters, and her book, up in the air. She examines questions, stories and attempts a narrative arc. However she never comes to the end of her arc and for all her insertion a large part of her book seems to be asking the reader do you or do you not. As an argument this would deeply flaw the book, however as a story it is a definite strength. As a story Opening Skinner's Box asks the reader to walk away thinking and emotional, as any good story should.

If anything Slater is memorable. The experiments she presents are ones that the reader should walk away knowing, in some respect. This is a dangerous effect, some say, because there is so much untruth, would be the argument. It's also a strength of the text, however. Slater has done the undoable, in a way, she has taken the dry and "boring" science and made it palatable and interesting. There is no memorization with Opening Skinner's Box, but there is story and with that comes the ability for a person to easily remember, recall and understand what the story is about. Slater has transcended rout internalization of scientific concepts and regurgitation of findings and made psychology into communication. Is this a book about psychology, then? One answer says yes, definitely. Slater has taken the human experience, what psychology is, and unwrapped the cellophane packaging around the experiments. She has the essence of it, this answer says. The other answer is no, she has broken and slaughtered all that makes psychology psychology and ventured into the world of literature and sensationalization. If psychology was the scientific quantification of human experience the final judgment would be that Slater has destroyed everything psychological in her book. However, psychology is the study of the human experience -- learning about humans. This book is exactly what psychology is.

Do you or do you not? But why? What else? Psychology, and indeed humans, should be asking these questions. There is no way to live without them, and no way to think about humans without them. We are a series of experiences, events, hypotheses, results and emotions. Everyone communicates and everyone needs communication. Opening Skinner's Box is a reflection of perspective; it's an exploration of self and selves. There is no reason why Opening Skinner's Box should have reading restrictions on it. The book is a question and an answer. Everyone will take something different from this book, there is no way to say that it will teach someone a certain concept, just as Slater that psychology is more than testing for a single independent variable. There is story here, there is human nature here, there is emotion and celebration and the cruellest of our fears. This book is nothing more than human. What are we afraid of? Lauren Slater is holding out psychology, and the question is do you take it from her? Or do you not? And why?

Comments

[shanaqui]

Hmmm, interesting. I keep coming across Stanley Milgram lately -- first one of my favourite singers wrote a song about the experiments, and then I started doing philosophy at university and the experiments kept coming up. I think I'd be interested in reading this book.

[corinthian]

The Milgrim Obedience studies are some of my favorites. You could say that Opening Skinner's Box isn't the most historically accurate book, but I think it gives a good impression of the experiments contained within.