Review: Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater
The book describes 10 milestone experiments in psychology in a very quirky way.
The experiments addressed a wide range of topics including behaviour conditioning, blind obedience to authority, recovered memory, bystander response in an emergency and even one debunking psychology itself. The approaches taken very often went way outside what would be considered ethical norms today and the conclusions drawn were often counter-intuitive, showing the subjects in a very poor light and suggesting that that’s how we humans actually are.
The book is very readable, not least because the author is a perfect subject for psych-analysis herself. The book defies the norms of scientific investigation and needs to be read with a hefty dose of skepticism but I understand the facts are fairly reliable even if the conclusions can be described as colourful.
It’s a book for people-watchers.
Asynchronists 