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

In Chapter 1, entitled “Opening Skinner’s Box: B.F. Skinner’s Rat Race,” Slater explores the work of B.F. Skinner, a psychologist who was once regarded as the “leading neo-behaviorist” during his heyday in the 1960s. Skinner is known most for his experiments on animals, and especially rats, to demonstrate “the power of rewards and reinforcements to shape behavior” (6). While he is celebrated for his contributions to the field of psychology, B.F. Skinner also has a reputation of being somewhat “evil”—largely because his experiments on behavior could potentially be used for “totalitarian ends” (7). Slater aims to pinpoint what frightens us about the work of B.F. Skinner and explores the mythology surrounding his experiments to determine Skinner’s “true legacy” (8).

Slater begins her exploration with biographical details and historical context: B.F. Skinner was born in 1904, and it was only a decade after World War I when Skinner went to Harvard in 1928, where he met his future wife Yvonne. At Harvard, Skinner studied Ivan Pavlov’s classic conditioning experiment—that is, the experiment in which Pavlov noticed that the ringing of a bell could serve as a cue to trigger a dog’s salivary glands. Skinner continued where Pavlov left off: “If one can condition a reflex, would it not be too much to try to go one step further and condition cartwheels, or other supposedly free-form movements?” (11). Skinner wondered if behavior could be trained and devoted his career to answering his question. Skinner then used his boxes to create controlled environments where he could observe and shape his rats’ behavior: Through a system of rewards and punishments, Skinner observed that he was successfully able to transform the way the rats behaved:

With the achievement of predictability and control, a true science of behavior was born, with bell curves and bar graphs and plot points and math, and Skinner was the first one to do it to such a nuanced and multileveled extend (13).

Slater wonders what to make of Skinner’s legacy and questions “how can we locate Skinner” (15) in the grand scheme of things, culturally speaking both within and outside of psychology. Some of Skinner’s findings have disturbing implications: If behavior can be controlled in humans as it was in rats, that power could potentially be coopted by a dictator for totalitarian means.

Slater interviews one of Skinner’s greatest detractors, a former colleague of Skinner’s at Harvard by the name of Jerome Kagan. Kagan, another professor of psychology, dismisses Skinner’s insistence on the power of conditioning. He argues that Skinner’s experiments negate free will and illustrates the power of free will by leaping underneath his desk in the middle of his interview with Slater. He tells Slater that there is nothing outside the existence of free will that could explain why he is under his desk.

Another psychology professor at Harvard, Stephen Kosslyn, is more impressed by Skinner’s findings; he sees them as contributing in a major way to understanding habit-driven learning.

Reflecting on her own personal experience, Slater considers how her 2-year-old child used to cry nightly, waking up her and her husband to comfort and soothe her. However, through a Skinner-esque process, Slater trained her daughter to sleep through the night:

It’s brutal in the beginning, having to hear her scream […] Within five days the child acts like a trained narcoleptic; as soon as she feels the crib’s sheet on her cheek, she drops into a dead ten-hour stretch of sleep, and all our nights are quiet (20).

Slater makes a pilgrimage to the basement of William James Hall at Harvard to view the “actual boxes that Skinner used” to conduct his initial experiments: “Did I read the boxes were black, or did I just concoct that, in the intersection where fact and myth meet to make all manner of odd objects?” (21). The boxes are not black, as Slater discovers, and in their presence, she thinks of how Skinner’s experiments have stoked so many fears about human agency. She then ponders what control we have over our lives.

Myths have tainted Skinner’s legacy, particularly the one about his daughter, Deborah Skinner: It is rumored that, after finding so much success in training rats, Skinner developed a new kind of box, this one for human infants, which he contained Deborah for the first two years of her life. This experience so damaged her, the legend goes, that Deborah attempted to sue her father when she was 31 years old for child abuse and then allegedly committed suicide. After some investigation, Slater finds this story to be completely false. While she is unable to locate Deborah for an interview, she does find Skinner’s other daughter, Julie. Julie assures Slater that her sister Deborah is alive and well, living as an artist in the U.K. Julie is protective over her father’s legacy and encourages Slater to do her own research on Skinner’s true aims.

Slater finds that, after reading Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which Skinner penned in 1971, she views Skinner much differently:

Skinner is clearly proposing a humane social policy rooted in his experimental findings. He is proposing that we appreciate the immense control (or influence) our surroundings have on us, and so sculpt the surroundings in such a way that they ‘reinforce positively,’ or in other words, engender adaptive and creative behaviors, in all citizens (27).

Chapter 2 is titled “Obscura: Stanley Milgram and Obedience to Authority,” and it explores Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1961 experiment designed to test obedience to authority. At that time, Milgram was a Yale assistant professor, and post-World War II brought about an interest to study what might have led SS officers to carry out their commanders’ orders to kill. Unlike many of his other colleagues, Milgram reportedly believed that situation (rather than a charismatic personality) could lead someone to “destructive obedience,” as we saw with SS officers in World War II. To learn more, Milgram devised a test that Slater refers to as “one of psychology’s grandest and most horrible hoaxes” (31). This chapter is divided into two parts: “Part One” tells the story of the experiment itself, while “Part Two” presents the follow-up story of those who participated in the experiment.

Milgram wanted to test human obedience to authority. In the experiment, Milgram instructed participants to administer a series of questions to a person strapped into an electroshock machine. If the person in the chair answered a question wrong, then the participant was instructed to push a button to administer an electric shock; with each question answered wrong, the electric shock delivered became stronger. Unbeknownst to the participant, the person strapped into the electroshock chair was an actor, faking pain and suffering as the experiment wore on. Milgram was surprised to find that participants were willing to administer the shock simply because a person of authority told them to.

In “Part One,” Slater walks the reader through the mindset of the participant:

At 315 volts Wallace gives one last, blood-curdling scream and then stops. He falls silent […] With your head you say no and with your hands you tap-dance up and down the shock board, in and around the words—skirt, flair, floor, swirl; goose, feather, blanket, star—and all the while there is just this eerie silence punctuated by electric skillet sizzles, and no man. There is no man here (37).

Milgram found that 65% of participants were obedient and willing to administer the shock.

Slater tracks down two participants of the Milgram experiment to find out what their lives have been like since that day in 1961. Many speculate that Milgram’s experiments were inhumane, given that they could have caused irreparable psychological distress in participants. Slater seeks to verify this or not.

The first participant goes by the pseudonym of “Joshua Chaffin,” who is one of the few who defied authority and refused to administer the shock. Slater is surprised to learn that Joshua’s life has been very conventional, post-Milgram experiment: “I ask Joshua about his life. The surprises keep tumbling out. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Joshua’s defiant laboratory behavior carried over in any way to his choices outside the lab” (52). Joshua worked for Exxon in a corporate capacity after a long career in the military.

On the other hand, another participant, “Jacob Plumfield,” agreed to deliver the shock. Jacob recalls how he was 23 years old when the experiment occurred, and that he was deeply horrified by his own actions. However, Jacob, does not find the experiments unethical because, upon reflection, he sees that the experiments led him to question how he was living his life. It inspired him to develop “a strong moral center” (59). He came out of the closet and dropped out of medical school to become a teacher and activist for LGBTQ rights. He now lives with his partner. Slater compares Joshua and Jacob and finds it ironic that the supposedly “defiant” participant leads a conventional life, while the “obedient” participant now bucks social norms. Slater offers up a revolutionary way to understand the importance of the Milgram experiment: “So this, perhaps, is what we’re left with: an experiment that derives its significance not from its quantifiable findings but from its pedagogical power” (61).

Chapter 3, entitled “On Being Sane in Insane Places: Experimenting with Psychiatric Diagnosis,” covers the experiments of David Rosenhan, the psychologist who wanted to test “how well psychiatrists were able to distinguish the ‘sane’ from the ‘insane’” (63).

In the early 1970s, Rosenhan and eight other people, all recruited by Rosenhan, faked their way into mental institutions. Once admitted, they began acting completely calm and rational. The idea was that “normal” behavior would warrant a quick release. However, most of the subjects (referred to throughout the chapter as “pseudopatients”) were admitted to mental institutions and then detained. Rosenhan’s experiment revealed how flimsy the diagnostic criteria for insanity was: “[Rosenhan’s] experiment implies we are inextricably immanent, suffused with subjectivity, and as such, it adds as much to the literature of philosophy as it does to psychology and psychiatry” (63). Slater walks the reader through Rosenhan’s personal admittance process into the psych hospital: “The strange thing was, the other patients seemed to know Rosenhan was normal, even while the doctors did not” (69). Slater questions this revelation:

Did the label of madness beget madness, so that the diagnosis sculpts the brain, and not the other way around? Our brains do not, perhaps, make us. Maybe we make our brains. Maybe we are made by the tags affixed to our flesh (69).

When Rosenhan’s findings were published in 1973 in the prestigious journal Science, it was met with resounding criticisms from psychiatrists and psychologists everywhere, who sought to defend the validity of their field. Critics met the article with vitriol, and Slater quotes a few of the most notable responses. Robert Spitzer, at the Institute for Biometrics at Columbia University, wrote two separate papers contesting Rosenhan’s findings and sought to make an argument that psychiatry is indubitably part of the medical profession.

Spitzer “was by far the most distressed” about Rosenhan’s findings, and he was intent on repairing psychiatry’s standing in the medical field: “If Rosenhan single-handedly set out to dismantle psychiatry, Spitzer, back then, single-handedly set out to restore it” (77). Spitzer was convinced that insanity could indeed be diagnosed objectively; he and several colleagues banded together to re-think the criteria for the various mental illnesses in the DSM-III in 1980. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the handbook used by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other health care professionals as the guide to diagnose mental disorders. In Spitzer’s heavily revised third edition, he included quantifiable criteria to diagnose mental illness:

[Spitzer] tightened diagnostic criteria so that each and every one of them was measurable, and in order to qualify for any diagnosis, there were very strict guidelines about which symptoms, for how long, for how often (77).

Slater gives a history of her own experience at a mental institution—she was hospitalized for depression and her tendency to self-harm. Returning to Rosenhan’s experiment, Slater compares it to a piece of art, but she is not quite sure what meaning is to be derived from the experiment. When she interviews Spitzer, he tells her that with his revisions to the DSM and the current diagnostic criteria, it would be impossible to recreate the experiment in modern times. Taking that as a challenge, Slater decides to repeat the experiment herself. She uses the exact line from the Rosenhan experiments and reports to hospital staff that she hears a voice saying “thud.” Slater goes into 9 different emergency rooms, and each time she is denied admission into the hospital. She is diagnosed as depressed and psychotic by several different doctors:

I am prescribed a total of twenty-five antipsychotics and sixty antidepressants. At no point does an interview last longer than twelve and a half minutes, although at most places I needed to wait an average of two and a half hours in the waiting rooms (87).

Slater reports her findings to Spitzer, who is shocked that she repeated the experiment. She was not given a “deferred” diagnosis, as Spitzer predicted; Spitzer offers that he thinks doctors “just don’t like to say ‘I don’t know’” (89). After recreating the Rosenhan experiment herself, her takeaway is that, unlike in the 1960s, she was not admitted to the hospitals and she was treated with “palpable kindness” (89) by the staff attending to her.

Slater attempts to visit Rosenhan in a West Coast hospital where he remains paralyzed (which even affects his vocal cords), but his family bars her from doing so. Slater imagines what she would do, if allowed the opportunity to pay homage to him in-person:

As an ex-mental patient, I’m impressed with anyone who cares to understand the intricacies of that distant world. So I would bring Rosenhan gifts, this essay, an apple, a watch with a face large enough to see the swirl of time, and from my daughter, boxes and boxes of Band-Aids (92).