Opening Skinners Box

Comments:
Ross Peterson

Summary:
In Opening Skinners Box, the author, Lauren Slater, provides a summary of 10 of the most prolific psychology experiments done in the past century.  The title, Opening Skinners Box, is very misleading because while she starts talking about Skinner and his boxes the book quickly diverges off this path and discusses other experiments.

In her presentation of the experiments, she uses a point-counter point system that helped motivate the experimenters.  For example when Harlow "proved" that a real mother wasn't needed, the field began searching for evidence to the contrary and Slater presented it as such.

The experiments ranged from Skinner and his boxes, to why no one calls the police when witnessing a murder, to Milgram's shocking experiment.  Covering a diverse range of topics, Slater gives a great introduction into the world of psychology in an easy to understand and easy to read format.

Discussion:
I thought this was by far the best book we read this semester.  While it isn't the most directly applicable, it is still very relevant to the field and opened my eyes to a different way of thinking when it comes to interacting with the user.

I really liked how Slater presented the experiments but at times I had to question her own sanity.  For example when describing the experiment where the experimenter got a lot of people to purposely get themselves institutionalized, Slater decides to do this herself.  Luckily she got turned away every time but it seemed like a few times she really took it too far.