'Opening Skinner's Box' is a collection of essays about ten significant psychological experiments of the twentieth century, including the eponymous B.F.Skinner's infamous black boxes, Stanley Milgram's electric shock chairs, Bruce Alexander's utopian rat parks and Elizabeth Loftus' imagined and implanted shopping malls. Each experiment is recounted as narrative, with Slater as the earnest, intrepid, increasingly existentialist detective narrator. The point, she says in the introduction to the book, is to lift these stories from the dusty academic journals, from the flatness of quantified data and black bar charts, and to elevate them, and celebrate them, as narratives, as theme and plot, as biography, history and philosophy.
One such theme is free will. B.F.Skinner's experiments, and their supposed implications, are well known - through conditioning and reinforcement, levers and pellets, the behaviour of rodents and pigeons, and so by inference our behaviour too, can be, and indeed perhaps is at some unconscious level, engineered and controlled. We are thus, according to the usual interpretation of Skinner's work, heteronomous slaves to the accidents and contours of our environments. We gamble because once or twice we were rewarded for doing so. We are superstitious because we seek causal links between our environments and our fortunes, between the levers and the pellets. These causal links are our narratives, and narratives are the format by which we make sense of the world, and of ourselves. Elsewhere in the collection, in an essay about Elizabeth Loftus' false memory experiments, Slater explores the idea that our free will may be undermined, not only externally by the contours of our environments, but also internally, because of the malleability of our own memories. False memories can be implanted, suggested, sewn as seeds which the subject then nurtures, elaborates and integrates into his or her own individual personality, into his or her own evolving narrative or world view. Loftus' experiments, like Skinner's, were controversial and incendiary, ostensibly because they were often, in the 1990's, utilised by defence teams in cases of historical sexual abuse, where the prosecution cases relied upon the previously repressed memories of the allegedly abused. In existentialist terms, these false memory experiments, like Skinner's experiments with rodents, were and are controversial because they strike at the notion of free will, and thus at our conception of ourselves as autonomous beings in control of our own choices, beliefs and personalities. Much of this book's appeal derives from Slater's interrogative approach to these and the other experiments, whether they be concerned with free will, or with conformity, cognitive dissonance, ethics or authority, and, more specifically, from the continual re-examination of the self that this interrogative approach provokes.
Inextricably woven in with the psychological implications of the experiments Slater explores are the biographies of the people involved, the psychologists themselves as well as the subjects. Skinner's biography is fascinating if only because of the schism between the myth and the reality. The myth is of a fascistic, amoral misanthropist, a monster who kept one of his two infant daughters in a box for two years to train her, who later drove her to suicide. The reality is more mundane, and more humane, a story of a man who was an early environmentalist, with a social conscience and two very much living grown up daughters. Our own responses to Skinner's experiments, and the existentialist insecurities suggested by those responses, are what the schism between the monster and the man, the myth and the reality, works so deftly to refine, reveal and challenge. Likewise, our initial responses to Stanley Milgram's infamous shock machine experiments are challenged, in part by Slater's biographical portrait of Milgram, but, more so in this instance by the retrospective biographies of the subjects who took part in the experiments. These experiments, as is the case with many of the experiments discussed in this book, are initially morally questionable. Milgram had his subjects believe that they were inflicting painful, sometimes potentially lethal shocks, upon a second subject, the latter strapped into an electric shock chair the other side of a pane of glass, often screaming in (feigned) protest. In the post-holocaust climate of the 1960's, the claims of the defendants in the Nuremburg trials still resonating, the point of Milgram's experiments was to test how far ordinary, rational people would go, how much pain they might be willing to inflict, under orders from an authoritarian personality. The results are now notorious, and seem, alarmingly, to give credence to those Nuremburg defences. Slater tracks down some of Milgram's subjects, and in her interviews with them tries to understand their responses to the experiment, as well as discussing the impacts and impressions it has left.
Altogether the experiments discussed in this collection serve not only as psychological interrogations, but also, in the trajectory of the moral, social and existentialist concerns they raise, as an alternative historical document. Each experiment is a reaction to, or resonance of the evolving landscape of the second half of the twentieth century. The Second World War and the Nuremburg trials provide the backdrop to Milgram’s electric shock experiments, and also to John Darley and Bibb Latané’s experiments into bystander behaviour, the latter also informed more specifically by the bizarre and disturbing murder, in 1964, of Catherine Genovese in Queens, New York. Leon Festinger’s experiments to test his theory of cognitive dissonance also draw from the post-holocaust climate of the 1950’s, and, in particular, from the perhaps inevitable emergence of apocalyptic cults within that climate. Bruce Alexander’s rat park experiments are set in the context of a newfound preoccupation with, and demonisation of drugs, born of the counter-culture movement of the 1960’s, and the final essays in the collection, concerned with memory, neuroscience and psychosurgery, draw our attention to modern day attitudes towards anxiety, depression and self-medication.
Anchoring the stories of these experiments in a familiar, evolving historical backdrop, Slater succeeds in lifting them above the dust of academic journals and into distinctly human narratives, narratives which cannot escape “the residue of mystery and murk” but carry it with them, narratives with themes which are conspicuously our own and a plot which, as all the best plots do, refuses resolution.
