Assignment 10: Chapters 1 & 2

Opening Skinner's Box by Lauren Slater

Chapter 1

        This first chapter is all about B. F. Skinner's life and work as a psychologist.  It talks about his life was riddled with scandals of him using his baby daughter as a lab rat which is completely not true.  After meeting one of his daughters, the author find out that he was actually amazing with children and they all loved him very much.  

        His famous boxes helped realize how positive reinforcement is a much better teaching tool than punishments for mental conditioning. By using variable reinforcements he is able to make selected behaviors happen more frequently and slowly developed more intricate behaviors such as playing hide and seek or ping pong.   I myself now want to test Skinner's techniques on a dog or even my roommates sometime.  He also found that random reinforcement creates a behavior that is harder to replace once instilled than set reinforcements.  This can explain such things as gambling and other extremely low chance possibilities that cause mental addictions. 

Chapter 2

        The second chapter focused on Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment that we learned all about in his book.  Dr. Slater takes a more broad approach about the experiment focusing on Milgram himself for most of it.  I did not know how the experiment made him famous, but also destroyed his reputation with other psychologists.  He was kicked out of Princeton and had a lot of trouble finding work.      

        It was also said that Milgram spent a lot of time trying to find out how to classify the subjects as obedient or disobedient.  He ended up theorizing there are too many variables to take in account with human mental processes.  The major variable is the situation itself.  Many sociologists believe that the power of the situation makes the individual personalities negligible.  Milgram's argument to this theory is what separated the obedient from the disobedient.  If the situation truly has the power then all subjects should have been either obedient or disobedient.  There should not have been any differences between subjects.