Opening Skinner's Box

At the moment I'm about three quarters of the way through 'Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century.' Lauren Slater (psychologist and author) provides an informative and entertaining glimpse into such notable experimentalists as B.F. Skinner, Stanley Milgram, Harry Harlow, and Eric Kandel and touches on what these great experimentalists have shown us about the nature of free will, authoratarianism, conformity, and morality.

As part of her travels she attempts to replicate the "Being Sane in Insane Places" experiment. While she wasn't committed and while she found psychiatrists more respectful of her hearing a voice saying "thud" than the initial experiment she was diagnosed with depression / psychotic depression and given an assortment of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. Spitzer is rather interesting in his response to her finding and all in all I found her portrayal of some of these great figures to be entertaining, deeply personal, and, at times, somewhat disturbing.

A very entertaining and readable book. Well worth a read.

http://www.amazon.com/Opening-Skinne.../dp/0393050955

(PS one of the amazon reviewers states that the author is a bit of a nut. I concurr but hey, nuts tend to provide entertaining reads so what the hey).

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
alexandra_k said:
At the moment I'm about three quarters of the way through 'Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century.' Lauren Slater (psychologist and author) provides an informative and entertaining glimpse into such notable experimentalists as B.F. Skinner, Stanley Milgram, Harry Harlow, and Eric Kandel and touches on what these great experimentalists have shown us about the nature of free will, authoratarianism, conformity, and morality....

A very entertaining and readable book. Well worth a read...

http://www.amazon.com/Opening-Skinne.../dp/0393050955


</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

Here's my glib reaction to Skinner: if you confine your testing to stimulus-and-response, you will find that your pigeon will respond to stimuli just as you predicted...

I have read that Harry Harlow was an emotionally stunted individual. Nevertheless his experiments are illuminating, I think. I also read that he had a "naive" assistant who once let all the monkeys out of their cages and was found playing with them. Naturally she was fired. Those monkeys lucky enough to have her as Harlow's assistant probably had much better lives than his other subjects.

I haven't read the book...

Hey. Yeah... Skinner also wrote a novel called 'Walden Two' which was part of the inspiration behind 'A Clockwork Orange' and 'Brave New World'. She actually turned out to be fairly sympathetic to Skinner... He did choose an unfortunate terminology (e.g., 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity') but he was something of a humanist and he had a lot of good ideas as to how to achieve a utopian like society. I think most of the criticisms have been based on misunderstanding his view... But that being said, I guess Chomsky was thought to have a nail in the coffin with respect to his poverty of the stimulus arguments etc etc regarding language acquisition. On with the Cognitive Revolution ho...

I have some really mixed feelings about the Harry Harlow experiments. He wanted to study the nature of love and so he proceeds to deprive monkeys of love to study the effects. Seems that he has resulted in lasting policy changes (doctors now place newborns on the stomachs of mothers to help promote the touch bond; kids in orphanages and infants in hospitals are now held and stroked and stuff etc etc). Put an end to some of the authoritarian childraising practices (shake hands goodnight and don't overindulge with touch).

But... Look at the monkeys... Horrific. The rape rack etc etc. I guess that for the mostpart... A person who is willing to devote so much time to their work is going to be a little odd... But I do have some serious ethical problems with the monkey experiments... Yeah...

There are some problems with the book in that she says someone said xxx and turns out that that is completely unsubstantiated. She has been called on a couple of things (sorry - can't remember precisely which) and looks like she got a little too liberal with the poetic lisence. Still, that being said, it is a great read for people who don't know anything about the people / experiements and it is a great read for people who do know something about them. It can be all too easy to lose sight of the humanist aspects when you are simply reading findings reported in a text book...

Wikipedia says:

'Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905–December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-deprivation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in the early stages of primate development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked for a time with humanistic [sic] psychologist Abraham Maslow.

'Some of Harlow's experiments involved rearing infant macaques in isolation chambers that prevented them from having any contact with other monkeys or human beings. The monkeys were left alone for up to 24 months, and emerged severely disturbed.

'The experiments were controversial, with some researchers citing them as factors in the rise of the animal liberation movement. William Mason, who worked with Harlow, told writer Deborah Blum that Harlow "kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It's as if he sat down and said, 'I'm only going to be around another ten years. What I'd like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.' If that was his aim, he did a perfect job."'

See any relevance to matters related on the boards of Psych Central?

he did worse than that, even...

*******the following will be triggering for people who are queasy about cruelty / abuse to animals. please don't read it if you think you may be triggered. or... if you choose to read it (and / or follow the links) please don't say i didn't warn you********

when he did the deprivation experiments he noticed that the monkeys got really attached to the cloth that was in the bottom of their cages. they would bite and snarl when the caretakers tried to remove it for cleaning.

he made a wire monkey with a nipple that provided food.
he made a cloth monkey that was soft and cuddly but didn't provide food. he expected the infant monkeys to spend the majority of their time with the wire feeding monkey - but they didn't. they would spend most of their time with the cloth monkey, cuddling it and playing with it. they would run over to the wire monkey for feeding but would return to the cloth monkey and they spent most of their time there.

http://www.stopanimaltests.com/photo...eprivation.jpg

so we learned that cuddles and play is preferred to whoever feeds you (hence change in practices in orphanages).

then he wondered just how strong this love bond was with the cloth cuddly monkeys...

so he make it so the cloth cuddly monkeys would hurt the infants. he put sharp metal spikes on them that would jab the infants when the infants tried to cuddle the cloth monkey. he made the cloth cuddly monkey emit a blast of pressurised water that would throw the monkey back against the bars of the cage. the monkeys would... keep going back to cuddle the cloth monkeys despite such abuse.

so we learned that infants who are severely physically abused still have strong attachment behaviour (love) for their abusers.

the monkeys who were raised in isolation from their peers never developed normal social skills once they were reunited with their peers. he wanted to mate the females to see whether they were capable of mothering infant monkeys well and to see whether the infant monkeys would develop normal social skills. the monkeys who were raised in isolation from their peers would bite and attack male monkeys who wanted to mate with them, however. they didn't seem to understand the social cues of 'want to mate' compared with 'want to fight'. so... he devised a 'rape rack' (that was his chosen terminology). basically... he made this rack that would physically restrain the females so the males could mate with them. he found that they were unable to mother their infants well. often they tried to kill them and / or they hurt or rejected them.

so we learned that abused mothers tend to not know what to do with their infants which tends to result in their being abusive to them in turn.

did we really need to do such cruel things to monkeys to learn any of this???? but still the monkey research continues... it was indeed because of Harlow that the animal rights activists started getting up in arms. The 'silver spring' monkeys were similarly influential with respect to that (where, for example, they would cut the nerve going from left arm to brain leaving the nerve going from brain to arm intact, tie up their right arm, and observe the monkeys starving themselves to death even though they should have been able to move their left arm okay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Spring_monkeys

that research was used to develop new treatments for neurological patients after strokes and the like. to teach them how to be able to move their limbs again. did monkeys need to starve to death in order for us to learn that?

IMHO no. we did not.

(Peter Singer is well worth a read. He argues that for the most part experiments that involve cruelty to animals could be more cleverly devised such that they do not involve cruelty to animals. it is just that... we are complacent...)

Thanks, alexandra_k, for that additional information. (BTW, how does one get to be a Magnate? Is that anything like a Magnet?)

My view now is that nature/our society provides enough "experiments" for us to grasp what is going on, so we don't need to add any more.

the cruelty of humans makes me absolutely desolete. this why i dont watch the news or read newspapers. what people do to eachother is already unimaginably cruel nevermind what they do to animals. what is wrong with these people that do this in cold blood!!!!!!!!!????????? so called objectively?!!!!!!!!!?????
jeez. i shouldnt have read this. my own fault. actually thats not true. its thanks to you alex that people are reminded and made aware. being reminded occasionally only does good i think. even if that 'good' involved homicidal rage!!. sigh.
no discovery is worth inflicting that pain on any living being. thats the end of it for me.

Hey. I think that I got to be a Magnate by posting so many posts. Maybe 2,000 or something like that. There is a little list somewhere of what name (Magnate etc) is associated with what number of posts.

Hey. It is interesting what could lead a researcher to do those kinds of experiments on animals... I find it similarly interesting what could lead researchers to do those kinds of experiments on human beings (thinking primarily of the Nazi scientists here).

Justifications include:

We need to test on animals in order to make medical advances. What if you could save one million people dying from cancer by sacrificing several thousand rats? The ends justify the means.

The best case for animal research is provided by the above style argument.

Other sorts of experiments include putting foundation (make-up) into the eyes of cats and rats to see whether it is 'non-irritant'. Administering substances KNOWN to be toxic to see precisely what a lethal dose consists in.

> In the past, argument about vivisection has often missed the point, because it has been put in absolutist terms: Would the abolitionist be prepared to let thousands die if they could be saved by experimenting on a single animal? The way to reply to this purely hypothetical question is to pose another: Would the experimenter be prepared to perform his experiment on an orphaned human infant, if that were the only way to save many lives? (I say "orphan" to avoid the complication of parental feelings, although in doing so l am being overfair to the experimenter, since the nonhuman subjects of experiments are not orphans.) If the experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his readiness to use nonhumans is simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant. There seems to be no relevant characteristic that human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree. (Someone might try to argue that what makes it wrong to experiment on a human infant is that the infant will, in time and if left alone, develop into more than the nonhuman, but one would then, to be consistent, have to oppose abortion, since the fetus has the same potential as the infant... this argument still gives us no reason for selecting a nonhuman, rather than a human with severe and irreversible brain damage, as the subject for our experiments).

> The experimenter, then, shows a bias in favor of his own species whenever he carries out an experiment on a nonhuman for a purpose that he would not think justified him in using a human being at an equal or lower level of sentience, awareness, ability to be self-directing, etc. No one familiar with the kind of results yielded by most experiments on animals can have the slightest doubt that if this bias were eliminated the number of experiments performed would be a minute fraction of the number performed today.

http://www.animal-rights-library.com...m/singer02.htm

all i can see since i agree with everything you ve said is to draw the following analogy that was posed for me in college:
if you had arrested a terrorist would you torture her/him to save the lives of innocents who might be caught in her/his bomb?
to me its a straightforward no because torture one person and that slippery slope. you re trusting the opinion of the people hired by the person in power placed there by some particular elected official. too many degrees of control for me by far. torture sucks in general. nevermind the mess that can be made of it by individuals charged with dealing with it.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
alexandra_k said:
then he wondered just how strong this love bond was with the cloth cuddly monkeys...

so he make it so the cloth cuddly monkeys would hurt the infants. he put sharp metal spikes on them that would jab the infants when the infants tried to cuddle the cloth monkey. he made the cloth cuddly monkey emit a blast of pressurised water that would throw the monkey back against the bars of the cage. the monkeys would... keep going back to cuddle the cloth monkeys despite such abuse.

so we learned that infants who are severely physically abused still have strong attachment behaviour (love) for their abusers.

the monkeys who were raised in isolation from their peers never developed normal social skills once they were reunited with their peers. he wanted to mate the females to see whether they were capable of mothering infant monkeys well and to see whether the infant monkeys would develop normal social skills. the monkeys who were raised in isolation from their peers would bite and attack male monkeys who wanted to mate with them, however. they didn't seem to understand the social cues of 'want to mate' compared with 'want to fight'. so... he devised a 'rape rack' (that was his chosen terminology). basically... he made this rack that would physically restrain the females so the males could mate with them. he found that they were unable to mother their infants well. often they tried to kill them and / or they hurt or rejected them.

so we learned that abused mothers tend to not know what to do with their infants which tends to result in their being abusive to them in turn.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

Of course, I am one of those monkeys. One whose mother was deprived of sufficient love, and, because of that failed at love when it came time for her to marry and parent, and then, not knowing why she did it, turned her rage against those who failed her upon her children (including me). That is, that's who I was as an infant. Now I am grown, and remain damaged.

What do I do about it? Try to understand it. There is a limited amount of help from our society in doing that -- because so many monkeys are significantly damaged -- and are virtually unaware of it, because it is so common.

I am working on it.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
biiv said:
the following analogy that was posed for me in college:
if you had arrested a terrorist would you torture her/him to save the lives of innocents who might be caught in her/his bomb?
to me its a straightforward no

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

Some in our (the U.S.) government came up with a different answer.
Politics? Relevant?

Forbidden?

Is it not possible to talk about these subjects in a useful and healing way?