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Summary: Gets way too many facts just plain wrong
Review: Slater writes about many famous psychologists and about their research. The single biggest problem is that her accounts of famous experiments in psychology, like Rosenhan's and Milgram's, are so full of factual errors that I find it hard to treat ANYTHING else she says seriously. There are experimental design features detailed in her book that were not part of those studies. Despite what some here say, all you have to do is actually read Rosenhan or Milgram to know that Slater just plain gets VERY important facts about what they did wrong.......
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Summary: emotional truth
Review: i loved this book. lauren slater is an amazing writer - with keen insights and a world perspective all her own. although i am not in the mental health field - i was quite entertained and moved by this book.
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Summary: DIFFERENT, FASCINATIING, ENTIRELY ENTERTAINING
Review: We are in the process of reading Lauren Slater's "Opening Skinner's Box" and find her book far different from any other psychologically-oriented book than we have read previously. This is a work of art that is entirely readable and provokes a good deal of discussion.
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Summary: Difficult to say
Review: I just finished the book and found it fascinating. I came to Amazon to see what other people were saying about it. Here's what they're saying:1) Slater is a compulsive liar, the book is full of inaccuracies and possibly lies, and therefore worthless. 2) The book was poorly edited. 3) The book is beautifully written and eye-opening. I can't really judge on point 1, but I pride myself on a strong "lie-dar". I have twice started reading new books that I knew nothing about, decided party-way through that they were probably fiction presented as fact, and then found through online research that either my hunch was correct or that at least lots of other people agreed with me (the latter in the case of Cameron West's "First Person Plural", which seems to me like fiction through-and-through). On point 2, the book was indeed poorly edited (it contains an embarassing number of misspellings and improper word use, and "per say" is unforgiveable). On point 3, Slater really is a fantastic writer. Lyrical, capable of spinning various themes in really intelligent and fascinating ways. I found the book stunning on those grounds. Some of the people attacking the book are motivated by personal/psychological politics. Slater casts doubt on the notion of recovered memory, and that's sort of a "third rail" in psychology. Try to suggest that sometimes a father is wrongly accused of incest because a daughter (perhaps unconsciously) fabricated the story, and lightning will surely strike you. See, for example, the reviews on Elaine Showalter's "Hystories". But now that the seed of doubt has been planted in me, I have to admit that I raised eyebrows many times while reading the book, notably during her descriptions of her own exploits (like biting the chocolate in Skinner's study) and in her recounts of interviews, where she always seems like the balanced, insightful person speaking to a brilliant experimenter who somehow comes across as a bit dim. On the whole, I'd say: buy and read this book if you want to be entertained, but take it as fiction, not fact. She who lies about the little things cannot be trusted to tell the truth in the big things. I'm sorely disappointed.
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Summary: Readers beware
Review: A factual point first. In her chapter on Skinner, Slater does eventually spell out unambiguously that the stories about his daughter Deborah that Slater has previously presented as what is widely believed in some circles are completely untrue. But by exonerating her on this one issue I am far from giving a welcome to this book. On the contrary, even before I read the complaints by prominent psychologists to the President of Norton Publishers that Slater had invented parts of the purported conversations she had with them, and that her accounts of psychological experiments contained serious errors, I had reason to doubt the veracity of the author. From lengthy extracts in the Guardian newspaper in January, and lengthy excerpts from the book on BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime" (five quarter-hour readings from different chapters), I formed the opinion that some of the author's accounts of her experiences, including passages in the alleged conversations she had with current psychologists, were very unlikely to be true. Likewise the detailed account of her first attempt at replicating Rosenhan's experiment concerning the diagnosis of someone who only pretended to have symptoms of severe mental illness seems to me to be largely a product of her imagination. Rebecca Berlin, from Montreal, deplores what she calls a "smear campaign" against Slater. It is depressing that genuine attempts to ascertain, and on clear evidence, doubt the veracity of material in Slater's book, including material that is extremely damaging to psychologists working today, is described as a "smear". It would be better for people like Ms Berlin to keep an open mind until they have had an opportunity to see the evidence adduced by critics of Slater's book.
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Summary: Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of th
Review: Slater (Prozac Diary; Love Works Like This) returns with this exploration of the continuing moral and social implications of nine important psychological experiments-a really great idea for a book. She includes B.F. Skinner's work on operant conditioning, Stanley Milgram's study of obedience to authority, Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, Harry Frederick Harlow's primates, and Elizabeth Loftus on false memory syndrome. All of these experiments continue to inspire current psychologists, and all have profound implications for our views of free will, conformity, and morality. Unfortunately, the execution of this book is not up to the idea. Slater is a clinical psychologist who views individual personality as the deciding factor in most situations, which is ironic since most of the experiments she covers have refuted this position. She doesn't seem to understand that social and biological psychologists are not particularly interested in individual differences-their agenda is based on improving the world by devising environments that encourage positive behavior. Plenty needs to be said about this, but, unfortunately, Slater spends too much of her time speculating about the experimenters' childhoods and personalities (two of her interviewees are described as "hysterical") to engage the topics.
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Summary: Get over the controversy
Review: There's been a lot of controversy about this book regarding the veracity of some of its claims. However, it appears that most of the criticms are from various psychologists who did not like the protrayl of their character in the book. No one has challenged the accuracy of the description of the experiments, which is the heart and soul the book. This is one of the rare books that discusses the facinating behavioral psychology studies that have been conducted throughout the 20th century. How easily are people subjected to authority? To what extent do we exercise free will? How accurate is human memory? There are 10 studies in all and at the end of the book I found myself searching for more. Some of the psychologists in this book are upset with Slater whereas in fact they should praise her. Despite this book's flaws, it is written in a manner that will motivate the layman to take interest in these thinkers and their studies. Before this book, only those in academia were aware of Loftus' or Milgram's work. This book is the first to introduce them to the general public in an inviting and readable fashion.
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Summary: Somewhat Creepy
Review: After reading how controversial Opening Skinner's Box is, I had to read the book myself. Some of the people interviewed in the book are claiming to have been incorrectly quoted, and some psychologists take issue with Slater's scholarship and conclusions. Having been warned not to take the facts too seriously, I thought it would still be intriguing to consider the deeper questions posed by the scientists who performed the experiments described in the book. And it was intriguing. Slater debunks the myth that B.F. Skinner raised his first child in a "box" in order to conduct an elaborate behavior experiment on her. The box turns out to have been a high-tech playpen designed and built by the doting father that Skinner apparently was. Another famous experiment which revealed that most people would torture another if encouraged by a benign authority figure was especially chilling in light of the Abu Ghraib torture by American guards. However, I came away with the distinct impression that Slater is a nut. Slater seemed especially enthusiastic about recreating an experiment in which normal people pretended to be demented enough to enter a mental hospital, then reverted to normal behavior and waited to see how long it would be before they would be discharged. Slater checked into some eight different hospitals. She also took some of the anti-psychotic meds she was prescribed rather than tossing them. She reveals that she was unable to recreate the experiment strictly, because under the original conditions, the pseudo-patients would be truthful after being admitted, but Slater actually had a mental hospital stay in her past, so she lied. And I simply didn't believe that bit about biting the ten-year-old chocolate bar in the Skinner House at first. As I read more of the book and learned more about Slater, it wasn't so unbelievable any more. Anyway, Opening Skinner's Box is definitely an unusual book. It poses many thoughtful questions about the nature of humanness. It is well-written, but I can't vouch for how well-researched it is or how factual. It is extremely interesting and thought-provoking, and more than a little creepy.
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Summary: A personal touch regarding the soft underbelly of science
Review: Lauren Slater manages to describe what she terms "the greatest psychological experiments of the twentieth century" with a lot of humor, wackiness, and insight into the personalities of the researchers. If you're expecting detailed impartial reviews, stick to psych journals. If, on the other hand, you want to take a roller-coaster adventure and learn something about the nature of psychological experimentation buy this book. One of the mantras one finds in psychology is that researchers who challenge long-accepted notions-mainstream work-with creative work are often shot down in flames, even though their work might be accepted as insightful, or even brilliant. Another common perception about such researchers is that they are eccentric, weird, driven, or harsh taskmasters/mistresses. Slater separates the myths from the realities as she describes Elizabeth Loftus' Lost in the Mall experiment-which has to do with false memories-a woman totally driven by the appalling false accusations of sons, daughters, and unreliable witnesses to crime, to B.F. Skinner, who turns out to be a very compassionate parent, not the monster man usually depicted. Dr. Slater also turns out to be quite a risk taker herself, repeating Rosahan's false patient psychiatric symptoms experiment, just to see if anything has changed since the 1970s, and indulging in potential drug addiction while testing Alexander's theories predicated on social environments. (Slater's description of Alexander's Rat Park is delightful; I wonder how much her husband contributes to the author's equivalent.) One major criticism of all these experiments is that it's hard to generalize the results, and make predictions. True. Yet one can't help but feel from Slater's interviews with subjects and experimenters and their families that this kind of work does deserve an important place in not only the psychologist's repertoire, but with all of us. And Slater does that admirably, in my opinion, by focusing on the personal side.
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Summary: A wacky lady steps out
Review: This book is just so fun. The concept of the book alone is just so fun ~ Slater writes about some of the great psychological experiments of our time (many of which, ethically, would never take place today) in a narrative form, superimposing her own experience of the experiments onto the narration. I just loved it, and wished there were more. Slater shares some history of each of the researchers, which gives an interesting slant to the picture, and leads us to wonder why they chose to look at human nature in the way that they did. Given all that is going on in the world (the Iraqi prisoner abuse comes to mind...) the findings from some of these experiments are all the more frightening. But so facinating... Slater herself comes off as a bit half-cocked in places (What was the deal with biting that old piece of chocolate? Very strange behavior indeed!) but her exploration into the "story" of each experiment is what kept me rapt with attention. She is a wacky one, a deep thinking wacky one ~ could you ask for more? My plan is to read more ~ of Slater that is.
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