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Book Review: Opening Skinner's Box May 15, 2009
The full title here is Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. Author Lauren Slater reviews 10 famous experiments from the various niches of psychology and attempts to understand them and their participants in new ways. It's really not very good.
And that's too bad, because these psychological experiments and the scientists involved with them are gold mines of fascinating stories --they're famous for a reason. Examples include getting average Joes to shock other people to death, imprisoning babies in boxes constructed to shape their psyches, turning rhesus monkeys into antisocial lunatics, faking your way into a psychiatric hospital on flimsy pretenses, crowds of people watching impassively as their neighbor is stabbed to death, and inserting false memories into the minds of people who should know better.
This is crazy, fascinating, outrageous stuff! Slater devotes a chapter to each set of experiments and attempts to delve deeper into the concepts that each one left in the landscape of psychology. She usually does this by writing about the people underneath the lab coats, including their personalities, their drives, their flaws, and their humanity. Unfortunately when she's short on information Slater had an annoying habit of just making details up, along the lines of "I imagined him blah blah blah" or "Did he look at this spectacle and blah blah blah?" Its an entirely ineffective literary technique that really only serves to yank you out of whatever flow you might have gotten into to be reminded that we're resorting to conjecture in an attempt at spicing things up a bit and to live up to the dust jacket's doubtful premise that there are great mysteries here to be revealed through personal research and fact checking.
In fact, this brings me to my major problem with the book: the author's writing style. The prose is so purple, sloppy, and florid, so full of itself and laden with pointless metaphores and descriptors that it strains credibility for something claiming to be non-fiction. She also has a flair for the dramatic, as when she breathlessly drew parallels between Stanley Milgram's subjects administering painful shock and his own doctors trying to revive him with defibulators.
It's just not well done. It's great source material (or at least I think so), but Slater just can't hold a candle to better science writers like Bill Bryson or Mary Roach.
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Tags: Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box, Psychology
