Opening Skinner's Box

B.F. Skinner’s Rat Race

B.F. Skinner is a key figure in behaviorism and is considered the father of operant conditioning. He is known for using rewards and reinforcements to influence behavior, emphasizing operant conditioning and observable actions over internal processes. The "Skinner box" is a setup used in animal experiments. An animal is isolated in a box equipped with levers or other devices in this environment. The animal learns that pressing a lever or displaying specific behaviors can lead to rewards or punishments. Skinner's experiments established how behavior is influenced by rewards, noting fixed-ratio and variable reinforcement schedules, which have implications for addiction and behavior persistence.

Stanley Milgram and Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram's 1961 experiment explored obedience to authority in the context of the Holocaust, challenging the notion of the "authoritarian personality" by highlighting the impact of situational factors on moral choices. Participants were instructed to deliver electric shocks to a "learner" for wrong answers using a shock machine. Many continued to shock despite the learner's apparent pain, demonstrating significant compliance to authority. About 65% of participants were willing to administer what they thought were lethal shocks, stressing the troubling extent of compliance to authority and prompting discussions on morality and personal responsibility. The experiment drew ethical criticism for deceiving participants and causing distress, with debates about the validity and applicability of findings to real-world situations.

Rosenhan Experimenting with Psychiatric Diagnosis

For an experiment, Dr. David Rosenhan and other participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions, saying they were hearing a voice saying the word “thud”. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication. However, they acted normally from then onward, reporting that they felt fine and no longer heard voices. Their stays ranged from 7 to 52 days, and the average was 19 days. All but one were discharged with a diagnosis of schizophrenia "in remission", which Rosenhan considered as evidence that mental illness is perceived as an irreversible condition creating a lifelong stigma rather than a curable illness. None of the pseudopatients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients were able to identify them as impostors. Hospital notes indicated that staff interpreted much of the pseudopatients' behavior in terms of mental illness.

Darley and Latané's Training Manual—A Five-Stage Approach

In 1964, psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané examined witness behavior following the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, where thirty-eight witnesses failed to help. Their research investigated the conditions that lead to inaction in the face of emergencies. College students were ushered into a solitary room, believing that a conversation about college life would ensue. This discussion occurred with other participants who were in their own room as well (the other participants were just records playing). After a round of discussion, one of the participants would have a “seizure” in the middle of the discussion, and the researchers measured the amount of time it took the college student to obtain help. If the student did not get help after six minutes, the experiment was cut off. Darley and Latané found that the more “people” there were in the discussion, the longer it would take subjects to get help. Still, those who did not get help showed signs of nervousness and concern for the victim. The researchers believed that the signs of nervousness highlighted that the college student participants were most likely still deciding the best course of action, not because they were indifferent, as previously thought. It showed that observers often become paralyzed in the presence of ambiguity in emergencies.

The Experiments of Leon Festinger

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance explains how many individuals rationalize beliefs when confronted with contrary evidence. He defines cognitive dissonance as “the psychological opposition of irreconcilable ideas (cognitions) held simultaneously by one individual, creating a motivating force that would lead, under proper conditions, to the adjustment of one’s belief to fit one’s behavior—instead of changing one’s behavior to fit one’s belief.” He was able to observe this through infiltrating a cult formed around the belief that on December 21st, 1954, the world would flood, and only those who believed in a god, Sanada, would survive. When the world didn’t end, the believers rationalized that they had saved the world from damnation and tried to convince more people they were right. Additionally, Festinger conducted a study by paying people to lie for either $1 or $20. Those who were paid only $1 stuck more to their beliefs, because they didn’t know how to rationalize lying for only $1 when they believed that they had to be better than that.

Harry Harlow’s Primates

In the 1950s, there was a dominant belief that attachment was related to physical (i.e., food) rather than emotional care. To test the validity of the claim, psychologist Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed them in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in cloth. The cloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. The infant would only go to the wire mother when hungry. This supports the evolutionary theory of attachment, in that the sensitive response and security of the caregiver are important (as opposed to the provision of food). Harlow then put them with other monkeys to see what effect their failure to form attachment had on behavior. The behavioral differences that Harlow observed from the isolated monkeys were: they didn’t know how to act with other monkeys, they were easily bullied, and they engaged in self-mutilation. They also tried to self-soothe by clutching their own bodies and rocking compulsively. They had difficulty with mating, so Harlow designed a “rape rack”, where females were forcibly impregnated. Those females were inadequate mothers and abused their infants. Harlow received widespread criticism for the ethics of the experiment, and it caused many people to start advocating for animal rights. His experiments have been seen as of limited value in attempting to understand the effects of deprivation on human infants, while some believe what was learned outweighs the cons.

Bruce Alexander’s Radical Addiction Experiment

Bruce Alexander’s experiments, in the 1970s, have come to be called the “Rat Park. Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles—one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine—the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed and died. But Alexander wondered: is this about the drug, or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to mate. They were given the same access to the same two types of drug-laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs. In another experiment, he forced rats in cages to consume the morphine-laced solution for 57 days without other available liquids. When they moved into Rat Park, they were allowed to choose between the morphine solution and plain water. They drank the plain water. He writes that they did show some signs of dependence, such as minor withdrawal symptoms.

Elizabeth Loftus’ False Memory Experiment

Elizabeth Loftus set out to test the reliability of memory with the Lost in the Mall experiment. She assembled booklets for 24 patients containing four short narratives from a patient’s childhood based on consultations with relatives, but one of the given stories was actually made up. The made-up story was that the patient had gotten lost as a child in a mall, and they had eventually been found. She instructed them to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events. During the experiment, 25% of patients said they remembered the event and unwittingly invented several additional details of the false narrative. The memory for the false event was usually reported to be less clear than the true events, and people generally used more words to describe the true events than the false events. At the end of the study, when the participants were told that one of the 4 events was false, 5 out of the 24 participants failed to identify the lost in the mall event as the false event and instead picked one of the true events to be false. Loftus calls this study "existence proof" for the phenomenon of false memory creation and suggests that the false memory is formed as a result of the suggested event (being lost in a mall) being incorporated into already existing memories of going to the mall.

Eric Kandel’s Sea Slug Experiment

Kandel proved the biological basis of memory/learning through new neural connections and the sea slug. The more you repeat a habit/task, the stronger and smoother the connection between neurons. He looked into how short-term memory is converted to long-term, and found it was based on whether or not there was a tiny molecule called CREB, which, when blocked, stopped short-to-long memory transfer.