Chapter Summary Of Opening Skinner's Box
Matt Noah
Summer Assignment
AP Psychology
30 August 2017
Book Review
Opening Skinner’s Box: Summary: This book consists of ten chapters each with its own short story, each of which containing an experiment. In the first chapter author Lauren Slater talks about the work done by psychologist B.F. Skinner, mainly about his experimentation and the controversy over his methods. He believed positive reinforcement worked better in establishing behavior than negative reinforcement. Chapter 2 talks about Stanley Milgram and describes Milgram's obedience to authority experiment, shocks were simulated to see if the subject would be obedient. The results of the experiment showed that 65% of people would obey the orders of a credible authority, even if it was to the extent hurting another human. The next story …show more content…
Chapter four, Lauren Slater talks about a crime that happened in New York in 1964, where a woman was stabbed and raped by man. This happened during the day where there were witnesses, however, no one took any actions stop the crime. Results from studies showed when other people were around the subject was less likely to intervene. In this chapter five, Lauren Slater talks about Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the phenomenon in which an individual adjusts his/her beliefs to better fit or justify one's behavior. Next, the experiments performed by Harry Harlow on monkeys to determine what the basis for love was. He separated new born monkeys from their mothers and found the baby monkeys preferred the soft surrogate mothers who could not feed them over the metal surrogates that could provide food. Based on these results, Harlow concluded that touch was the basis of forming love. Chapter seven talks about a psychologist, Bruce Alexander, and his research and experiments regarding addiction to narcotics. In experiments on rats, Alexander argued that the rodents
Summer Assignment
AP Psychology
30 August 2017
Book Review
Opening Skinner’s Box: Summary: This book consists of ten chapters each with its own short story, each of which containing an experiment. In the first chapter author Lauren Slater talks about the work done by psychologist B.F. Skinner, mainly about his experimentation and the controversy over his methods. He believed positive reinforcement worked better in establishing behavior than negative reinforcement. Chapter 2 talks about Stanley Milgram and describes Milgram's obedience to authority experiment, shocks were simulated to see if the subject would be obedient. The results of the experiment showed that 65% of people would obey the orders of a credible authority, even if it was to the extent hurting another human. The next story …show more content…
Chapter four, Lauren Slater talks about a crime that happened in New York in 1964, where a woman was stabbed and raped by man. This happened during the day where there were witnesses, however, no one took any actions stop the crime. Results from studies showed when other people were around the subject was less likely to intervene. In this chapter five, Lauren Slater talks about Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the phenomenon in which an individual adjusts his/her beliefs to better fit or justify one's behavior. Next, the experiments performed by Harry Harlow on monkeys to determine what the basis for love was. He separated new born monkeys from their mothers and found the baby monkeys preferred the soft surrogate mothers who could not feed them over the metal surrogates that could provide food. Based on these results, Harlow concluded that touch was the basis of forming love. Chapter seven talks about a psychologist, Bruce Alexander, and his research and experiments regarding addiction to narcotics. In experiments on rats, Alexander argued that the rodents