Opening Skinner's Box: great psychological experiments of the 20th century
Lauren Slater Bloomsbury, 276pp, £16.99
ISBN 0747563179
Who ever said science-writing was easy? You've got to do something to make the medicine slip down, right? So why not a breezy narrative style? OK. So if you've got a tolerance for Yiddishy slang and abundant split infinitives, with large helpings of my psychological quirks - and yeah, my husband's, too (he takes cocaine, for constant pain) - why not follow me through the tale of ten major psychological experiments of the 20th century?
Despite this nauseating style, Lauren Slater, a practising psychiatrist in Massachusetts, describes some genuinely interesting studies. They raise big questions. Are they science? Is human behaviour amenable to measurement and experiment, like a virus or an electric field? How accurate is psychiatric diagnosis?
B F Skinner's psychological experiments have had perhaps the most lasting impact. At Harvard in the 1930s, Skinner demonstrated that, as a motivating technique, reward is superior to punishment. With a series of boxes and levers, he taught rats to release food pellets and pigeons to play ping-pong. The simple idea that reward stimulates learning proved useful for prison officers, psychiatrists - and some parents. An interesting corollary, drawn from experimental observation, is that irregularly rewarded behaviour is the hardest to eradicate. The rat, or the casino gambler, will persist in repeated unrewarded actions in the hope that next time the pay-off will come.
By 1975, Skinner had become the most famous scientist in America for his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, proposing a society reoriented towards a technology of behaviour. However, his public reputation never recovered from a magazine article claiming that he had reared his daughter in a box. Not true, says Slater. Deborah Skinner's "box" was a transparent, warm playpen in which the child was placed for only a few hours each day.
An even more notorious experiment helped launch the animal rights movement. Harry Harlow, at the University of Wisconsin, took baby rhesus macaque monkeys from their mothers and gave them substitutes - little effigies made either of soft cloth or wire. But only the wire "mothers" gave milk. Even so, the baby monkeys preferred the scraps of terry cloth and became so attached to them that they screamed with grief when they were harmed or taken away.
Unsurprisingly, the cloth-reared female monkeys turned out to be bad mothers - and bad mates. They refused to be mounted and could be impregnated only by being strapped to a "rape rack". Slater reports that the Animal Liberation Front annually sits in mourning at the Primate Research Centre in Madison, Wisconsin before thousands of stuffed monkeys. Still, Harlow drew some humanising conclusions from his monkey tricks: holding is as important to a baby as feeding, and men can do it as well as women.
Slater devotes great attention to the infamous experiment at Yale in 1961 which purported to show that a potential torturer lies in us all. Stanley Milgram's volunteers were commanded to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to fellow "volunteers", who were really actors: two-thirds increased the voltage to the point where the victims screamed in pain. The widely drawn conclusion was that most people will show blind obedience to authority. But perhaps all it really demonstrated was that the volunteers realised it was unlikely that an Ivy League academic laboratory would allow genuine harm to be inflicted.
Slater greatly admires David Rosenham's experiment of the early 1970s in which nine volunteers faked their way into mental institutions and then acted normally - so much so that she repeated it herself. At this point, she comes out as a former mental patient (in adolescence, for depression). But unlike the original team, all of whom were kept confined for at least a fortnight, all she received for her "complaint" was a pill. Psychiatric treatment has moved on from the days of straitjackets, lobotomies and bathtubs full of ice, but clearly diagnosis is still arbitrary.
The most forward-looking of the ten studies offers hope of a cure for memory loss and Alzheimer's. Experiments relating to specific functions of parts of the brain have demonstrated that memory is stored in new neural connections. These can be strengthened by memory-enhancing drugs.
Slater concludes with the hope that psychology will become more scientific: "My own head hurts, and I look forward to the cures brought on by new knowledge." Unfortunately, there is no prospect of a pill to cure tricksy, self-referential prose.
Brenda Maddox is the author of Rosalind Franklin: the Dark Lady of DNA (HarperCollins)
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