Full Blog, "Opening Skinner's Box"

Opening Skinner's Box
Lauren Skinner
Published 2004, Norton & Company, New York

Summary
In this book Mrs. Slater gives us summaries of the facts about and her musings on several famous psychological experiments of the last century. Notably included are Milgram's obedience/electroshock experiment and Rosenhan's deconstruction of American psychological hospitals.

Discussion
This book is interesting and significant because the subject material is interesting and because it is by far the most important reading in terms of in-class discussions. The worst fault of Mrs. Slater's writing is a tendency to rely too heavily on her own prose and spend to little time on the facts; several of the experiments themselves had flaws which I discussed in the appropriate micro-blogs. Mrs. Slater also has an unfortunate tendency to stick to the traditional narrative of some events rather than question it; I think this was most apparent in the chapter dealing with Kitty Genovese.

I don't think "future direction" is a necessary section here, so I will omit it. Instead I will close by saying that although I think this book has less practical value to computers than, say, Design of Everyday Things, it was very interesting and informative and I feel smarter for having read it.