Opening Skinner's Box

Chapter 1

Throughout the chapter, Lauren Slater gives the impression that she is an investigator trying to solve the mystery of B.F. Skinner and his daughter whom people say had committed suicide. Slater has a way of putting Skinner on this sort of a pedestal that only a worthy man of great intelligence can reside. The chapter covers B.F. Skinner’s style of experimenting. He was a behaviorist and “a man of real frigidity who slept in a bright yellow cubicle”. Slater also gives a little bit of background to Skinner and his early life. He attended Harvard and fell in love with a woman named Yvonne, who later was to be his wife. Skinner did not always want to be a psychologist; in fact, he wanted to be a novelist. Skinner used to spend months in his mother’s attic “writing lyric prose.” After Skinner dove into the realm of psychology, he focused a lot on introspection and mentalist views. He wanted to see how subjects would react in different situations and he would observe their behavior. Skinner wanted to expand on Pavlov’s saliva experiment, but he wanted more out of it. In Skinner’s journal he wrote, “I began to become unbearably excited. Everything I touched suggested new and promising things to do”. This just shows the true passion Skinner had for learning new things and doing experiments. A common theme of Skinner’s experiments was that he would conduct experiments using rewarding gestures. For example, he would reward a bird whenever the bird would push a lever. He found that using reward rather than punishment is much more effective in creating a particular type of behavior. Also, Skinner found that an irregularly rewarded subject showed the most amount of commitment. An example Slater uses is that a woman may not leave a mean boyfriend because on occasion, that boy just might be nice or call. So that girl will hang on to that boy in hopes that someday he will call and be nice, even though he shows normal behavior of being a jerk. Slater ended the chapter with a segment about how she met with one of Skinner’s daughters. She let him read some of her archives and even allowed her to see a piece of chocolate that Skinner himself had taken a bite of.

Experiments covered

Controversy

B. F. Skinner's daughter Deborah criticised the book for its claims that she had been raised in a box and committed suicide. The book, indeed, mentioned such claims, but also rebutted them with an interview with Deborah's sister, Julie Vargas. In an article for The Guardian, Deborah described the claims as "doing her family a disservice" and stated that she was a very healthy child growing up. Skinner's daughter also described the truth behind the photographs which spawned the legend, namely that her father had developed a heated crib for her, later marketed under the name "Air-Crib", which had been mistaken by the public for a Skinner box.