A Critical Analysis Of Opening Skinner's Box By Lauren Slater

Obscura: Critical Analysis The Holocaust was a tragic event to say the least. Millions of innocent people killed, but how? In the second chapter of Lauren Slater’s book, Opening Skinner’s Box, an experiment is described that attempts to explain the mysteries of obedience and authority. Milgram’s experiment, that tricks subjects into believing that they have killed someone of their own free will, seems to point to the fact that a situation has the larger effect on how someone acts, than their personality. Slater writes that Milgram agreed with this and that he believed that any normal person could be commanded to do any number of terrible things if put into the right situation (32). An astounding 65 percent of the people put into that said

Slater references Daniel Goldhagen who argues that “‘His obedience theories just don’t apply,”’ and that Milgram’s experiments don’t include any time to consider their actions, unlike the real world (56). Milgram forced his subjects into an unrealistic position. If the subjects had been given time to think about what was happening and choose the best action, I am confident that nearly every subject would have held their hand. Slater even says that the experiment had subjects in hysteria to the point of “…strangled hee-haws and belly-aching bursts,” (44). This just shows how unrealistic of a scenario Milgram had created. It is a rare that people find themselves in a situation which a person of authority is telling them to kill someone, without giving them time to think, as part of an experiment in a dark cell-like room. Under these stressful circumstances, it is understandable that a person could be convinced to do something they would never normally do. And so, if Milgram’s experiment does not accurately display situations in the real world, what does it

Joshua was a defiant; he did not go past 150 volts. Jacob obeyed; he had gone all the way to the end of the shock machine. You would not, however, have known this just by looking at their lives. Joshua worked a desk job at Exxon until he joined the military as a soldier (53). This life is obviously very different from what you would expect from the guy who disobeyed the authority and refused to kill. Jacob, on the other end of the spectrum, gave up a career as a doctor to become “…a gay activist teaching inner –city kids,” (60). Jacob, who kneeled to authority and flipped the switch on the shock machine, lived his real life by sticking up for himself and others against the crowd or norm. It seems obvious that the only logical explanation is that Milgram’s experiment did not accurately display how our personalities affect whether we obey authority or