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Commentary On Opening Skinner's Box By Lauren Slater

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“Opening Skinner’s Box” is a book set up differently than I’ve ever read. Lauren Slater narrates a series of compelling experiments in the form of stories in a given chapter. Each chapter follows a different innovative thinker or scientist while Slater provides her own take and response to the experiment. Each experimenter thought differently than anyone else during their time and often performed dangerous and innovative experiments to get their psychiatric analysis. Slater starts off by talking about the title of her book and psychologist B.F Skinner. Skinner studied the effects of rats and how they can be trained with rewards and reinforcements. Skinner designed an experiment using rats that would be rewarded with one pellet of food if the lever …show more content…

One of the disadvantages is that I never had a little sister or brother. My older brother and his wife recently gave birth and now my niece is 6 months old. Needless to say, I am always around a baby now for the first time in my life. Living with my brother and his family, I have seen the struggle they go through with their daughter at night time. Slater describes a similar scenario with her daughter and how her daughter would always wake up crying and screaming almost every night. Slater tells her husband she wants to use Skinnerian principles to break her daughter’s habits (19). The idea is to slow down the response time to go and pick her daughter up while also reducing the amount of time their daughter is held. Slater uses an example of only picking her up for three minutes the 1st time and only for two minutes the 2nd time. Without even knowing anything about Skinner, my brother and his wife used a similar method when dealing with their daughter. In both cases, the babies started to sleep better throughout the night and broke their habits of waking up every night. Skinner’s methods are being put to use by people that don’t even know who Skinner

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55 Words | 1 Pages

Has anyone else ever wondered how many sane people have been misdiagnosed or even committed to an institution unnecessarily? In chapter three; On Being Sane in Insane Places, in the novel Opening Skinners Box, Lauren Slater has written about experiments conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1972 and again by herself sometime in the 2000’s.

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743 Words | 3 Pages

Among multiple issues including giving misleading information, the most dominate is the lack of consent Milgram received from his subjects to participate in such a test (102). While I do see that this is immoral, there is no way that Milgram could have completed his experiments effectively if he had done it morally. The first issue is if he explains what is actually going to happen during the experiments, that would obviously hurt the integrity of his results. Also, going back to how the experiments help us, if those who participated knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t have affected them as severely. It was the shock that the experiment gave that brought their life choices into question.

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449 Words | 2 Pages

In the excerpt “Rat Park” from Opening Skinner’s Box by Laruen Slater, demonstrates how addictions are a choice by conducting an experiment involving rats and drug addictions. Addictions are choices made by an individual. An addiction is a condition that results when an individual ingests a substance (e.g., alcohol, cocaine, nicotine) or engages in an activity (e.g., gambling, sex, shopping, eating) that can be pleasurable, but the continued use/act of which becomes compulsive and interferes with ordinary life responsibilities, such as work, relationships, or health. Addicts may not be aware that their behavior is out of control and causing problems for themselves and others. The outcome of this experiment explains how related rats are to human beings.

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576 Words | 3 Pages

Higgins and her daughter moved in with her family for a year or so. Even with family available during the day to lend a hand, the nights were particularly tough. “There were many nights when I didn’t sleep at all because I was the only one there, and then I would be up all day with her,” said Higgins. “The sheer exhaustion was overwhelming.

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1267 Words | 6 Pages

Through The Psychologist Eye In Lauren Slater’s book, “Opening Skinner’s Box,” we discover in the first three chapters the mysteries behind a few psychological experiments and the discoveries that three profound psychologists have made. Each chapter is about a different psychologist, the first is B.F. Skinner; a behaviorist who designed a process of learning in which behavior is controlled, he called this operant conditioning. Lauren Slater wanted people to know about his experiment, she read his books, talked to friends and family members to unearth the features behind this man. She found that he was a loving father, who could train animals to do unordinary things, like play the piano for an example, through the processes of operant conditioning,

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1385 Words | 6 Pages

Skinners experiment was based on operant conditioning, using the concept of discrimination learning, he carried out experiments on animals with the idea that their behaviour is predetermined by their environment and using a well controlled environment would allow him to in turn control their behaviours using a range of triggers. Using reinforcement and expectancy, the animal associates acting out certain behaviours with rewards. (Toates, F., 2010, pp. 165-167) After performing a number of experiments on rats using mazes, he subsequently designed the Skinner box.

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145 Words | 1 Pages

In total, Skinner published nearly two hundred articles and over twenty books. Skinner continued to write about his life and theories until he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1989. Today Skinner's preferred field of behaviorism is no longer a dominant school of thought, but his developments in operant conditioning continues to be used by mental health professionals who use reinforcement and punishment to alter behavior in the classroom and even by animal trainers. His work won him several awards from 1966 to 1990 including the Edward Lee Thorndike Award, the National Merit of Science from President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation and the Human of the Year Award and the Citation for Outstanding

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1014 Words | 5 Pages

Thus, when a child shows distress they should be immediately removed from the study. In addition to this, the findings show that after the test, a lot of the children discontinued wetting the bed, taking a bottle and there were no negative changes in sleep pattern (Bain et al, 1958). Therefore this may have impacted the psychological field as the features of the experiment may have lead to these neutral or positive changes in

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2094 Words | 9 Pages

The Little Albert experiment was a case study showing empirical evidence of classical conditioning in humans. The study also provides an example of stimulus generalization. It was carried out by John B. Watson and his graduate student, Rosalie Rayner, at Johns Hopkins University. The results were first published in the February 1920 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. After observing children in the field, Watson hypothesized that the fearful response of children to loud noises is an innate unconditioned response.

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1680 Words | 7 Pages

She also sees worth in the boxes; however, Ascher does not understand what the worth of the boxes is to the Box Man. Ascher uses words like “willed” (paragraph 1) and “unselfconsciously” (paragraph 3) to display admiration for the Box Man and to display desire to see through the Box Man’s eyes. By setting up her feelings in this way, Ascher instills in her audience those feelings and a need to satisfy curiosity. Her admiration of the Box Man comes from feelings of similarity and a wish to learn what she feels she should know, but what she can only find out by

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936 Words | 4 Pages

Nevertheless, Skinner points out that children learn nothing from the punishment. Instead, they may start to work out how to avoid it (Nolan & Raban, 2015). Another concept is classical conditioning (classical behaviorism) that emphasizes on the relation between stimuli and response. This concept embodies in a famous experiment, in which the food is presented to the dog when the bell rings, and the bell becomes a conditioned stimulus for the dog (Nolan & Raban, 2015). Likewise, if children receive toys in the condition that they behave well, then they will probably repeat this behavior to get the toys.

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2548 Words | 11 Pages

Introduction Learning enables you as an individual, to gain more knowledge about something which you have never learned about. Learning also has to do with past experiences which are influenced by behavioural changes (Weiten, 2016). There are different types of ways to learn; through, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning which will be discussed and analysed in the essay.   Behaviourism Behaviourism is considered one of the main subjects in psychology and the two main people who founded behaviourism were, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, also known as B.F Skinner and Ivan Pavlov who were famous for the work they did on classical and operant conditioning (Moderato & Presti, 2006). According to Moderato and Presti

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1125 Words | 5 Pages

In contrast to Redl and Wattenberg 's theories about teachers; Skinner 's theory states that behaving students will continue to demonstrate positive behavior. The misbehaving students, desiring the positive reinforcement, will begin to behave appropriately. Redl and Wattenberg 's (1959) theories have contributed significantly to classroom management. Middle school educators can take several directions from those theories. Some of which are understanding group dynamics where one 6th-grade teacher established a rule that students must raise their hands to answer a question.

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926 Words | 4 Pages

The Positive and Negative of Operant Conditioning and The Most Effective Method There are many ways we can come about in behavior. An American psychologist, B.F. Skinner, introduced the theory of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is known as associative learning and a learning process. The theory is made up of two factors in which behavior is modified through either reinforcement and or punishment.

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1404 Words | 6 Pages

Then, it was B.F. Skinner who made the concept became popular and well-known throughout the world and even pinned the name of operant conditioning to this concept That is why, he is called the Father of Operant Conditioning and his famous experiment, the Skinner Box. Operant conditioning determinants’ are reinforce, nature response and time interval between response and reinforcement. On the other hand, classical conditioning is a learning way that connects between two stimuli which produce natural response. It measures one stimulus that

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