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September 12, 2004
REVIEW: Rational or rationalizing?
KNOWN best for her Prozac Diary, Lauren Slater has always made her mind her subject and come at it from all angles. The thing that has sustained her slightly mad and sometimes maddening introspection, however, is the brilliance her mind proves itself capable of, and the unfailing curiosity about what makes her — and, by extension, perhaps all of us — tick. Both of these qualities are to the fore in Opening Skinner’s Box, an inspired history of humanity in the 20th century as told through 10 psychological experiments.
Some of these experiments — Stanley Milgram’s inquiry into authority and obedience, for example, or B.F. Skinner’s conclusions about controlling behaviour through reward — may be familiar to the general reader, at least in outline. All of the others, including David Rosenhan’s exploration of sanity in insane environments, or Bruce Alexander’s work with the cultural enforcement of addiction, deserve to be. Slater approaches all ten with a novelist’s sense of narrative that humanizes the science (or pseudo-science) of their findings.
She begins with Skinner, the first behaviourist, who infamously used his infant daughter, Deborah, to prove his theories by putting her, for a few hours a day, in a laboratory box (named ‘Heir Conditioner’) in which all her needs were controlled and shaped. Slater’s approach to this story is typical. She interrogates colleagues who knew Skinner and who now tend to rubbish him.
She then tries out some of the psychologist’s reward systems on her own daughter and finds they work frighteningly well. And she goes in search of Deborah Skinner, once her father’s captive audience, now in hiding. She finds instead his other daughter, who relates family secrets and reveals her own controlled shrine to her dad: his study, exactly as he left it a decade ago when he died at his desk, down to a half-finished piece of chocolate. Slater persuades the daughter to let her go through his box files, with titles like ‘Pigeons playing ping pong’ and ‘Am I a humanist?’ And then, the daughter’s back turned, she surprises herself by taking a bite out of the late behaviourist’s dusty chocolate and leaves her own mark on the story.
The intervention is appropriate given that all the while, as she rakes through these histories, Slater weighs her shifting responses, feeling the ethical debates on her own pulse. There is some nicely drawn comedy in this, and also a refusal to let things settle, as Skinner and the rest often wanted to let them settle, into easy coherence.
If Slater’s subjects often appeared to be looking for affirmation of their own pain, they also seemed destined to explain their historical moment. In 1961, with the world still struggling with the implications of the Holocaust, Milgram devised his experiment that proved that in certain environments two-thirds of us would be easily persuadable to kill if told to do so.
Milgram’s chilling results, obtained when volunteers delivered apparently fatal electric shocks to strangers as part of a ‘scientific experiment’, explained for many the mass dehumanization of SS guards. When Slater tracked down some of Milgram’s subjects — a man who would have delivered a fatal shock and one who said no and stopped when he heard the ‘patient’s’ screams — the story becomes more murky.
She looks for evidence of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, the idea that man is not a rational but a rationalizing being, adjusting belief to fit behaviour, forever making palatable fiction out of unwelcome fact. With her ready skepticism, Slater visits the shrine of a young girl in a coma, kept on life support by a mother who believes she can perform miracles and was chosen for this purpose. All is not quite what she — or Festinger — might have expected, but Slater lets the story find its own ending, with saints perhaps crying and wounds apparently healing and the thought that just maybe “God makes himself known through a cheap plastic relic in a ranch-style house”.
She gets away with such moments of credulity because the nature of her quest seems to invite them. The more she examines the classic investigations of the human mind, the more she finds those investigations fraught with human frailty. Her stories suggest our advancing knowledge of motivation is fleeting and circumspect and that behaviour refuses grand theories. “We try this and that. We love and work... we live our lives,” she writes. Her book is about as good a demonstration of this principle as I can imagine. —Dawn/Observer News Service
Opening Skinner’s Box
By Lauren Slater
Bloomsbury
ISBN 0747563179
276pp. £16.95
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