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Summary: THANK GOD FOR LAUREN SLATER
Review: ...or if not God, then whatever and whoever is responsible for her talent and insight. And if not a universal force, then maybe it's conditioning, free will or whatever psychological theory you subscribe to that formed her brilliant mind. I subscribe to the idea that Slater is always a step ahead, a real thinker in an age of dull "thuds" and a writer who compels me to pick up her books. I laughed outloud at her metaphors (pumpkins all seedy in a discussion of brains) and her humor (not being able to spell her assumed name). But most of all, in this book, she tells the truth about the psychological hoo-ha we've all been through and if that threatens the status quo, so be it. Bravo for her. Her work is important and how often can that be said?
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Summary: excellent prose, fascinating stories
Review: In response to the reviewer below, I thought Lauren Slater's prose was beautiful and her characters surely got under my skin. Her description of the Milgram experiment, her fantastic chapter on the work of addiction's researcher Bruce Alexander, the last chapter on psychosurgery -- all of it makes for a book you can't put down.
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Summary: Unreadably overwritten
Review: Slater has OD'd on early Tom Wolfe, but she lacks Wolfe's ability to get under the skin of his subjects. Slater's prose is heated up but the author's viewpoint remains entirely anchored within herself. The most vivid psychological lesson of the book has to do with the author's self-absorption.
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Summary: a great book
Review: I'm loving OSB; I'm almost to the end and I have found it to be one of the most insightfulbooks re: psychology that I've read in a long time. Great book!
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Summary: Amazing Book
Review: It's an amazing, beautiful, brave and brilliant book, one meant to raise vital issues for the common reader. "Who are we? What makes us human? Are we truly the authors of our own lives? What does it mean to be moral? What does it mean to be free?" (Opening Skinner's Box, page 3) Yet those who perseverate on items best left to copyeditors and factcheckers threaten any chance at genuine conversation. Again, read Slater in her Introduction: "Our lives, after all, are not data points and means and modes; they are stories--absorbed, reconfigured, rewritten."
Her book and its reception is perhaps a psychological experiment of the 21st century, one in which too contemporaries in Psychology come across as viscious, vengeful, myopic, and just darn illiterate in the literary experiments of the 20th century essay.
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Summary: should be marketed as fiction
Review: Slater is a talented writer but a terrible reporter who ignores facts when they are inconvenient to the story she is spinning. (see articles in the Times of London and the New York Times this month) Her editors have compounded the problem. What actually happened and and what's a product of Slater's imagination? Hard to tell. This edition of the book should be withdrawn from the market and reissued with all its errors corrected.
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Summary: The book that frightens the psychological establishment
Review: This is a book that many well-established figures in psychology and psychiatry consider heretical. Why? First off, it devotes a chapter to Rosenhan's classic study, which irrefutably demonstrates how undependable psychiatric diagnoses are-- a demonstration that clinical psychiatry found (and still finds) profoundly embarrassing. When Slater repeats some portion of this study, she finds that the zeal to pathologize patients has been replaced by a zeal to prescribe them drugs, hinting at the collusion between the psychiatric field and big pharma. Psychiatry as a field would rather leave the topics both of its own unreliability and its intimate relationship to drug manufacturers untouched.In another chapter, Slater describes the brilliant work of Bruce Alexander, who demonstrates that addiction derives from an attempt to adapt to difficult circumstances, not from pharmacological properties of certain drugs. If his work were given the credit it deserves, the drug treatment industry would be exposed as the canard that it is, and all the professionals who earn their money based on the decisions other people make about drug use would be forced to do something useful instead. Furthermore, the government would be forced to clean up the slums, and offer people a healthful place to live and a decent job. These are not the types of conclusions that the many people who profit from the drug war want you to hear. Finally, in Slater's stunning chapter on psychosurgery, she forces us to consider the unthinkable: that carving a slice out of a living brain may be more specific in its effect, and less deleterious to the overall health of the organism, then the consumption of psychiatric drugs. While lobotomies are no panacea, Prozac and all its cousins may be worse (you'll have to read the chapter to understand this point-- I can't do justice to the idea in a few sentences). How anxious do you think the folks at Pfizer or Eli-Lily, or their many well-remunerated stooges among the psychiatric establishment, are to have you read these ideas? It isn't any error in the text that bothers this book's detractors; it is instead precisely what Slater gets correct that troubles them so. I say more power to Slater for her to willingness to confront the established powers! Practically every chapter presents ideas that are subversive to the established order, which is why this text scares the people who depend on the very myths Slater artfully skewers. Read this important book.
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Summary: Opening Skinner's Box
Review: This book brings recent psychological experiments alive and makes them relevant now. Each chapter is a different study made personal and meaningful by Dr. Slater. The book is easy to read and when you finished, you will stop and think about the studies and what they mean today.
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Summary: Scientists and their experiments come to life
Review: I knew Fred Skinner personally when I was at Harvard, and I also met Stanley Milgram. So it was with great curiosity that I picked up Opening Skinner's Box. The portraits Slater paints of these great men and their experiments are true to my memory, but there's something more as well. Slater made me see, or rather think about, Skinner and Milgram (plus their work) in ways I had not considered before. This is the book's great strength. It asks counterintuitive questions and examines all sides of an issue so that, in the end, the reader is left with a truly prismatic perspective. I hope Slater writes a second volume of Great Experiments. Ieagerly await it.
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Summary: If Only Lauren Slater Would Write an Intro Psychology Text
Review: I try to teach Intro to Psychology with candor and a real-world emphasis. Thank you, Lauren Slater, for emphasing candor and the real-world in your excellent book. Too many psychologists (particularly the authors of bland intro textbooks and self-help paperbacks) avoid the really tough real world implications and value of some of the greatest experiments of all time. Dr. Slater does an impressive job of showing that psychologists have taught us much about the human mind, including some things we might find it troubling to know. Do some adults invent childhood memories of abuse? Sometimes. Can almost anyone be persuaded do be immoral? Yes. Are some of our beliefs and convictions simply the result of learning, not free will? Sometimes. Is love all you really need to be happy and healthy? Maybe. Lauren offers these questions, insights, and much more. Please, Lauren, write an Introduction to Psychology textbook... or at least follow-up this book with a second volume dedicated to more compelling research. Your willingness to share the questions psychological experiments truly ask and answer is necessary to help students and others truly appreciate the complexity of the human mind. Until then, I await the paperback edition as an excellent resource for my introductory psychology students.
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