Beth tells me she won�t be able to respond to my last message on *Opening Skinner�s Box* until later today, so that gives me the chance to get in a sneaky one before she gets her say.
I checked out the chapter on Skinner in *Opening Skinner�s Box* again, and Slater is definitely exonerated. Here is what she writes (p. 24): �The baby box, it turns out, was really no more than an upgraded playpen in which young Deborah spent a few hours a day. It all seems, without a doubt, good intentioned, if not noble, and sets Skinner firmly in humane waters.� Perusing the book, I had a sense that it makes for interesting, and often informative reading. I suspect the lay reader (and not so lay) can learn about, and be induced to think about, many issues relating to the important experiments in psychology that she surveys. And yet� it is difficult not to have serious reservations about the book. Some academics that she interviewed state she has misrepresented what they said to her in interviews. Recall that Jeff Nagelbush (16 March) copied a SCCPNET list serve message from Michael B. Miller (Assistant Professor, Division of Epidemiology and Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota) reporting that �Slater interviewed Robert Spitzer, Elizabeth Loftus, Jerome Kagan and that Julie Vargas (BF Skinner's daughter) for her book, but all four of those interviewees have sent e-mails to Spitzer and others (and I have seen those e-mails) stating that Slater fabricated parts of their interviews and had attributed words to them that they hadn't uttered and ideas to them that they hadn't endorsed.� Miller also notes that �Scott Lilienfeld at Emory and Bob Spitzer at N.Y. State Psychiatric Institute have been finding many serious mistakes in Slater's description of the Rosenhan study. Lilienfeld also found egregious errors in Slater's account of the Milgram study.� It is interesting to note the following paragraphs from a generally favourable review of *Opening Skinner�s Box* in the (London) Mail on Sunday (longer extract appended below).The reviewer, Craig Brown, reproduces several paragraphs of a conversation between Loftus and Slater, then comments: �But did this conversation actually take place? Throughout the book, Slater shows an artist's instinct for perceiving the strange and often contradictory forces that drive human beings. She is peculiarly adept at showing the other side of the coin, the real story behind the first impression. Sometimes, though, one wishes she were a little less artistic and rather more strictly factual. �It does not boost one's confidence in her judgment, for instance, that within the space of two lines she manages to spell the names of two famous psychologists wrong: Thomas Szasz she spells 'Sasz' and R. D. Laing she spells 'Lang'. She also writes 'per se' as 'per say', which makes you wonder if she knows what it means. �These might seem like pedantic quibbles, but there are important passages where one is led to wonder whether, to put it kindly, her creativity hasn't got the better of her veracity.� To which I add the following. The extracts in the Guardian on 31 January included the following paragraph about Slater�s attempt to replicate Rosenhan�s psychiatric hospital experiment (www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1134329,00.html ): �It's a little fun, going into ERs and playing this game, so over the next eight days I do it eight more times, nearly the number of admissions Rosenhan arranged. Each time, I am denied admission, but, strangely enough, most times I am given a diagnosis of depression with psychotic features, even though, I am now sure, after a thorough self-inventory and the solicited opinions of my friends and my physician brother, I am really not depressed� I am prescribed a total of 25 antipsychotics and 60 antidepressants�� When I read that paragraph at the time, alarm bells rang. In a total of eight visits to ER departments, is it likely that Slater would have been prescribed no less than 25 antipsychotics and 60 antidepressants? Maybe she was, maybe she wasn�t � but that�s what troubled me about the book. Like Craig Brown, I found myself wondering just how much of her accounts, whether about her own experiences, or those of others, are true. Maybe the great bulk of it is true, but which parts are not? Who knows? (Some people who know more than me about the experiments, and the conversations, have taken issue with what she has written, so some of what is untrue may come to light in the coming weeks.) A book by a writer who, according to the cover, �sets out to investigate the twentieth century through a series of fascinating, witty and sometimes shocking accounts of its key psychological experiments� should not have one constantly wondering if this or that is a passably accurate account of the events it purports to describe. If Slater has no pretensions to accuracy, if it is a book merely expressing her own reactions to what she is investigating as much as it is about the experiments and conversations themselves, then she should say so frankly, so that the book is advertised as a partly imaginative excursion through the experiments and the lives of the scientists concerned (both directly and indirectly). I don�t want to make this posting too long, but here�s an example of Slater�s approach: She interviews the psychologist Bryan Parker, and after questioning him about Deborah and the famous box, she asks him �Was she [Deborah] dead?� �Parker misses just the slightest beat, or do I imagine it?� � �No,� he finally says. He clears his throat. �Deborah Skinner is alive.� His voice drops. �And she�s doing fine really.� �But there�s something in the way he delivers this that makes me doubt him. There�s a suspicious sympathy in his voice; as though she�s just survived some horrid kind of surgery.� For my part, there�s something in the way Slater delivers her account that makes me doubt her, and has me wondering how much I can trust from someone with such an overheated imagination. Why should we take seriously the interpolations implying that Parker has something to hide. He may, or may not, but not for one moment would I trust Slater�s insinuation that he does. Slater describes going on to search out Deborah in the States (unsuccessfully), finally turning up her sister Julie Varga, whom she interviews. But if she was as keen to find Deborah as she says, why didn�t she get her address or phone number in England from Julie Varga? (Nowhere does she say that she asked for it, and was denied it. Deborah herself has made clear that she would have liked to have had the opportunity to give her story directly before the book was published.) A final more trivial point. Craig Brown (quoted above) noted that Slater gets the names of two famous psychologists wrong, writing Szasz as 'Sasz' and R. D. Laing as 'Lang'. I checked the index and found neither of these individuals there. That had me wondering about Brown�s statement � until I thought to check Charcot, Janet, and Bertrand Russell, all mentioned in passing in the book. None of them is in the index. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 -------------------------------------------- Excerpt-- from the Mail on Sunday (London), February 15, 2004; Pg. 69, a review of "Opening Skinner's Box" by Craig Brown. One particularly meaty chapter deals with the fashion in the Nineties - propagated in America by Oprah Winfrey and Roseanne Barr - for suddenly remembering that a close relative had abused you as a child. 'If you think you were abused, then you were,' Oprah Winfrey used to tell her viewers, with monstrous omniscience. Slater writes of an iconoclastic experimental psychologist called Elizabeth Loftus who has devoted her life to exposing this as nonsense. 'Only the flimsiest curtain separates reality from imagination,' she maintains and Slater appears to agree with her. 'Memory,' she writes, 'is as slippery as a stream, as unreliable as a rat.' In one experiment, Loftus set out to prove how easy it is to implant a false memory in a human being. She presented her subjects with made-up evidence that, as children, they had been lost in a shopping mall. Twenty-five per cent of her subjects then suddenly remembered this non-existent event, most of them providing more and more details to support the story of their forgotten trauma. The results seemed to show that a persuasive therapist could easily implant a memory of incest in a patient's brain, regardless of whether or not there was any truth in it. But there is, of course, a different way of looking at it. Supporters of the if-you-think-you-were-abused-then-you-were school point out that the vast majority - 75 per cent - of Loftus's subjects did not succumb to her suggestions. And on closer investigation by Slater, Loftus herself appears a little kooky, to put it mildly, often bursting into tears, slamming down the phone and taking her cause to such an extreme length that she has appeared as an expert witness for the defence in support of such obvious creeps and charlatans as the parent-murdering Menendez brothers and the serial killer Ted 'Son of Sam' Bundy. 'Talking to her, feeling her highflying energy, the zeal that burns up the centre of her life, you have to wonder why,' writes Slater. 'You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her?' It turns out that indeed it did: when she was 14, Loftus's mother drowned in the family swimming pool. 'Was it suicide?' asks Slater, over the phone. Loftus replies they'll never know, but that 'it doesn't matter'. 'What doesn't matter?' asks Slater. 'Whether it was or it wasn't. It doesn't matter because it's all going to be OK.' The line then goes silent. 'You there?' says Slater. 'Oh, I'm here,' replies Loftus. 'Tomorrow, I'm going to Chicago, some guy on death row, I'm gonna save him. I gotta testify. Thank God I have my work . . . Without it, where would I be?' But did this conversation actually take place? Throughout the book, Slater shows an artist's instinct for perceiving the strange and often contradictory forces that drive human beings. She is peculiarly adept at showing the other side of the coin, the real story behind the first impression. Sometimes, though, one wishes she were a little less artistic and rather more strictly factual. It does not boost one's confidence in her judgment, for instance, that within the space of two lines she manages to spell the names of two famous psychologists wrong: Thomas Szasz she spells 'Sasz' and R. D. Laing she spells 'Lang'. She also writes 'per se' as 'per say', which makes you wonder if she knows what it means. These might seem like pedantic quibbles, but there are important passages where one is led to wonder whether, to put it kindly, her creativity hasn't got the better of her veracity. For example, the mesmerising title story, Opening Skinner's Box, charts the career of a bizarre behavioural psychologist called B. F. Skinner who, it was rumoured, kept his baby daughter in a box for two years in order to shape her future behaviour. The rumour went on to suggest that in later life his traumatised daughter killed herself in a hotel room. Slater sets out to investigate this rumour, and, after many twists and turns, discovers that the box was a safe and luxurious playpen, and that the baby daughter spent only a few hours a day in it. Nor did she commit suicide: in fact, she is now said to be an artist living in England. All very interesting, but in tiny print in the endnotes Slater recommends a 'thorough and thoughtful' biography of Skinner, published ten years ago. Presumably, when Slater read this thorough biography she discovered the rumours were false - in which case, why does she then make such a to-do about tracking them down? There are quite a few similar moments when one thinks: 'Yes, but ...' However, despite a surplus of poetry and a lack of cold facts, Opening Skinner's Box is an endless delight, and the author's rebellious nature gives her the courage to remain at odds with by far the most decadent tenet of modern psychology - that feeling good is more important than being good. ---------------------- Extract from Michael B. Miller�s message on SCCPNET list serve: [�] Slater interviewed Robert Spitzer, Elizabeth Loftus, Jerome Kagan and Julie Vargas (BF Skinner's daughter) for her book, but all four of those interviewees have sent e-mails to Spitzer and others (and I have seen those e-mails) stating that Slater fabricated parts of their interviews and had attributed words to them that they hadn't uttered and ideas to them that they hadn't endorsed. [�] Slater has received a letter (from Spitzer, Lilienfeld, Loftus, Martin EP Seligman and others) asking for details on her replication of Rosenhan's study, but she has not responded. Michael B. Miller, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Division of Epidemiology and Institute of Human Genetics University of Minnesota ----------------- Extract from *Opening Skinner�s Box*, The Guardian, January 31, 2004 www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1134329,00.html Into the cuckoo's nest part II It's a little fun, going into ERs and playing this game, so over the next eight days I do it eight more times, nearly the number of admissions Rosenhan arranged. Each time, I am denied admission, but, strangely enough, most times I am given a diagnosis of depression with psychotic features, even though, I am now sure, after a thorough self-inventory and the solicited opinions of my friends and my physician brother, I am really not depressed. (As an aside, but an important one, a psychotic depression is never mild; in the DSM, it is listed in the severe category, accompanied by gross and unmistakable motor and intellectual impairments.) I am prescribed a total of 25 antipsychotics and 60 antidepressants. At no point does an interview last longer than 12 and a half minutes, although at most places I needed to wait an average of two and a half hours in the waiting room. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
