Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

Chapter 5, titled “Quieting the Mind: The Experiments of Leon Festinger,” examines cognitive dissonance, the psychological term for when a person’s beliefs are challenged or contradicted by circumstances or reality.

For example, Slater uses the story of a small cult in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to illustrate an example of cognitive dissonance: The cult believed that, on December 21, 1954, a select group of believers—the cult members—would be saved from the world’s destruction. To study cognitive dissonance, Leon Festinger, a psychologist at the nearby University of Minnesota, infiltrated the cult to observe their reactions and thought processes when the highly anticipated world’s ending did not come to pass. When the world did not end, the cult experienced cognitive dissonance:

Dissonance. A million fault lines in the earth, and the brain and all sorts of ways to sew them up […] What Festinger found, in his infiltration of the cult and in his readings of the history, was that it is precisely when a belief is just confirmed that the religious groups begin to proselytize, a sort of desperate disk defense mechanism (116).

The state of cognitive dissonance—“the disjunction between what one believes and the factual evidence” (116)—is an extremely uncomfortable state, so the mind rationalizes one’s beliefs to reconcile the dissonance.

Dissonance theory was a hotly discussed topic in American psychology at the time. After his study of the cult, Festinger conducted numerous other studies on cognitive dissonance. Festinger added to the field of psychology where Skinner left off: As a behaviorist, Skinner maintained that human action is primarily guided by mechanistic, physical responses; Festinger’s findings modified this, demonstrating the complicated “mental gymnastics” necessary to revert cognitive dissonance.

In her own exploration of cognitive dissonance, Slater meets with Linda Santo of Worcester, Massachusetts. Linda is the mother of Audrey, a girl who suffered irreparable brain damage when she drowned in her family’s swimming pool in 1987, an experience that left her completely mute and paralyzed. The Santo family is Catholic, and a few months after the accident, Linda began noticing that the “religious relics around Audrey’s bedside began to move” (119). Linda also reported that blood and scented oils would begin to ooze from those same religious relics. Soon, those with fatal illnesses would come to make pilgrimages to Audrey, and afterward, they would find their ailments miraculously healed.

Slater views the Santo story as “classic Festinger” in that Linda reconciles the tragedy of her daughter’s accident with the rationalization that the mute girl is now a saint, imbued with special powers. Slater presses Linda with difficult questions about Audrey and her Catholic faith. Linda recently received a stage 4 breast cancer diagnosis, so Slater asks why Audrey, who has allegedly healed severe illness in others, does not heal Linda’s cancer. Linda believes that Audrey takes on the pain of those that she heals; Linda replies to Slater by saying that, as a mother, it is her duty to alleviate pain from her child, not to burden her with even more pain. 

Slater’s visit to the Santo household makes her question Festinger’s findings on cognitive dissonance. Slater sees what Festinger’s research on the subject cannot: “Did Festinger ever consider how justifications are to save not only ourselves, but others too? Did he ever consider how lies and love are intertwined?” (127). Slater realizes that Linda’s cognitive dissonance is a form of “deep caring” and ruminates on how Festinger’s research did not take such sentiment into consideration:

[F]or this moment, hanging between dissonance and consonance, I am quiet. I am peaceful. This is what Festinger’s experiments missed, what it’s like to live in the gap between consonance and dissonance, where new series take shape, new beliefs are about to be born, or something much smaller, just a person, just me, with my hands held out, my body held high, wide open—no ending (131).

In Chapter 6, “Monkey Love: Harry Harlow’s Primates,” Slater examines the “science of touch” and “the psychology of attachment” borne from Harry Harlow’s experiments on infant primates in the early 1960s.

Harlow was born in 1905 in Iowa. Slater notes that he endured bouts of depression throughout his entire life, even during early childhood. As a child, Harlow took an interest in the arts, specifically poetry and drawing. After graduating high school, he went onto Stanford for both undergraduate and graduate work. Slater notes that Harlow found Stanford intimidating: “No place, Harlow often said, made him feel more insecure than Stanford. Therefore, he worked like a dog” (134). In 1930, Harlow got a job at the University of Wisconsin located in Madison and married fellow Stanford student Clara Mears, with whom he had one child.

Upon his arrival in Madison, Harlow began working with rhesus monkeys and performing experiments on them meant to upend the commonly held belief among psychologists that “drive reduction and its link to love” were inseparable. From the 1930s to the 1950s, this belief went “unquestioned” (135). Popular scientific opinion maintained that all human attachment was predicated on a reduction of primal needs such as hunger, thirst, or sex. Harlow questioned the idea of drive reduction as the primary link to love and set out to test his hypothesis on rhesus macaque monkeys.

In his first experiment, Harlow fashioned two kinds of “mothers”: One was a hard, wire silhouette with a single rubber bladder (equipped with milk) to mimic a monkey breast. The second “mother” was a soft, cardboard cutout draped in terrycloth. When infant monkeys where placed in the cage with their choice of these two “mothers,” Harlow observed that the monkeys preferred the terrycloth mother, even though she did not provide any food:

Harlow grasped the amount of time the monkey spent nursing versus cuddling, and his heart must’ve patted fast, for he was on the brink of discovery, and then he was over discovery’s edge. […] Here Harlow was establishing that love grows from touch, not taste, which is why, when the mother’s milk dries up, as it inevitably does, the child continues to love her, and then the child takes this love, the memory of it, and recasts it outward, so that every interaction is a replay and a revision of this early tactile touch (138).

This finding contradicted the drive reduction theory of love; Harlow and his team identified what they termed “contact comfort” as an elemental part of love. However, psychologists and the general public alike have criticized Harlow’s experiments, citing cruelty to animals:

Many have called Harlow’s experiments cruel—to yank apart mother and child, to devise wire feeding stations with sharp nipples, to listen to primates cry in grief, to watch them cling to mannequins because they have nothing else (140).

As the experiments went on, Harlow’s methods became increasingly sadistic. In later experiments, he devised something called the Iron Maiden—a wire mother that “shot out sharp spikes and blasted her babies with air so cold and forceful the infants were thrown back against the bars of their cages” (140). The Iron Maiden was to test the monkeys’ limits on attachment. Harlow noted that, no matter how much abuse the infant monkeys endured, they still clung to the Iron Maiden. This furthered the idea that attachment was based on something other than drive reduction.

Harlow’s experiments also contributed to our culture at large by sparking a movement of animal rights activists dedicated to preventing harmful scientific testing on animals of any kind. Slater approaches animal rights from both sides of the debate: She interviews animal rights activist Roger Fouts as well as Stuart Zola-Morgan, a researcher on memory who has relied heavily on animal testing for his work. Slater ponders if an animal life is worth as much as a human’s but does not come to a definitive conclusion: “It’s not at all as clear to me that human life has some intrinsically higher worth—no, not as clear to me at all. Not when I see a dolphin arcing out of the water, blowing jets of frost from that hole in its head” (151).

Although the abuse inflicted upon Harlow’s monkeys alarms Slater, she still sees value in his experiments; she argues with her husband whether it is morally wrong to test life-saving medications on animals. Slater goes to visit Harlow’s primate lab and holds one of the primates in her arms. With sympathy for Harlow, she imagines that the monkey she is holding there in the lab is Harlow reincarnated himself.

Chapter 7, “Rat Park: The Radical Addiction Experiment,” details the work of Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist who studied the nature of addiction. Using rats, Alexander conducted a series of experiments to counter the popular notion that substance abuse was “irresistible” due to physical, chemical dependency. Instead, Alexander found that cultural, not biological, factors are the primary drivers of addiction.

Slater tells the story of Emma Lowry, a middle-aged woman from New England, who underwent back surgery and over time developed an addiction to OxyContin: “[Emma] could, it seems, no more refuse these pills than a plant count deny the sun it tilts toward” (157). Emma Lowry illustrates a “common, undisputed” kind of story about addiction in the greater cultural context: Certain drugs are addictive not only because of their chemical composition, but also due to a biological propensity toward that addiction.

Alexander, however, made two radical claims that countered this notion: “[T]here is really nothing ‘inherently addictive’ about any drugs, and repeated exposures to even the most enticing drugs do not usually lead to problems” (158). As a heroin abuse counselor, Alexander noticed that his patients were primarily underprivileged, low-income people without access to helpful social structures. Alexander also noticed that not everyone who partook in drugs because an addict, so in the late 1970s, Alexander began to test his hypothesis that perhaps social forces were the primary, determining factor in who is driven to addiction.

Alexander wanted to see if rats would still partake in addictive substances if, instead of a cramped cage, he constructed them a spacious “rat park,” one that would provide an ideal social setting for rats. Alexander found that rats who lived in “rat park” resisted drinking the narcotic-laced substance, while rats in standard, cramped cages developed a dependency on the solution: “This rather stunning finding shows, perhaps most clearly of all, how rats, when in a ‘friendly’ place, will actually avoid anything, heroin included, that interrupts their normal social behaviors” (166). Alexander’s research implies that, if human beings have their basic social needs met, addiction is not an issue. Alexander tells Slater that he has never met an addict with “adequate internal and external resources” (179).

Alexander’s findings from “rat park” have been largely rejected by the scientific community: “Alexander is angry sometimes. He accuses the biomedical establishment of suppressing important scientific information about the complexity of the drugtaking for political purposes” (170). In this chapter, Slater also interviews Herb Kleber, a psychiatrist and substance abuse counselor from Yale, who opposes Alexander’s findings. He claims that undeniable evidence supports a biological basis for addiction, largely due to evidence shown in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) studies.

To delve more deeply into this debate, Slater tests the idea that there is a biological basis to addiction. For 57 days, she takes her husband’s hydromorphone pills, which he takes regularly for a chronic pain condition. At the end of the pseudo-experiment, Slater does not reach any definitive conclusion.