Opening Skinners Box : Chapters 9 & 10

Chapter 9: Memory Inc.

    Chapter 9 is about human memory and various nuances and studies revolving around human memory. It looks into research into enzymes in the brain, various memory centers around the brain. The most interesting part of the study is a man named Henry. He has his hippocampus literally sucked out of his head. Afterwards he cannot develop new memories. He remembers memories from before the surgery though. Henry is really interesting, otherwise the chapter was pretty boring.

Chapter 10: Chipped

     Chapter 10 is a chapter about the history of psycho surgery and psycho pharmacological drugs. The chapters main subject is a Dr. Mortiz, a Portuguese scientist who basically invented psycho surgery by going around the world and cutting people up. There's ethical stipulations that come from his actions are mentioned but not gone into detail. It then later goes up to modern history and the current process of psycho medical procedures. This chapter is real cool, the stories and processes described are really interesting. I'm surprised that the author didn't attempt brain surgery on herself at the end of this chapter

Opening Skinner's Box: Chapters 7 & 8

Chapter 7

Chapter 7 is all about addiction. It follows an interesting experiment in which a young Bruce Alexander believes that substance addiction is more of a social construct and not a biological one. He tests this theory with the 'Rat Park'. In the rat park Alexander creates an ideal environment for rats and then just a cage. In both environments he feeds the rats morphine water and in the ideal environment the rats resist it, preferring normal water instead. He does several variations of this and shows that addiction is more a social construct, as the caged rats always prefer the morphine water and the rat park rats always prefer normal water. I thought this was interesting, but the rats weren't in just a good environment  they were in a ideal one. So its really kind of hard to equate this to human beings. Also there's a bit at the end where the author experiments on herself....it's so stupid! Dear god, if she removed the last page of every chapter, they'd be alot better.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 is all about memory. Basically this chapter is about a psychologist who thinks that repressed memories are bullshit and that memory is fleeting and unreliable by nature. She proves this by inserting false memories into subjects via only suggestion and watches as the subjects begin describing the false memories more vividly as time goes on. This chapter actually scared me because I don't want people inserting false memories into me, it makes me not take my memories for granted.

Opening Skinners Box: Chapters 5 & 6

Chapter 5: Quieting the Mind

     Chapter 5 explores the science of cognitive dissonance. It begins with it's history and describes a small cult back in 1954 that was stationed in Minneapolis. They believed (sincerely) that the world was going to end  in December. Obviously they were wrong, but what's interesting is they very quickly and firmly reshaped their beliefs to match the fact that the world had not in fact ended. This leads to the theory of cognitive dissonance, which is basically that we restructure our world view to fit our already held beliefs. This chapter was very interesting, especially the christian family at the end. But I was upset at how cruel, insensitive, and stupid the author seemed  at times. I don't quite believe everything she wrote but the chapter was very interesting.

Chapter 6: Monkey Love

     This part of the book is basically the story of Harry Harlow, who is renowned for his experiments with baby rhesus monkeys. The chapter basically goes in chronological order starting with his childhood, going through his early adult and successful years and eventually to his late death. The history seems to mostly focus on his relationships with others as well as his scientific contributions. The life of Dr. Harlow comes of as a tragedy in this chapter and again, I'm not sure how much I believe it. Dr. Harlows work is fascinating and I'm glad she included this chapter because he did some landmark work. Toward the end she has a section about animal rights, which while important, don't really feel like they belong in the framework of the chapter.

Opening Skinner's Box Chapter 3 & 4

Chapter 3 - Of Sane People in Insane Places

This chapter is very interesting. The author describes the research of Dr. Rosenthal where he fakes his way into a psychiatric ward, and then begins acting normal the very second he is admitted. When he is in the ward he us treated badly, forced to take medicine, and doesn't get released for 19 days. He has 8 of his friends do  the same thing in different wards and they all get the same results. Afterwards Dr. Rosenthal published his findings in Science  and lit the world of psychiatric analysis on fire. He basically debunked a science and met alot of opposition.  The author reenacted the experiment and didn't meet the same results. In my opinion, the original study by Rosenthal is incredibly interesting. I can't believe that there would be such inherent wrongness in psychology. It's scary almost, I don't think I want to ever see a psychologist because I think I'd get diagnosed with something, regardless of what mental condition I'm in.

Chapter 4 - In the unlikely event of a water landing

This chapter is about a murder that took place in downtown New York that took place over 45 minutes. A lady got stabbed several times and raped right in the middle of the street. People turned on their lights and told them to quiet down, but no one came and helped. A few weeks later the NY Times publish an article about the unusual behavior of the witnesses and this set of some experiments. This eventually leads to the idea of diffusion of responsibility. Which is, the discovery that people seem to be less likely to take action or help someone when surrounded by other people. This chapter, which inherently cool, bored me. Which is mostly because I've already learned about this experiment in detail in previous years. But it does make sense and I've seen it happen before.

Obedience to Authority Book Review

     I actually knew about Stanley Milgrams experiment well before this class or reading this book. I've always thought that its crazy the extent someone will go when responding to authority. Its unsettling because it takes people whom we would think are monsters, such as guards of concentration camps and military torturers and takes them from the 'Monster' pedestal and puts them on our level. It's disturbing for people to have to confront the fact that the actions of people who have been considered evil are not committed by monsters, but by humans like you or me. The experiment also raised alot of ethical issues, is it right to tell someone that they would do such a thing? I don't know but it certainly is interesting.
     On another note, the book itself is an awful, awful, just awful read. Like, this book is the World Heavy Weight Champion of beating a dead horse. We get a chapter looking at social issues. And then 13 chapters of experiments. It's basically a.) we did the obedience experiment b.) we did it again, there was a chipmunk in the room, we can conclude chipmunks don't effect the outcome. The writing is good and straightforward, and I understand that after doing so many experiments, Dr. Milgram would want to publish them. But holy mother of god, I would not read that again. I found it really difficult to remain interested. It's like when you're watching a movie and you can tell what the ending is going to be halfway through, but then you have to watch it several more times. So, let me make this clear, the experiment is awesome. I've always thought this experiment is a phenomenal idea and I'm glad they've done it. The book though, isn't quite so great.

Obedience to Authority

Chapter 1
Chapter 1 describes the background and sets up the framework for the rest of the book. It's put in the book to define social issues that persist today in society.

Chapter 2
Chapter 2 describes the experiment in explicit detail. It goes over locations, details, and how they legitimize the experiment. Interestingly enough, Milgram goes through several iterations of his experiment to find out how to get people to stand up to authority and its already a stark indicator of how much people obey authority.

Chapter 3 
Chapter 3 is basically results as predicted by the common man. Almost everyone thought that the experiment would stop sooner than later.

Chapter 4
Chapter 4 focuses mostly on how user proximity effects the experiment and it's results. Basically, if someone is real close to you, you'll probably stop sooner. On the other side of the coin, if someone if insanely far away, you probably won't start.

Chapter 5
This chapter about peoples responses to the experiments. The standout example is the guy who laughed. We talked about him in class.

Chapter 6
Chapter 6 opens up alot of different variables in the experiments. Location, validity, experimenters, distances from experimenters, it all changed. I personally think it's crazy how almost none of these changed variables did anything.

Chapter 7
Chapter 7 is about the personalities and actions of the teachers in the experiment. It focuses on how they addressed the experimenter regardless of what was going on.

Chapter 8
Chapter 8 shows several variations on the roles in the experiments. As always in this book, the results are largely the same.

Chapter 9
Chapter 9  focuses on the effects of peers in the experiment. Even though they might have rebellious peers people still seemed meek in front of authority.

Chapter 10
Chapter 10 is straight philosophical! Milgram goes on and on about how obedience in society is a evolutionary trait of ours. It makes alot of sense!

Chapter 11
This chapter further explores the role of obidience in society and how it effects the subject in his experiments. He also talks about the relationship between the experimenter and the subject.

Chapter 12
Twelve revolves around the emotional impact the experiment has the on subjects. It goes in depth into the mental hurdles that a man goes through when he makes these descisions.

Chapter 13
Here, Milgram establishes that people aren't just gigantic assholes and are just conforming to authority.

Chapter 14
Chapter 14 addressed the 3 primes criticisms of his experiments.

Chapter 15
Chapter 15, the epilogue, basically goes into dark philosophy. It evaluates the results and how they effect our perception on our past. And also what it means is possible in the future.

Book Response: Gang Leader for a Day

Gang Leader for a Day

    So, of all the readings we've done in class, this is by far the most interesting. Gang Leader for a Day is written by a young Sudhir Venkatesh in the early 90's as he discovers and follows a gang leader in urban Chicago and learns about the different lifestyles there. The book is a New York Times best seller and is written in much of the same style as what's found in 'Freakanomics'.

    The book follows Sudhir as he befriends J.T. a gang leader of the Black Kings and follows J.T. as he shows him a filtered view of gang life in Chicago. Sudhir becomes enthralled with the culture, spending the next six years with the black kings, taking time to learn not only of J.T. but the workers, the squatters, the residents, the cops, and Ms. Bailey.