Free Will In Opening Skinner's Box By Lauren Slater

You see twenty dollar's fall out of a person's pocket, are you going to keep it for yourself or give it back to the unknowing person? The decision is your to make...not quite. In Lauren Slater's book, Opening Skinner’s Box, Slater studies B.F Skinner's experiments on reactions. In Slater's own research she meets Jerome Kagan who believes free will exist and even jumps under his desk to prove it. However, I disagree with Kagan's claim that by diving under his desk he is proving he has free will because he overlooks the fact that he was trained by his society to do so, people react based off operant conditioning and finally, determinism.

Jerome Kagan claims that jumping under the desk is a sign of his free will, when really it is just an example of how our society has held men higher than women. In Lauren Slater’s book, Opening Skinner's Box, Slater maintains that “Maybe he is acting out of a more problematic tradition, patriarchal and alone.” (28). In other words Slater believes that Kagan jumped under his desk because it is what our patriarchal society pushed him to do when questioned by a women. Kagan was trained in

This is the idea that people's behavior is based off of the consequences and reinforcements one receives. Slater agrees when she says, “Operant conditioning- a cold phrase for a concept that might really mean we are sculptors and sculpted, artist and artwork, responsible for the prompts we fashion.” (29). I making this comment Slater is agreeing that people are always in one of two positions. One is either the controller, giving reinforcements, or the controlled receiving the consequences they are given for their actions. Both people in these rolls are reacting based off the the reinforcements they are given. Their actions are pre-trained by cues they receive in their individual environments. Operant conditioning is another idea that goes against the idea of free