Opening Skinner's Box Analysis

Despite having autism, he was able to understand given math problems, knows how to spell words perfectly, and had a pretty big vocabulary for his age. However, he saw a word he didn 't know he got really frustrated. He felt very confused and felt that he was inferior to the other kids for not knowing a few words. His school work was like every other normal kid, about average. When it came to school work that required reasoning, he became utterly confused on the given assignment and decides to give up on it. This shows that Sean wants to be as smart as possible but he decides to block himself from trying to learn things that he can’t comprehend which is a bit understandable considering that this is occurring at such a young age. This behavior of his occurs again when Sean reaches his adolescence. He would ignore the things he didn’t know how to do or understand by either lying saying he knew how to do it or by saying things that were off topic. He was becoming even more aware of this behavior and his parents (Judy and Ron) were afraid he wouldn’t be able to do things like normal kids(drive a car, playing a musical instrument, sports,

Written by former NPR correspondent, Mary Louise Kelly, the story is interesting and kept my attention, however, I would not say it was heart-pounding.

In conclusion, I believe the way Slater presents her evidence is very convincing. She makes it a point to explain all of the controversial points that surround Stanley Milgram and his experiments. While we might not agree on all of her points, we both share the thought that Milgram and his experiments have affected positively despite the issues of its purpose, results, usefulness, and morality shroud the experiments in

This essay will discuss the role of ecological validity in psychological research, drawing on material from the DE100 textbook ‘Investigating Psychology’. It will begin by giving a description of what ecological validity is, and consider it in relation to different examples of research. The research used to discuss the role of ecological validity will be based around social learning and aggression, behaviourism, and memory. Firstly the study of Bandura et al. will be considered, his experiments on children copying violent behaviours using the Bobo doll experiment. Then the Skinner box will be discussed, finally leading to the studies of Loftus and Palmer on the link between language and memory. The role and importance of ecological validity in each body of research will be discussed and evaluated.

In Lauren Slater book “Opening Skinner’s Box” her main argument is about who Skinner was and what he did. Some might ask why do we need to know about Skinner if we have never heard of someone with that name? Basically why was he important or what he did was important? Slater mentions that skinner had a daughter was he using her to help him find out new experiments?

At Yale University, Stanley Milgram a psychologist carried out the most famous study of obedience in psychology. The experiment was focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal ethics. In 1963, Milgram was interested in researching how far a person would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Milgram was interested to see how an individual could be influenced by committing murders, for instance the Germans in World War II. Milgram wanted to investigate whether Germans were obedient to their superiors as that was the common explanation for assassinations in the Nazi in World War II. At Yale University, Milgram selected participants by placing an announcement that was printed in the newspaper highlighting the male participants to take part in the study of learning.

Although there were no drugs used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, there was physical and mental abuse used in the experiment. The Stanford prison experiment started in 1971 and was conducted by psychologist by the name of Phillip Zimbardo. The Stanford Prison Experiment continues the steady theme of controversial psychological experiments because of its lasting impacts on the participants. In the experiment, Zimbardo tried to prove idea of Dispositional factors. Dispositional factors are when the personality traits or the motives of people change from the different circumstances at which they are involved (Phelvin 2014). The author of the journal, Andrew Phelvin, discussed the experiment in depth and where the idea had lacked. Phelvin explains

Both behaviorism and psychoanalysis do not believe in the concept of free will in humans and they are both deterministic. Behavioral approach assets that the environment and the consequences of behavior control people while psychoanalysis believe that people are controlled by their unconscious drives. Through his observations, Freud believed that childhood experiences could lead to emotional problems in adulthood. Skinner in his experiment proved that behavior that produces pleasurable consequences is likely to be repeated whilst that which produces negative consequences is stamped out.

The presuppositions I had before taking this class concerning the history of psychology were based on the things I had learned previously about the founding fathers of psychology. The thoughts that I had were that many of the founding fathers were not very stable themselves. I also had learned that there was a lot of cocaine abuse in those early days, which added to my disrespect for some of the people who had been instrumental in launching psychology as a scientific study. In addition to the lack of faith in the character of these founding fathers, I had also come to the conclusion that they had very little solid data for their conclusions and even among their peers there was a lot of skepticism regarding their conclusions. Without measurable research based on solid data and controlled studies that the field of psychology has had to fight hard to become a reputable science.

The movie “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” gives an inside look into the life of a patient living in a mental institution; helping to give a new definition of mental illnesses. From a medical standpoint, determinants of mental illness are considered to be internal; physically and in the mind, while they are seen as external; in the environment or the person’s social situation, from a sociological perspective (Stockton, 2014). Additionally, the movie also explores the idea of power relations that exist between an authorized person (Nurse Ratched) and a patient and further looks into the punishment a deviant actor receives (ie. McMurphy contesting Nurse Ratched).

Skinners experiment was standardised and controlled it made the study more reliable because there were no influences from other factors like extraneous variables/confounding variables.This shows that researchers could have compromised ecological validity for other factors that are just as important in psychological

The first thing we discussed was classical conditioning. It sort of all started after Pavlov’s experiment with the dogs. John B. Watson, a psychologist, began his testing on emotional conditioning. John’s theory was that people are not born with a fear of objects. He persisted to hypothesize that we do have to learn to be surprised or frightened, it happens automatically. John organized tests to reveal that we do not have to learn to be afraid, but what objects we fear must be learned. An unconditioned stimulus is a sudden, loud noise. The unconditioned stimulus is for the unconditioned response of fear. The conditioned response of fear is known as a conditioned emotional response (CER). We then defined important words from this lesson. A stimulus generalization “is the tendency for the conditioned stimulus to evoke similar responses

The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.

According to Dr. Schreier, syntax is the structure of a language, underlying rules of order/function for how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences [Schreier slides]. Semantics is the understanding of words and word combinations. In Genie’s case, she was able to acquire semantics, but not the syntax of English. By listening to the sentences she produced and watching her reactions after receiving simple words from others, we know that she grasped the meaning of many individual words, and could even put them in combinations to convey a simple message. However, arranging the words in a grammatically correct order was something Genie could not achieve. This means she lacked the understanding syntax of English. For example, as Susan

One of the most infamous experiments conducted in the history of psychology was the Stanford Prison Experiment. The main objective of this experiment was to see what effects would occur when a psychological experiment into human nature was performed. As I read through the material provided, I noticed that my thoughts on the matter were similar to many; that it was a complete failure as a scientific research project. However, his findings did provide us with something much more important that is still being talked about today; insight into human psychology and social behavior.