Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century PDF Download

Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393347478
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Through ten examples of ingenious experiments by some of psychology's most innovative thinkers, Lauren Slater traces the evolution of the century's most pressing concerns—free will, authoritarianism, conformity, and morality. Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.

Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393050950
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Traces developments in human psychology over the course of the twentieth century, beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of the child raised in a box.

Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408883120
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A century can be understood in many ways - in terms of its inventions, its crimes or its art. In Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater sets out to investigate the twentieth century through a series of ten fascinating, witty and sometimes shocking accounts of its key psychological experiments. Starting with the founder of modern scientific experimentation, B.F. Skinner, Slater traces the evolution of the last hundred years' most pressing concerns - free will, authoritarianism, violence, conformity and morality. Previously buried in academic textbooks, these often daring experiments are now seen in their full context and told as stories, rich in plot, wit and character.

Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780747568605
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This title provides an account of the 20th century's key psychological experiments, by the author of 'Prozac Diary'.

Author: Gina Perry
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595589252
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961, none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide sensation that the published results would cause. Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even suffering a life-threatening heart condition, simply because an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy and fascination more than fifty years later. In Behind the Shock Machine, psychologist and author Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of this controversial experiment and its startling repercussions. Interviewing the original participants—many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did—and delving deep into Milgram's personal archive, she pieces together a more complex picture and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man's ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.

Author: Michael A Britt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1440597081
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Psychology's most famous theories--played out in real life! Forget the labs and lecture halls. You can conduct your very own psych experiments at home! Famous psychological experiments--from Freud's ego to the Skinner box--have changed the way science views human behavior. But how do these tests really work? In Psych Experiments, you'll learn how to test out these theories and experiments for yourself...no psychology degree required! Guided by Michael A. Britt, creator of popular podcast The Psych Files, you can conduct your own experiments when browsing your favorite websites (to test the "curiosity effect"), in restaurants (learning how to increase your tips), when presented with advertisements (you'd be surprised how much you're influenced by the color red), and even right on your smartphone (and why you panic when you can't find it). You'll even figure out how contagious yawning works! With this compulsively readable little book, you won't just read about the history of psychology--you'll live it!

Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679462791
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
The author of the acclaimed Welcome to My Country describes in this provocative and funny memoir the ups and downs of living on Prozac for ten years, and the strange adjustments she had to make to living "normal life." Today millions of people take Prozac, but Lauren Slater was one of the first. In this rich and beautifully written memoir, she describes what it's like to spend most of your life feeling crazy--and then to wake up one day and find yourself in the strange state of feeling well. And then to face the challenge of creating a whole new life. Once inhibited, Slater becomes spontaneous. Once terrified of maintaining a job, she accepts a teaching position and ultimately earns several degrees in psychology. Once lonely, she finds love with a man who adores her. Slater is wonderfully thoughtful and articulate about all of these changes, and also about the downside of taking Prozac: such matters as dependency, sexual dysfunction, and Prozac "poop-out." "The beauty of Lauren Slater's prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and Slater's remarkable gifts as a writer are present here in sentences that are like elegant darts, hitting at the center of the deepest human feelings. Prozac Diary is a wonderfully written report from inside a decade on Prozac, and an original writer's acute observations on the challenges of living modern life.

Author: Dan P. McAdams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199780927
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
George W. Bush remains a highly controversial figure, a man for whom millions of Americans have very strong feelings. Dan McAdams' book offers an astute psychological portrait of Bush, one of the first biographies to appear since he left office as well as the first to draw systematically from personality science to analyze his life. McAdams, an international leader in personality psychology and the narrative study of lives, focuses on several key events in Bush's life, such as the death of his sister at age 7, his commitment to sobriety on his 40th birthday, and his reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, and his decision to invade Iraq. He sheds light on Bush's life goals, the story he constructed to make sense of his life, and the psychological dynamics that account for his behavior. Although there are many popular biographies of George W. Bush, McAdams' is the first true psychological analysis based on established theories and the latest research. Short and focused, written in an engaging style, this book offers a truly penetrating look at our forty-third president.

Author: Paul Bloom
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307886859
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice. Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race. In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Just as reason has driven our great scientific discoveries, he argues, it is reason and deliberation that makes possible our moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery. Ultimately, it is through our imagination, our compassion, and our uniquely human capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies. Paul Bloom has a gift for bringing abstract ideas to life, moving seamlessly from Darwin, Herodotus, and Adam Smith to The Princess Bride, Hannibal Lecter, and Louis C.K. Vivid, witty, and intellectually probing, Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives.

Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9780747562177
Category : Pregnancy
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
In this remarkable book, the author of "Welcome to My Country" and "Prozac Diary" writes about how people discover what love truly is and make the decision to open their life to a child.