Opening Skinners Box Great Psychological Experiments Of The Twentieth Century

Author : Lauren Slater
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393347478
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century written by Lauren Slater and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 9780393050950
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opening Skinner's Box written by Lauren Slater and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 1408883120
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.29/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opening Skinner's Box written by Lauren Slater and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 13 : 9780747568605
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.0X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Opening Skinner's Box written by Lauren Slater and published by Bloomsbury Paperbacks. This book was released on 2005 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides an account of the 20th century's key psychological experiments, by the author of 'Prozac Diary'.

Author : Paul Bloom
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 0307886867
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Just Babies written by Paul Bloom and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Thomas Cathcart
Publisher : Workman Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0761178708
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Trolley Problem, or Would You Throw the Fat Guy Off the Bridge? written by Thomas Cathcart and published by Workman Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trolley is careering out of control. Up ahead are five workers; on a spur to the right stands a lone individual. You, a bystander, happen to be standing next to a switch that could divert the trolley, which would save the five, but sacrifice the one—do you pull it? Or say you’re watching from an overpass. The only way to save the workers is to drop a heavy object in the trolley’s path. And you’re standing next to a really fat man…. This ethical conundrum—based on British philosopher Philippa Foot’s 1967 thought experiment—has inspired decades of lively argument around the world. Now Thomas Cathcart, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, brings his sharp intelligence, quirky humor, and gift for popularizing serious ideas to “the trolley problem.” Framing the issue as a possible crime that is to be tried in the Court of Public Opinion, Cathcart explores philosophy and ethics, intuition and logic. Along the way he makes connections to the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, Kant’s limits of reason, St. Thomas Aquinas’s fascinating Principle of Double Effect, and more. Read with an open mind, this provocative book will challenge your deepest held notions of right and wrong. Would you divert the trolley? Kill one to save five? Would you throw the fat man off the bridge?

Author : Lauren Slater
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 0807061123
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Playing House written by Lauren Slater and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be family. Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. In these autobiographical pieces, Slater presents snapshots of domestic life, populating them with the gritty details and jarring realities of sharing home, life, and body in the curious institution called “family.” She asks difficult questions and probes unsettling truths about sex, love, and parenting. In these pages, Slater introduces us to her struggles with her mother, her determination to make a home of her own, her compromises in deciding to marry (her conflicts manifesting as an affair on the eve of her wedding), her initial struggle to connect with her newborn child, and the dilemmas of mothering with a mental illness. She writes openly about her decision to abort her second pregnancy and her later decision to have a second child after all. She tells us about the searing decision to have elective double mastectomy and how her love for her husband was magically rekindled after she saw him catch fire in a chemical accident. It’s not all mastectomies and chemical fires, though. Slater digs into the everyday challenges of family living, from buying a lemon of a car and fighting back menacing weeds to gaining weight and being jealous of the nanny. Beautifully written, often humorous, and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes uncomfortable truths.

Author : Dan P. McAdams
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199780927
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream written by Dan P. McAdams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Luke Dittrich
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 067964380X
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Patient H.M. written by Luke Dittrich and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King”* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M. For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes a story that has much to teach us about our relentless pursuit of knowledge. Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • New York Post • NPR • The Economist • New York • Wired • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today. Patient H.M. is, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich’s grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison—and thousands of other patients. The author’s investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather’s relentless experimentation—experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves. Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons, as they called themselves, conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide. “An exciting, artful blend of family and medical history.”—The New York Times *Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author : Ali Smith
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307801977
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hotel World written by Ali Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.