How free is free will?

Lauren Slater's new book about 10 landmark psychological experiments has ignited a firestorm in the psychological establishment. But whatever her shortcomings as a reporter, Slater is asking profound questions about human nature and its limitations

By Farhad Manjoo

May 21, 2004 | Early in Lauren Slater's engaging new book, "Opening Skinner's Box," the author reports an amusing conversation she has with Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard who insists that humans beings possess "free will." Kagan is having a hard time convincing Slater of his view; in the middle of the last century, the psychologist B.F. Skinner showed, through a series of ingenious experiments with animals, that we are all far more mechanistic than we believe. We do what we do because we are conditioned to do it, because we are, all of us, acutely sensitive to rewards and reinforcements in the environment.

Slater, who is herself a psychologist, agrees with Skinner. She tells Kagan, "I don't absolutely rule out the possibility that we are always either controlled or controlling, that our free will is really just a response to some cues that --" And just then, to prove that people really do whatever they want to do, "Kagan dives under his desk," Slater writes. "I mean that literally. He springs from his seat and goes head forward into nether regions beneath his desk so I cannot see him anymore."

Kagan shouts to Slater, "I'm under my desk. I've never gotten under my desk before. Is this not an act of free will?"

"Opening Skinner's Box," in which Slater guides us through 10 landmark psychological experiments, brims with moments like this one -- unbelievable little scenes in which Slater or one of the many people she encounters does or says something so unexpected that you'll wonder, for just a split second, whether you're reading fiction. There's Kagan diving under his desk. There's the dour psychologist Robert Spitzer, who, when told that an old foe of his is laid up with a terminal disease that doctors can't diagnose, responds with perverse glee. There's Elizabeth Loftus, a famous memory researcher who "blurts out odd comments" and has "targets from a rifle practice affixed to her office wall." She volunteers her bra size to Slater. In the middle of a telephone interview, Loftus slams down the phone for no reason, then "calls back sheepishly," offering no explanation for her behavior.

And finally there's Slater herself, a writer so personally invested in her subject that she seems willing to risk just about anything for a good story. In order to explore the psychology of addiction, Slater puts herself on a two-week regimen of her husband's hydromorphone pills. She tests how well psychiatrists can detect patients who lie by repeating an experiment that the psychologist David Rosenhan did in the 1970s -- Slater stops showering for five days, then goes to several psych emergency rooms and complains that she keeps hearing a voice that says "thud." She is repeatedly diagnosed as depressive and psychotic and given psychiatric medications, which she takes.

These exploits make for captivating reading. Given its premise, "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century" might have been a dull book, a slow trudge through endless academic debates in psychology. It is, instead, a powerful and accessible introduction to the science by a writer who is adept at navigating its bitterest fault lines. Slater has the necessary technical expertise to tackle the various ethical dilemmas that inevitably arise in inquiries of the human mind, but she also has the necessary creativity to cut through those controversies in order to show us just how complex and curious psychology has shown us humans to be.

Next Page: Since its release, "Opening Skinner's Box" has become only tangentially about its subject

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