How free is free will?

Slater's book could therefore have made a fine survey of psychology for the general audience, which the writer says was her aim. But since its release in March, "Opening Skinner's Box" seems to have become, at least in psychology circles, something altogether different -- a book that is only tangentially about its subject, psychological experiments, and mostly about what many call its author's troubled relationship with the truth. Slater has been besieged by some of her book's key characters, who claim that her writing is pocked with errors and fabrications.

While some of the allegations are frivolous, a few are serious, and the fight between Slater and her sources has turned nasty. Neither side offers a good argument to readers looking for guidance on what to believe, and so, in the end, it's hard not to feel adrift and alone with Slater's book. This is a shame: "Opening Skinner's Box" is a genuinely compelling read. Learning of its deficiencies -- or what some of Slater's sources call deficiencies -- doesn't completely discredit the work, but it does, alas, dull the pleasure.

Jerome Kagan says he never jumped under that desk; he merely told Slater that he had enough free will to crawl under his desk if he chose to. Robert Spitzer denies ever telling Slater that a colleague deserved his illness. Elizabeth Loftus says Slater got just about everything wrong in her chapter on Loftus' work; the chapter "is riddled with errors -- some minor but others extremely serious," Loftus wrote in a letter to Slater's publisher, W.W. Norton. "Moreover, quotes are attributed to me that I have never said, nor would ever say." Among other things, Loftus claims not to have volunteered her bra size to Slater -- as Slater's text implies -- and never to have intentionally slammed the phone down on the author.

There's more: Writing in the Guardian in March, B.F. Skinner's daughter Deborah accused Slater of carelessly reproducing the cruelest myths about her father, including the one that he raised Deborah in the same kind of box he used for his experiments on rats and pigeons, damning the daughter to a troubled life said to have ended in suicide. (Deborah, of course, is still alive, and is now known as Deborah Skinner Buzan.) And a group of prominent academics have called on Slater to release additional details about her own experiment on the emergency rooms that medicated her just because she was hearing the word "thud"; Spitzer says he finds the details in the experiment hard to believe. Many of the critics have used Slater's previous work -- especially her memoir "Lying," which provocatively blended truth and fiction -- against her.

Spitzer concluded his letter to W.W. Norton (copied to reporters at the New York Times, National Public Radio and several psychology journals) with this puckish bit: "I am enjoying reading Slater's book, 'Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.' I am up to the part where she describes how she went through a period of her life when she was a compulsive liar."

A few of these complaints are rather silly. Not only does Kagan's denial that he jumped under his desk undercut his argument about free will -- it's not much proof of free will, after all, to just argue that you could jump under your desk if you wanted to and leave it at that -- but as Slater told reporters, Kagan signed off on the incident during the fact-checking process. (Kagan has claimed that he misread the fact-checking e-mail Slater sent him.)

Next Page: Skinner's daughter complains about Slater's treatment of her father -- but has she even read the book?

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